The underlying concept of XRD is that year-to-year player performance does not inherently follow a smooth trend. Rather, surges are followed by declines, and declines by surges, even as overall growth may still occur. What this means for us is that we need to significantly downgrade players coming off of peak or career years, and carefully target those who are coming off of down years. In fact, we might want to build our entire draft strategy around that. So did it work?

Looking back at the Tout Wars saga and a surprise appearance in the Moneyball movie.

We cannot predict the future; all we can do is provide a sound process for constructing a "most likely expectation for future performance." All we can control is the process. As such, if we've captured as much information as is available, used the best methodology and analyzed the results correctly, that's about the best we can do. We simply can't control outcomes. What we can do is analyze all the misses to see why they occurred.

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2011 updates to the Mayberry Plan

2010 introduction to the Mayberry Method (Part 4 of 4)

2010 introduction to the Mayberry Method (Part 3 of 4)

2010 introduction to the Mayberry Method (Part 2 of 4)

2010 introduction to the Mayberry Method (Part 1 of 4)

The title of this week's column is also the title of an essay from the 1990 Baseball Forecaster. Nearly two decades ago, we did not know nearly as much as we do now, so our forecasting efforts were far more rudimentary. We were in no position to make grandiose claims about projective accuracy (though some did anyway). The touts at the end of the last century lived in a world of imprecision.

Here are some recent facts about the LIMA Plan: It has been around for a long, long time (11 years in fantasy time is forever) The more popular it has become, the less effective it has become. With each year that passes, memory fades and more people get it wrong I have not used the LIMA Plan, as written, for at least four years.