I've been off thinking a little too much. In particular, I've been reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Fooled by Randomness, and, well, let's go to a table. Suppose an investor has a mythical portfolio that has an a priori 15% annual "real return" and a 10% "error rate". This investor has a magic spreadsheet hooked up to Bloomberg and he can get an instaneous update on his portfolio. This table describes what he'll see:

PROBABILITY OF MAKING MONEY AT DIFFERENT SCALES

That's a good portfolio, but if this investor of ours is refreshing his portfolio every couple of seconds, then he's going to ride a roller coaster. Taleb further claims that the stress of negative news isn't evened-out by the (more frequent) moments of positive news. In other words, it's in this investor's best interests to check his portfolio infrequently.

This is all a long-winded way of saying I'm trying not to focus on the ups-and-downs of the baseball season. OK, that's not quite right, since I'm watching or listening to every game (Mulder is Mulder again, Encarnacion's getting a walk per month and John Gall must've done something unspeakably awful). I'm trying not to analyze the ups-and-downs. In spite of the methods used to boost the signal-to-noise ratios in-season (e.g., for pitchers use K/BB instead of W/L or, of course, good ole-fashioned scouting), there's still a lot of noise in the data.

Taleb noted that he'll allow himself to be fooled by randomness, like wearing a lucky tie or some similar superstition. In fact, he claims these kinds of irrational emotions are necessary for survival. In this case, there's something to be said for the "poetry of baseball", as cliched as that sounds. Again though, losing myself in the analysis of randomness can take me down many blind alleys, and I'm getting too old for that. That's leaving me at a loss for words.

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One thing I've decided has decent signal is BPro's Postseason Odds Report, since it makes use of a larger data set. Even if PECOTA's too high on the Brewers, it changes the way I'm looking at the pennant race. The Cardinals aren't as strong as their record indicates, in large part because they've played so many games against the dregs of the National League (Washington, Florida, Pittsburgh, Chicago), and that needs to be accounted for. This could be a pretty good fight.

Two idle thoughts:

(1) Did you see in the PD that Mulder's back pain goes back to 2000? While no pitcher's ever perfectly healthy, I suppose this says something about the clean bill of health given to Mulder at the time of the trade.

(2) Dave Duncan on Sidney Ponson's injury: "We have two off days in the next 10 days. Hopefully we can work it out and go with just four pitchers." Instead of being hopeful that they can get by on four starters, isn't this an opportunity for Anthony Reyes?