You can take predictions seriously — and I try to — or you can have fun with them. Either way, the results are about the same, it seems. When you’re predicting who will win an award or who will win a postseason series seven months from now, there’s just too much chaos in between the now and the then to be able to spot any sort of success rate.



One way to react to this fact of life is to just take your projections and predict chalk all the way to the end. At least then you’re aiming for the biggest part of the meat. But then you’d also miss things like the Milwaukee Brewers winning 96 games, the Athletics winning 97, Blake Snell winning the Cy Young and the Braves winning a division title. Because every year, things happen that surprise us. It’s part of why we love baseball.



Into the breach come these ‘bold predictions’, which are an attempt to try to walk the line between going ‘all chalk’ and going...