Okay, the Braves clinched the division. It felt like it was a long time coming at some point, and then they reeled off a sweep of the Astros in Houston, and here we are. That it happened without any kind of collapse is a testament to just how profoundly bizarre the 2026 Braves team is: they continue to maintain the fourth-best record despite a below-average wRC+ and position player fWAR rank, carried entirely by pitching and the ability to win when outproduced. (Seriously, after June I figured that
the team would collapse if the offense didn’t rebound to notably above average, irrespective of what else happened. Instead, the team continued to be below-average offensively through any cut except something like, mid-July onward, including July-onward, August-onward, and September and the best it could register through any arbitrary starting point through the present was 12th, but here we are. Way to go Braves, sorta.)
But, today, I want to ask about something that many of you may not care about, but has been bugging me for a while.
If you recall, in the offseason, I ran a long series of posts like this. In those posts, I provided some commentary on projected production for a handful of Braves players, and then y’all submitted guesses/prognostications of WAR production for each, as well as a confidence level.
Well, the season is nearly in the books, and it’s time to score them. (There’s also a few other questions scattered in there, including how the Braves’ rotation would perform, their overall record, whether they’d miss Jonah Heim, etc. etc. The question of how to score those is a little different, though related, but probably simpler.) The problem is, I’m not actually sure how to score them. I could pick one of the methods that has rattled around my head, but I figured I’d throw it to you all, in case there’s some kind of consensus or crowdsource-based solution that works better than anything I’ve been able to come up with.
The “issue” is that everyone submitted a single guess, and a single confidence level, but WAR is a cardinal value. Sure, we could score things by just going, “if you were right, you get a point multiplied by your confidence level; if you were wrong, you lose a point multiplied by your confidence level,” but this means that if a guy had a 3-WAR season, someone who picked 4 WAR would lose the same number of points as someone who picked 0 WAR, assuming the confidence was the same. We could do “distance from” but that raises the question of how the math should work — is it like, you get +X (where X is confidence) if you nailed it, you get zero (irrespective of confidence) if you’re 1 WAR off, and you start losing points scaled by confidence for being 2 WAR off or more? Anyway, you get the idea — it’s complicated-ish, or more to the point, there’s just a lot of ways to go about it.
I’d say the two main criteria are: 1) you want to reward people for being closer (and reward less or punish more for being further); and, 2) you want to scale things by confidence. But other than that, how we get there is what I’m soliciting input on.
So, whadda ya got? (For me, discussing this is probably more interesting than whatever else transpires with the Braves at this point.)
