I will probably issue some preseason predictions in the next few days. Predictions are basically a ritual, in that everyone is expected to do them yet they’re meaningless. I don’t really know what’s going to happen, and what’s more the people who talk about baseball for a living — from Joe Morgan to the Baseball Prospectus guys and everybody in between — don’t know either.

A lot of what happens in a baseball game or season is essentially random. Now, the best team generally wins the most games, but has a good chance of losing any individual game. A really good team might have an 80 percent chance of beating a really bad team, but that means that even in a three-game series the really bad team has almost a 50 percent chance of winning at least once (actually 48.8 percent). And most of the time the difference isn’t that great.

I was discussing this with Alex yesterday when he was counting out the Phillies in the division. I don’t see why. They return basically the same team from last season, a team that won 88 games and missed the playoffs by one, and don’t you wish they’d beat out the Astros, and three of the four years before that they won 86 games. Anyway, they replaced Billy Wagner with Flash Gordon, and that’s a downgrade but not much of one — I doubt it’s more than one game’s worth. They got rid of Thome and added Rowand, and other than that it’s the same guys. Let’s say they decline all the way to being, say, an 83-win team, which is what Alex estimated.

The thing is that an 83-win team can, just by random luck, wind up with anything from 73 to 93 wins. That’s just how it is. The Phillies could not improve at all and win a few more games and the division and Charlie Manuel would win Manager of the Year and yet not do anything different. Just chance.

At the same time, baseball is in a remarkably stable period. Before the White Sox breakout last season, the AL had been remarkably stable for years, with five teams (New York, Boston, Minnesota, Oakland, and Anaheim) as the five top teams of the previous three years, and the East finishing New York-Boston-Toronto-Baltimore-Tampa Bay every year but one since 1998. The NL has seen the Braves win every year that finished since 1991, and the Cards in the last few years have been about as dominant; the only real question division has been the West and what team will catch fire that year.

So my guess is that if you predict that what happened last year will happen again this year, you’ll be more right than not. But you aren’t going to get much attention that way.

You’ve probably seen the covers and ad copy of various annuals which state that they made this right prediction and that right prediction. I’m convinced that BP predicts the Braves’ demise every year so that they can put “PREDICTED THE BRAVES WOULDN’T WIN THE DIVISION” on the cover when it happens. But they didn’t know, it’s just the famous stopped clock method.