Football Mogul Predicts The 2016 NFL Season

It's that time of year again. We used the beta version of Football Mogul 17 to simulate the upcoming season 1,000 times. Projected standings are shown for each league, including average number of wins and losses for each team during the simulation. "Super Bowl Champs" shows that team's chance of winning the Super Bowl.

The Only Rule Is It Has To Work

I just finished reading my favorite book of the year, The Only Rule Is It Has to Work: Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team, by Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller. As it is about baseball -- and it helped refine the way that I think about the game and how to model it -- I figured I would share my thoughts here.

This book may not be for everyone. But as someone who writes baseball simulations for a living, I have to say that this book is perfect.

The authors start with the sequence of events that landed them with the Sonoma Stompers for the Summer of 2015. One key reason is something that hadn't occurred to me: the general manager of a low-budget team spends most of his time selling tickets and keeping the concessions flowing, so he is happy to get free help building the roster (the task we associate most often with a team's front office).

Then Ben and Sam dig into the nitty-gritty of building a team. They do a great job of laying out all the numbers that they had in front of them for such tasks as: choosing which players to sign; making lineup recommendations; employing extreme defensive shifts; and building detailed reports on opposing pitchers for use by the team's hitters. Seeing the raw data made the book much more enjoyable than if they had just jumped ahead to the conclusions that they reached.

The authors also do a great job of conveying the storylines and emotions associated with the team. It's reminiscient of a movie like Bull Durham: the overarching plot is about baseball players trying to get a crack at the majors, but the most interesting and amusing and important events revolve around the players' individual growth and interpersonal relationships.

Finally, I found this book inspiring as a personal story of humility and frustration, combined with some great insight into how to "make friends and influence people". I would honestly recommend this book to aspiring business leaders or consultants. Ben and Sam are two extremely bright guys with great communication skills. So one could assume that they had an easy time showing up at the Sonoma Stompers and turning the team around. But I know that my life is never that easy -- and I have to admit it's nice to see that their lives aren't either. Although Ben and Sam are nominally in charge of the roster, it's difficult for two guys that never played professional baseball to earn credibility in the clubhouse. But if you keep reading you see that more often than not they are able to succeed at what they try to do -- relying on respect and candor and true generosity, more than on any spreadsheet.

2016 Mock MLB Draft

Jason Groome

A.J. Puk

As many of you already know, this year’s version of Baseball Mogul includes most of the 100 top prospects that are eligible for this year’s amateur draft. As the 2016 database already includes the top 75-80 players for each franchise, we also have a decent understanding of each team’s specific organizational needs.

So I booted up Baseball Mogul 2016 to see how it would handle this year's draft. One advantage of having a full simulation at our disposal is that I was able to simulate the draft 10,000 times and record all the results. The following table shows the most likely result of the first round (although this exact order only occurred in 131 of the 10,000 simulations). The average draft position for each player is shown below as “ADP”.

Pick	Team	Player	Pos	Age	Bats	Throws	Hgt	Wgt	Scouting	ADP
1	Phillies	Jason Groome	LHP	17	L	L	6'6"	220	40/75	1.61
2	Reds	A.J. Puk	LHP	21	L	L	6'7"	230	45/70	1.78
3	Braves	Nick Senzel	3B	20	R	R	6'1"	205	40/70	3.31
4	Rockies	Mickey Moniak	LF	18	L	R	6'2"	190	40/70	4.36
5	Brewers	Corey Ray	CF	21	L	L	5'11"	185	40/75	5.46
6	Athletics	Delvin Perez	SS	17	R	R	6'3"	165	45/75	6.26
7	Marlins	Riley Pint	RHP	18	R	R	6'4"	195	40/75	8.31
8	Padres	Kyle Lewis	RF	20	R	R	6'4"	195	35/70	10.86
9	Tigers	Matt Manning	RHP	18	R	R	6'6"	195	35/70	10.41
10	White Sox	Dakota Hudson	RHP	21	R	R	6'5"	205	40/65	11.46
11	Mariners	Cal Quantrill	RHP	20	L	R	6'3"	185	40/70	11.01
12	Red Sox	Braxton Garrett	LHP	18	R	L	6'3"	190	40/65	12.06
13	Rays	Blake Rutherford	LF	19	L	R	6'2"	190	45/70	10.86
14	Indians	Zack Collins	C	21	L	R	6'3"	220	40/65	14.16
15	Twins	Forrest Whitley	RHP	18	R	R	6'6"	250	40/70	15.21
16	Angels	Bryan Reynolds	CF	21	S	R	6'2"	210	35/70	16.26
17	Astros	Alex Kirilloff	CF	18	L	L	6'2"	195	40/65	16.06
18	Yankees	Kevin Gowdy	SP	18	R	R	6'4"	170	35/70	18.61
19	Mets	Will Craig	3B	18	R	R	6'3"	225	45/65	17.16
20	Dodgers	Jordan Sheffield	RHP	21	R	R	6'0"	185	40/70	18.71
21	Blue Jays	Buddy Reed	CF	21	S	R	6'4"	185	35/70	20.51
22	Pirates	Ian Anderson	RHP	18	R	R	6'3"	170	40/65	20.56
23	Cardinals	Cody Sedlock	RHP	20	R	R	6'4"	210	45/65	19.86

Scouting shows Baseball Mogul’s “Overall” and “Peak” ratings for each player (on the standard 20-80 scouting scale).

... and this table shows how frequently each player was taken with one of the top 3 picks (rounded to the nearest 0.1%):

Player	Pos	Age	Pick #1	Pick #2	Pick #3
Jason Groome	LHP	17	50.1%	39.1%	10.6%
A.J. Puk	LHP	21	39.2%	45.5%	14.4%
Nick Senzel	3B	20	6.8%	10.2%	42.1%
Mickey Moniak	LF	18	1.4%	2.6%	11.3%
Corey Ray	CF	21	1.0%	0.9%	9.0%
Delvin Perez	SS	17	0.7%	0.5%	6.2%
Riley Pint	RHP	18	0.5%	0.8%	3.5%
Kyle Lewis	RF	20	0.2%		0.7%
Matt Manning	RHP	18		0.3%	0.4%
Dakota Hudson	RHP	21			0.3%
Cal Quantrill	RHP	20	0.1%	0.1%	0.4%
Braxton Garrett	LHP	18			0.3%
Blake Rutherford	LF	19			0.2%

As you can see, Baseball Mogul was ambivalent about whether to take Puk or Groome with the first pick. Twelve years after Moneyball publicized the argument that college players had been perennially under-valued, front offices still frequently use top picks on high school players — so Mogul's drafting AI models that behavior.