2016 Red Reporter prediction contest: Results

As always, we at Red Reporter gave you guys a list of stats and asked everyone to predict how they thought the team would do in regards to those stats. It turns out that a rebuilding team with a lot of injuries to the rotation can be a difficult thing to predict.

A few observations:

• First of all, we all overestimated the overall performance of the team this season. Only two of us thought that we'd actually finish last in the division, and only 3 predicted that we'd have fewer than 70 wins. We also underestimated how many runs the Reds would give up, as only one person guessed within 50 runs of the actual total and only a handful guessed within 75.
• The injuries and shuffling of the pitching staff threw a wrench in this whole damn thing. Only five people got points by correctly predicting a pitching stat. First of all, nobody saw Dan Straily coming this year and we certainly didn't expect him to be the team leader in strikeouts and wins. Second, we had so much faith in J.J. Hoover. He was the one piece of the bullpen who was a lock to make the roster out of spring training and, well, that didn't really work out very well. Lastly, the injury to and subsequent move to the bullpen by Raisel Iglesias threw things off about as much as Straily did. It didn't surprise me that the majority of us picked Iglesias to have the best starter ERA, but I was a little surprised at the fact that only two of us picked Anthony DeSclafani for the same category. Lastly, I almost threw out Iglesias for the best reliever ERA since he began the season as a starting pitcher and nobody would have picked him for that category. But, when I saw that Michael Lorenzen had the 2nd best reliever ERA, I decided to roll with Iglesias.
• As far as the offensive categories go, Joey Votto was picked pretty much across the board on every offensive category besides stolen bases. Only 5 of us picked someone other than Votto to have the highest SLG, and only 3 correctly predicted that Jay Bruce did. Also, congrats to Reds Menace for being the only person to predict that Adam Duvall would lead the team in home runs.
• For the second year in a row, we only had one person get a prediction exactly right, and that was RedStalk correctly guessing that Joey Votto would hit 34 doubles this season. Also for the second straight year, we unanimously guessed that Joey Votto would have the highest OBP and that Billy Hamilton would have the most stolen bases.
• The table is below so everyone can see how they did. How did we score? One point was given for correctly guessing the player to lead a certain category (yellow boxes), a bonus point was given to those who were closest to correctly guessing the total in each category (orange boxes), and two bonus points were given to those who correctly predicted the player and the total. Congrats to KC Gardner on winning the 2016 Red Reporter prediction contest. He was only one of two people who correctly guessed that the Reds would finish 5th in the division and was also the only one who guessed that the Reds would give up over 800 runs this season, which ultimately broke the tie with johnnywaffles.