Unfortunately as of June 21, 2023 FiveThirtyEight is no longer updating their MLB Predictions page. I really enjoyed checking it every day and wanted to continue to see how the season would play out. So I built this site to do just that.

The origin story for this site. FiveThirtyEight has discontinued MLB predictions.

I'm planning on writing up how the algorithm works. It is using a system called the Elo Rating System. If you've seen The Social Network, this is the same algorithm that Mark and Eduardo use to rank people on FaceMash. The movie makes this out to be a secret algorithm that Mark Zuckerberg needed Eduardo's help to write. To me this is comical as it is a fairly simple set of equations that have been around since the early 1960s.

"The Algorithm" from The Social Network. The formula Eduardo is writing is the Expected Score for a given player.

It uses a very similar methodology to the original FiveThirtyEight algorithm. There is a great write-up on how that works here this blog post from FiveThirtyEight.

The TLDR version is that a team gets points for winning games against other teams. The higher the rating of the opponent you defeat, the more points you get. The converse holds true if you lose. The lower the rating of the opponent you lose to, the more points you lose.

More to come...