Pointless but maybe fun, Part 1: guess the IWAG distribution for position players

I make this post knowing that it will only appeal to a minority. If the title rubbed you the wrong way, feel free to move along and enjoy all the other Spring Training and other Braves content that Talking Chop has to offer.

However, if homebrew projection systems, the 2020 Atlanta Braves season, and quizzes are all things you have some degree of interest in, then you may want to see the content below.

At this point, the IWAG 2020 projections for position players are largely complete, less any bugs I find and may end up fixing. That’s allowed me to pull together an anonymized set of the distributions from those projections, for the 19 position players that are even vaguely likely to get any playing time for the Braves this coming season. Your mission, should you be bored enough, or trying to avoid work enough, to accept it, is to try to match each distribution to the correct player.

One note that should help you: IWAG does not attempt to do much of anything at all with minor league defense. A few of the curves may stump you even harder if you don’t keep that in mind.

In any case, the quiz is available here: https://www.sporcle.com/games/striderremix/iwag-2020-position-player-distributions. You will get nothing out of this, other than a five-minute grace period of relief from your other responsibilities.

Have absolutely no idea what’s going on here? Well, this is a four-sentence explainer: IWAG is a projection system I made a half-decade ago to try to better understand how projection systems work, as well as their strengths and weaknesses, by the process of building one myself. While current projection systems definitely generate outcomes probabilistically, they generally don’t share the probability distributions they generate (for good reason). Each year, I put together a series of posts detailing the IWAG outputs, both distributions and point estimates, for the Braves in their upcoming season. I’m still doing that this year, but since I had all the distributions generated anyway, I threw them together into a quiz on a lark, and now you can waste your time on that quiz as well. Good luck!