Again, I highlighted where you went wrong. Those are 50% outcomes.
We have tons of information to work with, given context. Things like manager tendencies, player tendencies, scheduling, the trade deadline, run differentials, SoS, injuries, attitudes, hot streaks...your projection systems are worthless because they lack to account for all those (very real) variables, and they are not "the best" indicator of anything. One of the systems you constantly cite pegged the Sox for 88 fucking wins before the season began. One right now is telling me the Nats have a 50% playoff odds, the other 20%. Why are we putting weight behind this garbage, let alone trying to push it as anything definitive? It's guesswork, and it's not particularly good.
You continually cite these systems' numbers as if they are meaningful, truthful, or predicative. If you do so, I'll continue to point out that they're worthless, just like the opinions of the "analysts" on sports broadcasts.
Scheduling, run differentials, SoS and injuries are all explicitly in the BP & Fangraphs systems.
Manager & player tendencies should be accounted for in the underlying performances, as should attitudes.
The trade deadline is definitely not accounted for, because there is no reasonable way to project that, and hot streaks are not accounted for because most data we have says they're not valuable to predicting the future.
To the extent anyone wants to make adjustments for what's
not accounted for, that's awesome. To the extent we want to tease out why two systems have different outcomes, that's a fun discussion to dig into. If someone wants to talk about what's
wrong with their method, I'm very interested to hear it.
Separately, on the Nats point, BP is giving the Nats a 17% chance of making the playoffs, and FG is saying 43%. They have a large disagreement about how good each of the NL East contenders are going to be the rest of the year - my guess is that FG is weighting past performance more and BP is weighting current performance more. I think that's pretty interesting, personally, and I think others also do. If you don't, that's cool - but your mission seems to be telling other people not to discuss it.
I don't think they're definitive - I think they're the best estimates we have, which add color and context to many discussions. I think they have
some meaning, have
some truth, and are as predictive as we have at our disposal.