Try as we might to make predictions, there is a lot of uncertainty when it comes to sports analysis. That's the case whether you're a traditional scout who relies on experience and the eye test or a data-drunk 21st-century front-office disrupter, or even a hardworking scribe. The trick is to mitigate that uncertainty and avoid the temptation to channel the overconfident Nostradamus when you're sharing your observations.
For all we still don't know about sports, there is one thing of which we can be certain: It's zero-sum. For every game, there is a winner and a loser. For every point (or run) scored, there is one allowed. Every transaction, no matter how small, changes the outlook for every team in the league, if only a little bit. That's one of the greatest challenges in making sense of things in a sport, even one as meticulously documented as Major League Baseball is at the close of the 2010s.
