Three HITs, One MISS, and a CBA That Arrived Right on Schedule
The Week in Review: Issues #16–20
- #16Apr 13 — Notre Dame: Most Protected and Most Vulnerable — The EO helps ND’s sports program on every front — but threatens $200M in federal research funding. Part 3 of 5.
- #17Apr 14 — The Cignetti Rule — 18 portal transfers built an 11–2 season. Under the EO, that rebuild becomes nearly impossible. The drawbridge rises after the king is inside. Part 4 of 5.
- #18Apr 15 — Mets Pitching Isn’t the Problem — Five starters under 3.10 ERA. Bullpen at 2.84. And the Mets are playing .500 ball. The culprit is the lineup.
- #19Apr 16 — The Old Guard Returns — Blue bloods won 85% of titles pre-portal. The portal briefly opened the door. The EO closes it. Part 5 of 5 (Final).
- #20Apr 17 — WNBA Pay & Maturity — The 116× pay gap is real but misleading. Compared to every other league at the same age, the WNBA is ahead of schedule.
The EO series dominated the first half of the week — three consecutive parts on transfer limits, NIL economics, and the federal funding lever. We broke that up with a Mets pitching analysis on Wednesday and closed with the WNBA. Next week returns to the regular rotation: cross-sport analytics, fan misery, and the WNBA-MLS comparison.
The Prediction Scorecard
Updated with fresh data pulled April 19, 2026. Changes from Sunday Edition No. 1 are marked.
| Issue | Prediction | Fresh Outcome | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | Skenes’ 67.5 ERA would recover in ~4–5 starts (Gamma-Poisson model) | After 4 starts: 3-1, 4.00 ERA overall. Last 17.1 IP: 1.56 ERA, 17 K, 0.94 WHIP. Recovery complete. | HIT — upgraded from PENDING. Recovery took the full 4 starts, not 3 as modeled, but the trajectory matched. |
| #2 | 60.2% chance Alonso finishes below .250 in 2026 | Hitting .200–.216 through ~17 games. Had an 8-game stretch of 2-for-31. Showing life recently (2 HR, 2B). | PENDING — tracking strongly toward HIT but too early to score |
| #3 | Rangers decline trajectory: −36% in two seasons | Rangers missed the 2026 playoffs entirely. Sabres (50-23-9, 108 pts) won the Atlantic. Playoffs started April 18. | HIT — confirmed. We called this in Issue #3 and detailed the collapse in Issue #11. |
| #4 | .500 after 6 games has no predictive power; median projection 88 wins | Mets now 7-14 (.333), on a 10-game losing streak. Tied with Kansas City for the worst record in MLB. Worst record in the NL. Soto still on IL (day 16). Lindor at .194. | MISS — downgraded from HIT. The noise point was correct in isolation, but the 88-win baseline was too optimistic. Ten straight losses and the worst record in the National League isn’t noise. This team is regressing. |
| #7 | 54.4% chance Soto misses 10+ games from calf tightness | Day 16 on the IL. Running program active, took live at-bats at Citi Field this week. Target return: April 21–30 homestand. | HIT — confirmed. Our most precise prediction holds. |
| #8 | Bichette’s 53% K rate is “not just noise” | K-rate normalized toward ~25%. BA improved from .111 to ~.200. Still below career norms. | PARTIALLY HIT — K-rate was real signal (correct), but the extremity of the initial number was partly small-sample noise (as we also said). Holds from last week. |
| #18 | Mets will win 12 of 20 games after Soto returns | Soto hasn’t returned yet. Target: April 21–30. | PENDING — evaluation begins when Soto is activated |
What We Got Right
The Wins
Skenes is back. Our Issue #1 Gamma-Poisson model projected ERA recovery within 4–5 starts. It took the full four, but the trajectory was exactly right. His last 17.1 innings: 1.56 ERA, 17 strikeouts, 0.94 WHIP. The Opening Day disaster — 5 ER in 0.2 IP — is now a statistical footnote, exactly as the denominator-leverage math predicted. The model worked.
The Rangers are out. We flagged the −36% two-season decline in Issue #3 and mapped the full collapse in Issue #11. They didn’t just miss the playoffs — they weren’t close. Meanwhile, the Sabres ended a 15-year drought and won the Atlantic Division with 108 points. Both trajectories landed where we said they would.
The WNBA piece aged beautifully — in three days. On April 17, we published an analysis arguing the WNBA’s pay gap is a maturity problem, not a fairness problem, and that the league is “ahead of schedule.” The new CBA, finalized the same week, proved the point: minimum salary jumped from $66,079 to over $300,000. Supermax contracts hit $1.4 million. Revenue sharing is now built into the structure. The data saw the curve. The CBA followed it.
What We Got Wrong
The Miss
We let the Mets off the hook. In Issue #4, we said .500 after six games was noise, projected an 88-win median, and told everyone to calm down. Two weeks ago, the Sunday Edition graded that a HIT because the Mets were 6-4 and “still within the confidence interval.” That was generous. They’re now 7-14 and riding a 10-game losing streak. Tied with Kansas City for the worst record in baseball. The worst record in the National League. The problems go deeper than Soto’s calf.
Lindor is hitting .194. Bichette is improving but still below league average. The $765 million outfielder hasn’t played in sixteen days. The rotation is genuinely excellent — our Issue #18 analysis confirmed that — but elite pitching can’t fix a lineup that doesn’t score. Last night the Cubs beat them 4-2 on a pinch-hit three-run homer. That’s the kind of loss that defines a losing streak: close enough to feel winnable, far enough to feel inevitable. We were right that six games of .500 was noise. We were wrong about what the signal underneath would look like.
The honest comparison isn’t 2025. It’s 2007–2008. The 2024 Mets reached the NLCS. The 2025 Mets were a letdown. The 2026 Mets are worse. That’s a regression curve, not a slump. Willie Randolph watched the same thing happen — 2006 NLCS Game 7, then 2007’s September collapse, then fired from a hotel room in Anaheim in 2008. The pattern isn’t identical, but the trajectory is: a team built to compete sliding backward one year at a time until something breaks. Our 88-win projection didn’t account for that structural decline. We’re downgrading to a MISS.
“A model that can’t be wrong isn’t a model. It’s a press release. We got the Mets wrong. The Sunday Edition exists so we have to say that out loud.”
— The Sports Page, Sunday Edition No. 2Over-Reactions and Under-Reactions
Over-Reactions
The EO series ran three parts in five days (Issues #16, #17, #19). That was ambitious and arguably too dense for a newsletter built for friends and family. The analysis was solid — the NIL Gini coefficient, the Cignetti portal math, the blue-blood share projections — but stacking three college football policy pieces in one week tested the variety rule’s spirit even when we technically interleaved them. Lesson: series pieces need more breathing room, even when the topic is timely.
Under-Reactions
We under-reacted to the Mets’ regression. Issue #18 correctly identified the pitching-vs-offense disconnect, but framed it as “the pitching will carry them when Soto returns.” That’s optimistic analysis dressed as statistical insight. The regression pattern — NLCS to letdown to worse — deserved the structural scrutiny we gave the Rangers in Issue #11. We gave the Rangers the cold-eyed autopsy. We gave the Mets the benefit of the doubt. That’s bias, not analysis.
Playoff Watch: The Sabres Are Dancing
The Sabres — 50-23-9, 108 points, Atlantic Division champions — open their first playoff series in 15 years tonight against Boston at KeyBank Center (7:30 PM ET). The longest active drought in the NHL is over. We mapped this trajectory in Issue #11, when we charted three franchises going in three different directions. Buffalo was rising. The data confirmed it. Tonight, the building will confirm it.
The Rangers, meanwhile, are watching from home. From a Presidents’ Trophy two seasons ago to missing the playoffs entirely — the biggest collapse from that height in modern NHL history. We called it in Issue #3 (Misery Index) and detailed it in Issue #11. Both predictions landed.
Three Days Later: The CBA Proved Our Point
On April 17, Issue #20 argued that the WNBA’s pay gap is a maturity problem, not an inequality scandal. We compared the league to the NBA, NHL, NFL, and MLB at the same age and found the WNBA ahead on every metric. The conclusion: “The conversation should be about how to accelerate the curve — not whether the curve exists.”
The new CBA, ratified the same week, did exactly that. Minimum salary: $66,079 → $300,000+. Supermax: $249,244 → $1.4 million. Revenue sharing: built in for the first time. A 44-game season expanding to 52 by 2029. Two expansion teams (Portland Fire, Toronto Tempo). The maturity curve didn’t just continue — it accelerated. Our analysis didn’t predict the CBA. But the structural trajectory we described is exactly the one the CBA followed.
The Road Ahead
This week brings a shift in tone. The EO series is done. The queue has four pieces ready: a cross-sport investigation into superstar sensitivity (which sport collapses when it loses one player?), the fan misery map (54 years of loyalty, quantified), the WNBA-vs-MLS comparison (born the same year, same salary, different narratives), and a deep dive into what makes a championship roster.
Soto’s return is the story to watch. He took live at-bats at Citi Field this week and is running without restriction. The Mets open a homestand April 21, and the target is activation somewhere in that window. Our Issue #18 prediction — 12 wins in 20 games post-return — starts its clock when he’s back. At 7-14 with a 10-game losing streak and the worst record in the NL, the Mets need that prediction to hit more than we need to be right.
The NHL playoffs are live. We’ll be tracking the Sabres’ run and watching whether the data that predicted their rise can predict how far they go.
“Twenty issues in. Four hundred eighty to go. We got one wrong this week. We’ll get more wrong. That’s what the models are for — to be precisely wrong instead of vaguely right.”
— The Sports Page, on accountabilityPitch a Story
Noticed a weird stat? Saw something that doesn’t add up? Send it in. The best ideas become issues.
