What's an "Early trend"?

Personally, I don't believe 2-4 games constitutes any sort of "trend", but apparantly, it does for ESPN, who have a poll up: "What early trend is going to continue throughout the MLB season?" and the options are:

Royals in contention
Parity in the A.L. East
Tigers in last place
Nationals leading the pack in the NL East
Cubs in last place

How do any of those consitute an "early trend"? Doesn't it take more than 3 days of games to call something a trend? Maybe if this was May 1st, it'd make sense, but as is, none of those are trends...

Nonetheless, of those options, the only one that I believe has a greater than 5% chance of happening is parity in the A.L. East because there are 4 legitimate .500 teams.

Ah, those types of polls are put up all over the place every season. Their just for fun, and indeed they always seem to generate quite a bit of interest.

And, I agree. Parity in the AL east is a distinct possibility this year, which will certainly be a lot of fun to watch!
:)

Lots of extra inning games as well. The Braves played 24 innings in there 1st 2 games.

its total garbage. 3 games does not make a trend. I'm sure there's 3 guys in the world with their "johnson" pierced, doesn't make it a trend.

That's a wonderful analogy...lol.

some would say thats what you get for going to espn.com :p

An "Early Trend" is HoustonGM biatching about how stupid everyone who writes about sports is.

Think that'll continue?

I think it will!

Snap!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Biggles

An "Early Trend" is HoustonGM biatching about how stupid everyone who writes about sports is.

Think that'll continue?

I think it will!

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I think it's perfectly fair to expect our so-called baseball experts to actually understand simple baseball concepts.

Sorry that me not liking that baseball writers are ignorant about the sport they write about bothers you.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by yankee hater

It really wasn't ignorant, its just people that try to be uberliteral about everything and nitpicky to the point of entirely missing the point.

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This also wasn't even about sports writers or anything. It was just something that I think was funnily worded and kind of shows an ignorance to the concept of sample sizes. I know what the point of the poll was, and it's a perfectly legitimate question, but I would've worded the question something like "Which of the following events from the first couple games of the season is most likely to continue?"

I just found the use of the term "early trend" to be an odd word choice when it wasn't a choice between early trends. Maybe it's you that takes things so literally. Lighten up.

I know exactly what they meant by it and basically why they used it, but I found it to be a strange and inaccurate word choice.

Jeez.

I'm surprised that the Tigers one isn't more "Tigers having scored the second least amount of runs in baseball" considering their offense. But ESPN isn't exactly what I call intelligent. (Besides Gammons and Caple) Also, that whole poll is stupid in the first place.