November 2025 Newsletter
By Gilbert D. Martinez
A music-themed baseball quiz, a World Series to remember, a host of baseball awards and a first-time meeting attendee filled the November meeting on Saturday.
Thirteen chapter members and guests – including Wyatt, a Cubs fan from La Grange – gathered for lunch at Cover3 in Central Austin.
Tom Thayer, winner of last month’s trivia quiz, brought the beats–er, questions–in his Musical Baseball Quiz. Asking questions that spanned much of baseball history, he challenged us to recall baseball lyrics and music history related to baseball.
Jerry Miller, who was overjoyed to watch his Dodgers win back-to-back World Series, eked out a one-point win over Jim Baker, 22 to 21, to take Tom’s a capella quiz. The author came in third with 16 points, followed by the author’s spouse, Raeanne Martinez, with 15.
For his thrilling win, Jerry was awarded “The Best of Spitball: The Literary Baseball Magazine” (Pocket Sports, 1988).
Does this quiz sound like music to your ears? Care to see if you can bridge the gap between baseball trivia and music (as conceived by Tom Thayer)? Click below to give it a go!
Meanwhile, Jim Baker announced the winners of the full-season Predictatron contest.
Dodgers fan Mike Harrell won the full-season Predictatron contest, riding his favorite team to the top of the standings. He’ll have a division named in his honor for the 2026 edition. Meanwhile, Tom Wancho won his division, so he’ll likewise have a division in his name for next year. This is especially impressive considering their picks were made in March!
Congratulations to all the winners!
Previously, Jim shared that if the Dodgers won the World Series, then Jerry Miller would be crowned the post-season Predictatron champion. He bested the author, who was the only person in the post-season contest to predict the Toronto Blue Jays to win the World Series. Alas, it wasn’t to be.
Jim Baker will present trophies complete with the winners’ names for both contests at the 20th Annual Bill Gilbert Winter Meeting at Texas State University in San Marcos on Jan. 10, 2026.
By Jim Baker
HARRELL WINS IT ALL!
WANCHO TOPS ROGERS DIVISION
Congratulations are in order for our 2025 Predictatron Champion, Mr. Harrell. After posting the best regular season record with 803 points, he tacked on 40 more in the postseason to carry the day 843 to 834 over his nearest competitor, Mr. Miller. Meanwhile, Mr. Wancho racked up 830 points to carry off the Brian Rogers Division title.
The average score this year was 798 points with a median of 803. Mr. Dillon led the way with five perfect picks, nailing it exactly on Cleveland, Detroit, Houston, Cincinnati and San Francisco. Mr. Martinez had four such picks while Mr. Polk, Mr. Siegel and Mr. Miller had three each. No player had a perfect pick on any of their Locks, which is the ideal. Interestingly enough, our champion didn’t have any perfect picks, but he was just one point off on six teams.
Rookie Mr. Windham had an impressive first outing, finishing with a fourth-best score of 823. He even led the contest as late as June 22. Our other rookie, Mr. Barnes, got off to a hot start before settling in to finish at 784.
In the end, the right thing to have done was pick the team with the biggest payroll to win it all again. Who knew? Of course, they didn’t play that way during the regular season, finishing with just the third-best record in the National League and fifth overall. The top three finishers in the Brian Rogers Division all picked the Dodgers to go all the way, while no less than eight of the 13 players in the Eric Robinson Division did so. It will be interesting to see how many players predict a threepeat for Los Angeles in next year’s contest.
In recent weeks, we had another prediction contest wrap up and another start up, thanks to Ryan Pollack adding to the suite of prognostication contests.
Awardatron 2025
[Editor’s note: Ryan Pollack shared this Awardatron 2025 wrapup with the email list on Nov. 15.]
By Ryan Pollack
Hello everyone! Can you believe we’ve come to the end of the 2025 baseball awards season? I sure as hell can’t. Do you remember when everyone thought Jacob Wilson was going to run away with the AL ROY award, and then Nick Kurtz hit 4 bombs in one game, and we were all like “Nick who?”? Seems like forever ago. But here we are.
Below are the final tallies and standings for the contest.
Sam Jethroe Division
Bob Windham took the division title here with a solid 71 points. Bob’s predictions were as follows:
- AL MVP: Aaron Judge (changed from Bobby Witt, Jr. at the ASB, thus getting fewer points)
- NL MVP: Shohei Ohtani
- AL Cy Young: Tarik Skubal
- NL Cy Young: Paul Skenes
- AL ROY: Jasson Dominguez
- NL ROY: Jacob Misiorowski (changed from Dylan Crews at the ASB with no effect on points)
- AL MOY: Dan Wilson
- NL MOY: Terry Francona
It was a solid showing that was held back only by whiffing on both Rookies of the Year. As you’ll see below, these were the hardest picks for everyone.
Standings:
Walt Dropo Division
Ryan Pollack took the crown here (look, I know, just bear with me as I stay with the 3rd person voice here) with 81 points, beating runner-up Jan Larson 10. His picks were:
- AL MVP: Bobby Witt, Jr.
- NL MVP: Shohei Ohtani
- AL Cy Young: Tarik Skubal
- NL Cy Young: Paul Skenes
- AL ROY: Jacob Wilson (changed from Kristian Campbell at the ASB)
- NL ROY: Drake Baldwin (changed from Dylan Crews at the ASB, thus getting fewer points)
- AL MOY: Alex Cora
- NL MOY: Craig Counsell
Strategy note: By holding on to his Bobby Witt, Jr. pick all year, Ryan netted 8 points for Witt Jr’s fourth place finish. If Ryan had switched to Aaron Judge mid-year, he would’ve gotten only 7 points (15 points for Judge’s first place finish, divided in half and rounded down per the rules). Something to think about as far as strategy next year; sometimes changing from a high-but-not-first finisher to a first place finisher is a poor move.
Standings:
Overall Winner
With 81 points to Bob’s 71, Ryan Pollack wins the 2025 contest! If you’re booing right now, you can thank Jim Baker who reminded me last year that I could enter, seeing as how I have no special knowledge of baseball’s outcomes prior to the season starting 😉
Stats
The point totals for each award show us how difficult each was to predict. A higher point total in the category means it was easier to predict who was going to win the award.
Ranked from easiest prediction (highest point total) to lowest, they are:
- NL MVP: 233 points scored in the category. Many of us picked Shohei to start the year and were rewarded handsomely.
- NL Cy Young: 177 points. Many of us picked Paul Skenes.
- AL Cy Young: 150 points. Most of us picked Skubal or Crochet.
- AL MVP: 140 points. Most of us picked Bobby Witt, Jr. to start the year. Several switched to Judge mid-season which, as I mentioned above, resulted in one fewer point!
- AL MOY: 121 points. A lot of us picked Alex Cora and he ended up finishing 4th.
- NL MOY: 86 points. The most common pick was Terry Francona who finished runner-up. However, this was balanced out by other people’s picks (Snitker, Roberts, Mendoza) not giving any points at all.
- AL ROY: 62 points. This was a hard one to start the year as there was no clear-cut frontrunner. Many people switched to Wilson at the ASB; while this got them some points, the halved point total meant it was many fewer than if they’d guessed him in March.
- NL ROY: 26 points. This was a tire fire that reflected the crowded field in the NL. Misiorowski’s breakout came just before the ASB and many of us fell victim to recency bias, using the NL switch on him. However he finished 11th, zeroing out any point total.
That’s a Wrap!
I love doing all of these for you and keeping tabs on the races all year. I think I’ve dialed things in with the scoring system and I hope you appreciated the tweak to be able to change one pick in each league instead of one pick overall. I think this strikes a better balance of difficulty while maintaining interest in the season.
Thank you for playing; please tell your friends about it next year so we can get even more people in!
Contractatron (winter 2025 edition)
[Editor’s note: Ryan Pollack shared this first update on Nov. 8 about Contractatron, which dares us to predict how much prominent free agents will make in the off-season.]
By Ryan Pollack
Hello & welcome to the 2025 Contractatron contest! Thanks to everyone who entered. I had a fun time with this last year and am glad to be repeating the contest.
I’m your host (and also contestant), Ryan. Get ready for a winter of what appears to be a fairly mediocre free agent class. Kyle Tucker is the clear #1, but he is not in the class of Judge, Ohtani, or Soto who headlined the last few free agent classes. His inconsistent 2025 leaves a lot of room for doubt.
Additionally, there’s a steep drop-off in talent after him. I don’t project anyone else to clear $200M in guaranteed money. The next highest prediction I personally made was Bo Bichette at $170M.
Am I wrong?! Are you??? We’ll have to stay tuned to find out.
To kick things off, here is a look at the range of our predictions in boxplot form:
For each player, the black vertical line is the median prediction among our contestants. The white boxes to either side end at the 25% and 75% prediction levels, and the dots are outliers. Yes, someone predicted Framber Valdez to get a $40M deal. I think that person is likely to be off by a large amount. But who knows? Maybe he’ll sign a one-year, $40M deal and the rest of us will look silly.
Settle in, it’s a long offseason. But at least we have this contest to distract us.
I’ll send an update after the first free agent on our list signs.
Future meetings
We’re scheduled to meet at 1 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 14, at County Line on the Lake (5204 FM 2222, Austin) which was the site of the initial meeting of what has become the SABR Rogers Hornsby Chapter. In fact, this meeting will come five days after the 22nd anniversary of the very first meeting. A call for RSVPs will go out on our Google Group email list and on this website in early December.
As mentioned above, the Bill Gilbert Winter Meeting, which will feature executives with local professional baseball teams, perhaps a former major leaguer and baseball presentations, will take place on Saturday, Jan. 10, 2026, at Texas State University in San Marcos. Save the date for a fun and full day of baseball chatter. More details to come next month as we finalize the schedule.
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