Boston Red Sox Baseball Team Now Mirrors MIT Professor’s Prediction

Before this year’s baseball season began, Dimitris Bertsimas, an MIT Sloan School of Management professor who teaches a course called “The Analytical Edge,” predicted the Boston Red Sox baseball team would win 101 games in the regular 162-game baseball season.

As Bertsimas explained in May at a colloquium at the MIT Sloan School,  his statistical model predicted last year that the Boston Red Sox baseball team would win 90 games in the regular season — and they in fact won 89 that year. But this year, Bertsimas’ prediction at first looked overly optimistic, as the Red Sox got off to a slow start — and won only half their games in the first quarter of the baseball season.

MIT Sloan Professor Dimitris Bertsimas

“They are behind [the predicted record], I admit,” Bertsimas said back in May. “But I am hopeful.”

Bertsimas’ hopefulness in May now looks to have been justified: After beating the Seattle Mariners 12-8 on Sunday July 24, the Boston Red Sox had a record of .626 — quite in line with the .623 record Bertsimas predicted for the team for their entire regular season this year.