Several weeks ago the website CBSChicago had this headline: “PECOTA Projects Cubs For 92 Wins, White Sox For 82 Victories.”

Dodgersnation.com declared: “PECOTA projects great year for Dodgers.”

And this from a site called rightinyourwheelhouse.com: “PECOTA: The mortal enemy of old baseball.”

PECOTA is a contrived acronym for a projection system that is owned and published by Baseball Prospectus but was created by Nate Silver, who gained renown and well-paying jobs not for his baseball projections but his remarkably accurate and comprehensive political projections.

PECOTA has failed to make a believer of me and I should probably just …

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This column comes to you with the assistance of a reader, Bob Russell. Without his contribution, it might not exist.

“Were you on vacation when Red Sox owner John Henry spoke out about the team’s past over reliance on sabermetrics?” Russell wrote in an e-mail a couple of weeks ago. “He did that last week … I have been waiting for you to jump on that and run with it. Check it out.”

I was not on vacation, I replied, but I must have been asleep because I missed that development, a most intriguing one in the analytics field. I assured my alert reader I would look into it and I have, finding more than I expected.

What I found most interesting was the acknowledgment of some baseball people that …

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Editor’s note: Joe Garagiola died Wednesday at the age of 90. A .257 career hitter, Garagiola was best known as Yogi Berra’s boyhood buddy from the Hill in St. Louis. I knew him best as a catcher on the awful Pittsburgh Pirates teams in the early 1950s. Joe, however, turned stories of those futile teams into a second career as a baseball comic and a third career as a baseball and news broadcaster.

Garagiola, though, was more than all of those. He was an exceptional human being, one of the finest I ever met, who worked for worthy causes no one else would touch. One of those causes was his effort to eliminate chewing tobacco from baseball. Every spring for years he visited training camps to show players the physical devastation caused by smokeless tobacco. He might have been too ill in his final days to learn that New York City banned smokeless tobacco from the city’s ball parks, including Yankee Stadium and Citi Field.

In this reminiscence, Fay Vincent, the former baseball commissioner, recalls another of Garagiola’s off-field efforts.

Murray Chass

The death of my friend Joe Garagiola floods my memory bank, and out of the many fond recollections I have of Joe there is one he agreed was special. When I became the baseball commissioner, I inherited a program that had been instituted by Peter Ueberroth when he was commissioner to provide financial assistance to needy old ballplayers and their spouses. The effort was named the “Baseball Assistance Team” and when I arrived in the commissioner’s office, the leadership of BAT was the duo of Joe and Ralph Branca, the former Dodger pitcher. Their efforts were notably successful and I quickly signed on to …

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