Recently, Nico and Flashfire have gone back to the lets take pot shots at DFA and stats across the blog modus operandi that prevailed around here circa early 2009.  In the process, Nico decided to dredge up the Eveland/Braden debate from the beginning of last year.  I thought it was a pretty cheap shot since it is a logical fallacy to say that because you were wrong once that you must be wrong again. Well that made me do some digging back in the archives to see what I could find and I found a lot of what I was looking for: A less full throated defense of Eveland than I remember and plenty of completely wrong predictions that Crosby would break out, Chavez would finally be health, and Giambi could hit .300 on his return from Nico before even starting in on Flashfire that I could make into this

via seattlebuzz

and a comeback of nuclear proportions.  While writing one of those sadistic fanposts that you really should delete, I started to think about times my analysis had been as wrong as Nico's, which lead to a far more productive line of thinking.

I thought Aki Iwamura would be a good free agent target ----- OOOPS -1.1 WAR and sent down

I said that Wallace wouldn't be traded to the A's

I have many times supported the position that Eveland could be a ML SP even said he could be a number 3

And those are just from my fanposts and the initial Eveland argument that got me started down this path.   But baseball is a magical game that has the tendency to do this to all of us and humbling people that speak in absolutes. While I have certainly had my hits, like suggesting that we offer Beltre a 4/$32m deal last offseason, these failings have taught me much.  I have learned to be less cavalier with small sample sizes, more suspect of luck either way in HR/FP%, to regress defensive statistics more aggressively to the mean and even more than that with injured players.

It is a terrible analyst who does not examine their failings and try to learn from them. What has been your biggest miss and what did you learn from it?