The final stretch is upon us, which brings playoff races, scoreboard-watching ... and that lovely endeavor of baseball projection experts eating crow for projections that proved wildly inaccurate. While this yearly ritual is inevitable -- you expect 20 percent of players to reach heights or depths you only projected them to have a 1-in-10 chance of reaching -- that doesn't make the meal any more palatable. Baseball wouldn't be as exciting if all projections were dead on and you learn more from mistakes than successes, but that still doesn't save you from that moment when you must acknowledge how wrong you were!
With that, let's look at the worst ZiPS projections among the 2,000-plus projections heading into 2014.
The hits: Players who most outperformed their projection
Dellin Betances, RP, New York Yankees
Projected ERA: 6.24 | Actual ERA: 1.39
Yup, you could say that was a dreadful projection, and possibly my pick for the worst that ZiPS has ever made in 11 projected seasons.