One of the best things about the sportswriting racket is the complete lack of accountability the trade offers. In most fields, one’s credibility is bound up with the accuracy of one’s past predictions. If your accountant advised you that you could get away with claiming tax deductions for seven imaginary children because the IRS doesn’t care about small fish, for instance, you’d probably stop paying him. And if a political candidate had spent an entire term in office zealously advocating for a space-based death ray to repulse an invasion from hordes of undead Mauritanians, no one would vote for him or her. A sportswriter, though, this one hardly excepted, can get away with any number of absurd claims without anyone much holding it against them.

In itself, this isn’t a bad thing. Sports are unpredictable by definition, which is why people care about them; even the sharpest, best-informed observers are going to get a lot of predictions wrong. The problem is that because there are no real consequences for even spectacularly idiotic calls — and I say this as someone who suggested in print this year that the St. Louis Cardinals would be so bad it would make sense for them to trade Albert Pujols — there’s little incentive for chin-stroking pundits to think through the reasoning behind their more ludicrous mistakes.

For example, plenty of writers — including nine of 19 ESPN contributors surveyed in March — inexplicably predicted that the Seattle Mariners, who have the worst record in the American League, would win their division this year. Seattle, it’s true, won 88 games last year and then added ace Erik Bedard in a trade. Unfortunately, it was still obvious that Seattle would be lousy. The 88 wins were an illusion, as the team was outscored last year; the Mariners also have a lot of really bad players. If sportswriters were held to better account, this year’s Seattle boosters would be more likely to notice that the team wasn’t any good to begin with, and thus less likely to blame the team’s collapse on things like Ichiro Suzuki’s clubhouse presence or Bedard’s pitch count. They’d also be less likely to be taken in by fluke win totals in the future. These would be good things.

While pointing out the motes floating around in everyone else’s eyes, of course, it’s best to point out the beam in yours, so I hasten to add that I’ve spent many an hour at the stupid party this year. A minute with my own preseason predictions is more than a little humbling, but it’s also educational. Here’s what I’ve learned, subject to revision.

First, it’s a good idea to trust great managers. This March, I wrote that “the Cardinals now consist nearly entirely of bench players and relievers pressed into starting roles and the remnants of several injury-riddled former stars.” This was, and is, true. Tony LaRussa, though, is a great manager whose teams more or less always fit that description. Maybe no one could have specifically foreseen that Ryan Ludwick would hit like Manny Ramirez while Kyle Lohse pitched like Tim Hudson, but it was easily foreseeable that a club in the hands of a true Hall of Famer can very easily be much better in practice than theory. Similarly, I waved off the Chicago White Sox and proposed that Ozzie Guillen would be the first manager fired this year; neither was a good call, given Guillen’s talent for coaxing stunning performance from pitching staffs of relatively modest talents.

Second, Coors Field really doesn’t distort the game as much as it once did. I predicted that the Colorado Rockies would both score and allow the most runs in the National League this year. The former because they finished second last year and looked to have a strong offense again this year; the latter just because I figured their pitching would be weak, and both because I thought the thin Denver air would generally affect things. I may not have been wrong about their pitching — the Rockies are second-worst in the league in runs allowed a game — but I was dead wrong about their offense, which isn’t very good and hasn’t been overly aided by Coors (they’re eighth in runs per game). The last time the team led the league in scoring was 2001, and the last time they led in runs allowed was 2004. The idea of Coors as a field of unique and immense impact is out of date, and I should have known it.

Finally, age counts. Along with lots of people, I picked the Detroit Tigers to win the American League Central, completely ignoring the fact that they’re incredibly old. Of their starting nine, just two players — Miguel Cabrera and Curtis Granderson — are younger than 31. As someone who annually preaches doom for the Yankees on the premise that a really old lineup will see more than its share of underperformance and injury, this was something too obvious to have overlooked. The only consolation is that the division-leading White Sox are even older. I’ll mark it down to luck and chance and hang my hat on bold and shocking predictions such as division wins for the Chicago Cubs and Los Angeles Angels and a Rookie of the Year award for Cubs catcher Geovany Soto.

As I say, it’s a good racket.

tmarchman@nysun.com