What will the 2017 standings look like at season's end? Probably not like the chart below. This is Fangraphs' Zips projections for each team, which has every bit as much value as every other projection system, but less than toilet paper, which has at least one other important use.
Still, it's a starting point for understanding the upcoming season.
Some items to note:
1. None of the projection systems see much in the way of division races. Zips has the Red Sox winning the AL East by 4 games, but after that there's no drama. It's got Cleveland by 8 in the Central and Houston by 10 in the West. In the NL, it projects the Nats by 8 and Cubs by 17, and the Dodgers over the Giants by 7 in the West.
2. If all goes according to form, which it literally never does, the Wild Cards are a pair of shootouts at the October corral. This chart rates the Angels Mariners, Rangers and Rays as a toss-up for the second Wild Card behind the Blue Jays. In the NL, the Giants, Mets, Cardinals and Pirates will battle for the play-in game.
3. The most volatile projections belong to the Anaheim Angels, Baltimore Orioles and St. Louis Cardinals. Zips puts the Halos at 83 wins and a Wild Card while Baseball Prospectus's PECOTA rankings have them at 77 wins and 85 losses. PECOTA doesn't believe in the Orioles either, tabbing them at 74 wins and the AL East cellar. And PECOTA is unfathomably dubious about St. Louis, forecasting just 77 wins and a finish behind Milwaukee.
So where do all those wins go in PECOTA? To the basement. Its worst team -- the Royals -- still win 71 games, more than four teams in the ZIPS projections
4. No one is much buying the Rangers, who ran away with their division last season. The advanced metrics suggested that was more a matter of serendipity than talent and regressed the Rangers to their natural ability level. A healthy Yu Darvish could mess with that.
5. The Mets' outlook is dampened severely by health concerns on the mound. They are rated as just the fourth best staff in the NL, barely ahead of Washington in fifth. But if the breaks go their way -- or actually, if there are no breaks, and pulls, tears, strains, tweaks, stiffness, contusions and syndromes are kept to a minimum -- they could be scary good at preventing runs. Of course, if the queen had testicles she'd be king.
6. The White Sox will look to deal whoever isn't nailed down mid-season, so their numbers could suffer in the short term in order to improve quickly down the line. The projections already like the path the Braves are on.
Are you ready? Opening Day's just a couple of days away.
Remember this?
And this?
They were Baseball Prospectus's projected standings for 2016 last March. At the time, I made sport of the sabermetric community for continuing to expose themselves to ridicule. BP can no more predict next season's results than can any nominally educated fan .
Want proof? Look at that very first line. They have the 68-94 Tampa Bay Rays winning the East, while tabbing the Baltimore Orioles, a Wild Card entry, as the worst team in the AL. With projection systems like this, why not just throw darts, right?
But Wait, There's More...
Well, keep looking. BP pretty much nailed the rest of Baseball. Sure, the Rangers won the West, but there's lots of evidence that their level of play was much more like a lucky .500 team. The rest of the AL is dead on. As projected, the World Champion Royals did stumble. The Indians did indeed run away with the Central. The Angels, with Mike Trout and Albert Pujols, did in fact stink.
Take a gander at their NL projections. Nationals, Mets, Cubs, Dodgers and Giants in the playoffs. Spot on, but for the Nats and Mets switching places. The new and improved Dbacks? Correctly unimpressed. The 98-win Pirates? Stumbled even worse than projected. The Braves' tear down? BP nailed their record.
PECOTA's High BABIP
We could analyze what happened in the game that led to this unlikely result. The big spending teams in Chicago, Boston and Los Angeles delivered. The bad teams lived down to expectations. There's no evidence that the projection system, called PECOTA, learned any new tricks.
If you were projecting BP's projections for 2017, you would regress them to the mean and peg them for largely on target but for some big misses. But BP had a high BABIP last year and avoided the injury bug. They outplayed their third-order Pythagorean record. I project that BP's 2017 projections -- and everyone else's -- will stumble about like Andy Capp, with some home runs and some big whiffs, no better than a semi-educated fan's best guesses. They won't nail all the playoff teams in either league, but they'll get the Cubs and Dodgers right, maybe the Astros too.
Next year this time, we can review my projection of BP's projection and determine who the bigger dope is. I'm betting that baseball's unpredictability vindicates me.
