2013 FanGraphs Staff Predictions
After last year’s rousing success that included tabbing Albert Pujols for AL MVP, Devin Mesoraco for Rookie of the Year, and Arizona as the National League champions, we’ve decided to make fools of ourselves again. Yes, predictions are basically worthless, even ours. Yes, they’re still kind of fun, and provide a useful reminder of what we all thought was true before the season started. So, here’s the FanGraphs Staff predicting 2013.
AL West: Texas
AL Central: Detroit
AL East: Rays
AL Wild Card: Angels
AL Wild Card: Blue Jays
The Rays and Blue Jays actually tied with 15 votes apiece as the AL East winners, but Tampa Bay got more votes as a WC team, so they got stronger playoff support overall, so I used that as the tiebreaker, which pushed Toronto into the second wild card spot.
AL MVP: Evan Longoria
AL CY Young: Justin Verlander
AL ROY: Aaron Hicks
10 different players got AL MVP votes, as there are a number of fine candidates who could plausibly win. Longoria edged out Mike Trout with two extra votes. On the pitching side, only six different hurlers were picked, with Verlander getting one more vote than Yu Darvish. Hicks edges out Jurickson Profar for AL ROY, likely because Hicks has a job and Profar does not. That six people still think Profar will win the award without a clear path to the Majors speaks to how impressive a prospect he really is.
The full grids, in order for you to point and mock later.
| Author | AL West | AL Central | AL East | AL Wild Card | AL Wild Card |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Al Skorupa | Angels | Tigers | Blue Jays | Rays | Rangers |
| Bill Petti | Rangers | Tigers | Blue Jays | Rays | Angels |
| Blake Murphy | Rangers | Tigers | Rays | Blue Jays | Angels |
| Bradley Woodrum | Rangers | Tigers | Rays | Blue Jays | Angels |
| Brandon Warne | Rangers | Tigers | Blue Jays | Rays | Angels |
| Brett Talley | Angels | Tigers | Rays | Blue Jays | Rangers |
| Bryan Grosnick | Angels | Tigers | Blue Jays | Rangers | Rays |
| Carson Cistulli | Angels | Tigers | Yankees | Rangers | Blue Jays |
| Chad Young | Angels | Tigers | Rays | Rangers | Athletics |
| Chris Cwik | Rangers | Tigers | Blue Jays | Rays | Angels |
| Colin Zarzycki | Rangers | Tigers | Rays | Angels | Indians |
| Dan Wade | Angels | Tigers | Rays | Blue Jays | Rangers |
| Dave Cameron | Rangers | Tigers | Blue Jays | Rays | Angels |
| David Appelman | Angels | Tigers | Blue Jays | Rangers | Rays |
| David Laurila | Angels | Tigers | Rays | Rangers | Indians |
| David Wiers | Rangers | Tigers | Blue Jays | Athletics | Rays |
| Eno Sarris | Rangers | Tigers | Blue Jays | Angels | Indians |
| Howard Bender | Angels | Tigers | Rays | Rangers | Royals |
| Jack Moore | Angels | Tigers | Blue Jays | Rangers | Yankees |
| Jeff Zimmerman | Rangers | Tigers | Rays | Angels | Yankees |
| Jeremy Blachman | Rangers | Tigers | Rays | Athletics | Royals |
| Jesse Wolfersberger | Rangers | Tigers | Blue Jays | Rays | Angels |
| Marc Hulet | Rangers | Tigers | Rays | Blue Jays | Angels |
| Michael Barr | Angels | Tigers | Blue Jays | Rays | Rangers |
| Mike Petriello | Rangers | Tigers | Blue Jays | Angels | Rays |
| Mike Podhorzer | Rangers | Tigers | Blue Jays | Rays | Angels |
| Patrick Dubuque | Rangers | Tigers | Rays | Blue Jays | Athletics |
| Paul Swydan | Rangers | Tigers | Rays | Angels | Athletics |
| Steve Staude. | Angels | Tigers | Blue Jays | Rangers | Rays |
| Wendy Thurm | Angels | Tigers | Rays | Blue Jays | Rangers |
| Zach Sanders | Angels | Tigers | Rays | Blue Jays | Rangers |
And the award winners.
And now, for the Senior Circuit.
NL West: Giants
NL Central: Reds
NL East: Nationals
NL Wild Card: Braves
NL Wild Card: Cardinals
The division winners were all pretty clear, but the Wild Card was tougher, as the Braves, Cardinals, and Dodgers all got a decent amount of support from our authors. In the end, 25 of the 31 voters had Atlanta making the playoffs, so they secured the first wild card spot, and then the Cardinals edged out the Dodgers for the final playoff spot with a few extra votes.
NL MVP: Joey Votto
NL Cy Young: Stephen Strasburg
NL ROY: Shelby Miller
Votto got 14 of the 31 votes for MVP, while the next highest vote getter was Buster Posey with four. I’d call that a runaway. Strasburg dominated the pitching side of the equation as well, getting 16 votes, while six different pitchers showed up on just one ballot. Shelby Miller rounded out the blowouts, getting 14 of the ROY votes, with Jedd Gyorko finishing a distant second.
| Author | NL West | NL Central | NL East | NL Wild Card | NL Wild Card |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Eno Sarris | Giants | Cardinals | Braves | Nationals | Reds |
| Al Skorupa | Dodgers | Reds | Nationals | Braves | Giants |
| Mike Petriello | Dodgers | Reds | Nationals | Braves | Cardinals |
| Steve Staude. | Dodgers | Reds | Nationals | Braves | Giants |
| Patrick Dubuque | Dodgers | Reds | Nationals | Giants | Cardinals |
| David Wiers | Dodgers | Cardinals | Nationals | Braves | Reds |
| Blake Murphy | Giants | Reds | Nationals | Cardinals | Braves |
| Howard Bender | Giants | Reds | Braves | Nationals | Cardinals |
| David Laurila | Dodgers | Reds | Nationals | Braves | Giants |
| Bryan Grosnick | Dodgers | Cardinals | Nationals | Reds | Diamondbacks |
| Brett Talley | Diamondbacks | Reds | Nationals | Braves | Cardinals |
| Chris Cwik | Giants | Reds | Nationals | Braves | Cardinals |
| Chad Young | Giants | Reds | Nationals | Braves | Dodgers |
| Carson Cistulli | Dodgers | Reds | Nationals | Braves | Diamondbacks |
| Bill Petti | Giants | Reds | Nationals | Cardinals | Braves |
| Jesse Wolfersberger | Dodgers | Cardinals | Nationals | Reds | Giants |
| Dave Cameron | Diamondbacks | Cardinals | Nationals | Giants | Reds |
| Dan Wade | Dodgers | Cardinals | Nationals | Braves | Reds |
| Mike Podhorzer | Giants | Reds | Nationals | Braves | Dodgers |
| Zach Sanders | Giants | Cardinals | Nationals | Braves | Reds |
| Michael Barr | Giants | Reds | Nationals | Braves | Dodgers |
| Jeff Zimmerman | Giants | Cardinals | Nationals | Braves | Dodgers |
| Wendy Thurm | Giants | Reds | Nationals | Dodgers | Braves |
| Paul Swydan | Giants | Cardinals | Nationals | Braves | Padres |
| Bradley Woodrum | Giants | Reds | Nationals | Cardinals | Dodgers |
| Brandon Warne | Dodgers | Reds | Nationals | Giants | Braves |
| Jack Moore | Giants | Reds | Nationals | Braves | Cardinals |
| Colin Zarzycki | Giants | Reds | Nationals | Braves | Dodgers |
| David Appelman | Dodgers | Reds | Nationals | Braves | Cardinals |
| Jeremy Blachman | Giants | Cardinals | Nationals | Braves | Reds |
| Marc Hulet | Giants | Cardinals | Nationals | Braves | Reds |
And the awards.
Dave is the Managing Editor of FanGraphs.
I see what you did there, Zimmerman
Also as a Nats fan I’m pleasantly surprised at the love Ryan Zimmerman got here.
I don’t believe in Zimmerman.
I just believe in me
The Zimmerman thing is awesome, what makes it even better that there is an actual chance for it to happen.
No vote for Jeff Sullivan?
Yeah–we wants to know whatcha think!
That’s a lot of people who think that Elvis Andrus is going to injured or traded in the next two months. I’m not sure how someone can reasonably think that Profar is the most likely person to be AL Rookie of the Year.
There is always the possible injury to Kinsler or Beltre or the moving Kinsler to 1B idea that’s been thrown around. If he is as special as all prospect evaluators say then he’ll find a way into the lineup soon enough.
It’s easy to pick the consensus number 1 prospect going into a year. Trout and Posey both spent a month or two in minors and still won it. If he is as good as expected, he will force the issue.
I also just visited the Hardball Times website and was struck that on both this site and theirs, there was an amazing lack of variation in prediction on playoff teams. In both the NL and the AL, the overwhelming number of prognosticators pick 5 of just 6 teams, including nine of last year’s ten playoff teams (the Yankees being the exception). The non-playoff teams that get some love are the Blue Jays, Dodgers, and Angels.
Even 7 out of ten repeats would be unprecedented in the wild card era. Not sure if the predictions reflect groupthink, risk aversion, or (if they end up being correct) a change in the ebb and flow of baseball team fortunes.
I think it’s kind of like if you asked a bunch of people to predict the next roll in monopoly.
Yeah, we know sometimes there will be 2s and 12s, but nobody is going to predict that. You’re going to get a lot of 6 and 7 and 8, and those predictions are going to be wrong at a pretty predictable rate, but they still might be the best prediction given what we know now.
So then the question is why is this year different than all other years (sorry, it’s Passover)? Maybe my perception is wrong and there is usually a consensus but if not, then have the best teams opened up a significant gap on the rest that it may take a while to close? Or have our analytical techniques become sufficiently accepted that everyone who fancies themself an analyst, must come up with the same answers for a question like “who will make the playoffs?”
Even if they end up being incorrect, they don’t necessarily reflect groupthink or risk aversion. It can both be true that these were the best picks coming into the season and be true that some of them will seriously underperform. Since the baseball season isn’t run a million times, inferior teams triumph through luck. Similarly, you can’t do much in a preseason prediction to account for freak injuries that might derail a team’s fortunes.
i like when people call consensus “groupthink.” it reminds me of when people call scientific theories “guesses”.
it may be better to represent the results by percentage, to better reflect the fact that Tampa Bay and Toronto are equally predicted to win the AL East and the dodgers are 2 votes shy of an equal chance at the postseason as the Cardinals. and it would probably make more sense to have people predict all division results with win loss and tally the wild cards based on the aggregates; that would probably increase the odds of something interesting in the results. But that’s a lot of work to put into an otherwise meaningless exercise that seems like a source of frustration for many baseball writers.
They’re doing this for us, you know. well, except zimmerman probably.
I am just offering possible hypotheses for a level of consensus that I think is highly unusual in an enterprise where uncertainty is extremely high.
What part of scientific theories are not guesses?
this is a perfect reply.
Where are you seeing THT predictions?
My mistake, it was a different bunch of smart people who have called their website Hardball Talk, my bad: http://hardballtalk.nbcsports.com/2013/03/29/2013-preview-the-hardballtalk-staff-predictions/
it’s almost like those are the good teams
What’s curious here isn’t that they picked the best teams but rather how the staff chose to consider the incentives of picking teams. There is almost no downside and unlimited upside if you pick, say, the Dbacks or the Royals. If you do pick it and you’re right, you’re a genius. If not, no one remembers.
While I too consider the Nationals the favorite to win the NL East, I’m surprised by the level of consensus. I would have expect about 25% of votes for the Braves and at least one guy predicting a dark horse philly.
Especially on a site whose WAR projections put the NL East as a toss-up between the Nats and Braves.
Yeah, but you forget it was DEFINITIVELY PROVEN yesterday that this site HATES the Braves. It doesn’t rise to a Giants level of unabashed, unwarranted hatred, but it’s close.
Don’t forget about Miguel Cabrera.
Let’s say, hypothetically, that everyone believed that the Braves had a 25% chance of winning, which would be less than the Nationals. In that case, the Braves wouldn’t be picked 25% of the time; they would be picked 0% of the time.
I’m surprised Harper only got three votes. Love Jeff Zimmerman’s picks.
Also surprised that not a single person picked Gio for Cy Young.
I can’t tell how much of his MVP/Cy picks was surname related ;P
I still don’t understand why the Nationals are so heavily favored over the Braves. The projections show them to be equals. I understand factoring in a full season of Strasburg and Harper, but I still figured it would be closer than 2 votes to 29 votes. Again, not saying the Braves should be favored, but when 2 teams seem at least close to equal, I figured the votes would be split more along a 60/40 or 70/30 split in favor of the Nationals.
I don’t know about anyone else, but one of the reasons why I picked the Nats over the Braves is because of the pitching disparity … specifically the idea that more can go wrong in Atlanta.
The level of uncertainty amongst the Atlanta starters is pretty high for me. Minor / Medlen / Teheran could be good, or they could be okay, or they could be not-so-good. I have more confidence that the Washington starters will be very good-to-good. Hence my pick.
A well-timed injury could really do some damage to either team, so hey, gotta watch the games.
But you also picked the Reds, Cardinals, and Diamondbacks over the Braves, which is probably going to look pretty dumb in about a month and then every day through the end of the season.
I’m positive that picking a non-Braves team to win the NL Central is NOT going to look dumb in the future.
Fair enough. And the Reds will probably finish with a better record. But take it to the bank: the Braves will run away with the first wild card. The D’Backs (or maybe the Dodgers) and Cards will be scrapping for second.
The fact that the Nationals advantage over the Braves is in pitching is the reason I like the Braves. Pitching is the area that fluctuates the most, so I’ll tend to favor the team I think has the advantage in position players.
Well, it’s not like Atlanta has better position players. The most significant difference between the clubs is that The Nationals have the best rotation in the majors, while the Braves…don’t.
Actually, yeah, the Braves do have better position players. I know everyone thinks Harper is about to duplicate Trout’s 2012, but he’s not. He’s gonna be a 5-WAR guy anchoring a solid but unspectacular lineup.
bryan-
what is this ‘watch the games’ stuff you speak of???
Interesting results from the player profile auto-linker… Blake Murphy, Jeff Zimmerman, Jordan Zimmerman(n)… and Cy Young!
Too bad there isn’t really an opportunity in this article for Johan Santa(na) to make an appearance.
i love the cy young auto link. it makes me wish each player award was named after a player.
Well, ROY is technically the Jackie Robinson award. As for the Kenesaw Mountain Landis award…
As an aside, for those thinking about doing Community Research posts, I found out recently that the player name auto-linker does not apply there. Gotta do ’em by hand.
That AL Central looks like it’s going to be a real dogfight.
this is easily the prediction most likely to backfire, right? the positional power rankings have the tigers 14 wins ahead of the white sox/royals. that’s the kind of long odds worth taking. One 2012 red sox-esque season riddled with injuries and regression and suddenly the division is up for grabs.
the problem is the fight for 2nd place has no clear victor right now, so any prediction of an alternative al central winner is even more of a lucky guess than most other divisions.
Catfight.
Catfight?!?!
Beefight?!?!
Disclosure: I am a Rays fan.
I am surprised at the choice of the Rays in the AL East (however narrow it might have been) because everybody but I seems to be on the Blue Jays bandwagon. I think, however, that by a slight margin over each of the other teams, that the Rays are the best choice.
I am perhaps even more surprised at the choice of Evan Longoria as the AL MVP. There is certainly a reasonable chance that he may be the most valuable player in the AL this season, but I think there is little chance that he will win the award.
The Rays are starting James Loney at first base. Your argument is invalid.
Longoria’s always been a darling of the sabr crowd, and among his most visible talents are home runs and rbi’s, which are the darling of everyone else. He’s therefore more likely than most to win the MVP award, given that he earns/deserves it.
Don’t everyone go out on that Tigers limb at once, now.
Looking at that table makes me so want anyone BUT the Tigers to win the Central.
Well, you can’t say that Dave Cameron was a Mariners homer today. He didn’t pick Felix for the Cy Young Award.
Loaddddds of people taking Yu Darvish as AL CY Young. As someone who struggled with long balls in the Texas heat last summer, is there something im missing?
He knocked a full BB/9 off without giving anything up in the strikeout department. In fact, improving his strikeout rate.
He had an extremely low HR/9 number. There is something your missing
I’m not endorsing him for Cy Young, I’m presenting what probably is the reason people are endorsing him–his command improved substantially over the course of the year. To the point where even if you take into account his HR/FB rate, his xFIP was still 3.29. Which happens to be Justin Verlander’s 2012 xFIP as well (3.31).
A low HR/9, yes, as well as a monster K%, above average IFFB% and GB% and slightly below average HR/FB. Why cherrypick the HR/9 stat?
I’m surprised too. I expected him to get a few dark horse type votes, but he’s basically the co-favorite alongside JV. He got almost as many votes as Felix, Price, Sabathia and Dickey combined.
A 93 mph fastball and a 90 win team?
He dominated late in the season and people assume the first 75% of the season was an outlier and the last 25% his true talent. I tend to bet against 2nd year pitchers, especially those from Asia so I don’t buy him.
No MVP votes for Ryan Braun, has he already been suspended or something?
Some may think he will have the best season, but you and I both know there isn’t a chance in hell the voters will give him the award.
To say nothing of the fact that his team’s probably a 78-82 win team.
Cant wait for Yu Darvish to silence all the idiots/casual MLB fans that think he is just another Japanese pitcher who tricks his way to decent 1st year success here…
Only 2 people had either the Yankees or Red Sox making the playoffs. It’s got to be quite some time since baseball experts were so down on both those teams at the same time. As a Red Sox fan, this disappoints me, both because no one had the Sox making the playoffs, and because there are few things I enjoy more when the Sox and Yanks are both dominant and play each other. But as a baseball fan, I’m very much looking forward to the 2013 AL East dogfight.
In a “contest” where the scoring is 1 point for being right and 0 for being wrong and you’re trying to maximize points NOT the chance of outscoring others, it only makes sense to pick the favorites. I think the Tigers have much less chance of winning the AL Central than most people do; I actually have money on it. But I can’t see how to spin the Tigers as less than 50% or any other team at 20%.
I suspect a lot of voters see the NL East as 52-45 or 55-41 for the Nationals vs. Braves but they don’t get a weighted vote they have to pick one and thus they pick “Nationals”.
If we applied some Vegas-style scoring where you get 3 points for the Nationals and 5 points for the Braves and 40 points for the Phillies, I think we’d see very different picks. But that’s not how it works.
I’ve noticed that same effect in March Madness bracket completion. I checked four peoples’ brackets at work and the number of correct sweet sixteen entries was:
11, 11, 11, and 11.
It would be cool to pick a low-probability team like FGCU or Lasalle to correctly advance to the Sweet Sixteen, but most people have figured out that probability rules, so you get a lot of vanilla, predictable brackets with the Sweet Sixteen comprised of all 1-5 seeds. Unless the scoring system is tweaked to provide some advatange to correctly guessing a low-probability event, why take the chance?
Some respect for the Giants !!
Thank you Fangraphs staff for overriding your projection systems!
All the best to you for the new season.
Somewhat surprising that despite the constant barrage of the Yankees are still good, only two writers have them in the playoffs (both as WC2). Alas, that is two more than those that have the Pirates in the playoffs. Shock the world Cutch and crew!
Cistulli has them as winning the AL east.
Very… Cistullian.
Also, picking Gillaspie for ROY is the very apotheosis of Cistullianism.
Always hating on the Rockies. Pffft.
More seriously. I’ll take “the field” on every one of these category picks for division winner. I’m kind of surprised at the consensus as well. Yes – the picks represent the best plurality probability. But if the numbers were actually accurate enough to project well — then we probably wouldn’t really need to play baseball.
Fortunately, we do need to play the game and not the simulations.
I would probably take the field for every division except the AL Central. The Tigers are very solid all around and have decent depth, and the rest of the division is just extremely mediocre. I think you can cobble together scenarios comprising 30 or 35% of hypothetical trials in which the Indians or Royals manage to filch the division crown, but Detroit is rightly being seen as the heavy favorite.
That was the division that raised my eyebrow. Sure – tigers are dominant. Maybe a 50% probability to win – with every other team being a 10-15% or so. That’s — really really dominant.
But this is a saber site. I would expect that probabilities would be handled the way probabilities MUST be handled. Easy to do in Excel with a random number generator.
As it is, these projections look like a March Madness pool where everyone has predicted that there will be no upsets and the Final Four will ALL be #1 seeds. Where’s the Cinderella team? Where’s the uncertainty? Where’s the “damn I know my home team sucks but I’m still going to pick them to win the division because — there’s always a chance they might do that”?
Well, the critical difference between predicting the MLB season and predicting March Madness is that one is a one and done tournament, and the other is a 162 game season. Upsets are going to happen much more frequently in a knockout tournament than in a 6 month long season.
To predict someone other than the Tigers winning the Central, you’d have to believe both that the Tigers are being seriously overrated, and that there’s some other team in the division that’s being underrated.
Yes, it’s possible that the Tigers could be plagued with injuries (it’d need to be a lot due to how much depth they have; if one or two pitchers go down they still have a formidable rotation, and the lineup is stacked), regression and that some team makes an improbable run. But if you’re asked to pick one team who you think will win the Central, pretty much every person is going to say the Tigers.
Is it weird that I love how, out of all the possible ways to organize this information, that all the tables are sorted by the first name of the NL ROY votes?
Who let Cistulli compile the data?
Not because I think my picks are worth anyone’s time (they’re not, you can stop reading), but so I can find them again at the end of the season:
AL West: Angels (Angels, Rangers, Athletics, Mariners, Astros)
AL Central: Tigers (Tigers, Royals, White Sox, Indians, Twins)
AL East: Blue Jays (Blue Jays, Rays, Yankees, Red Sox, Orioles)
AL Wild Card: Rangers
AL Wild Card: Rays
NL West: Dodgers (Dodgers, Giants, Diamondbacks, Rockies, Padres)
NL Central: Reds (Reds, Cardinals, Brewers, Pirates, Cubs)
NL East: Nationals (Nationals, Braves, Phillies, Mets, Marlins)
NL Wild Card: Braves
NL Wild Card: Giants
I will never understand SABR writers’ irrational love of Evan Longoria. He is the MVP prediction every single year on too many sites.
I don’t understand why people pick him in the 1st round in fantasy either. Even if he manages to stay healthy he isn’t a particularly strong 1st rounder since he doesn’t have a .300 AVG hit tool and doesn’t run anymore and it is a mediocre lineup.
Cistulli is so hip! The Yankees to win the AL East, a Cistulli Exclusive! Tulo to earn MVP honors, a Cistulli Exclusive! Gallaspie to earn ROY honors, a Cistulli exclusive!
I love that everyone continues to sleep on the Phillies. Not one single vote? Looks like chalk rules. Good.
Pack Mentality is fast at work this year— The ESPN “experts” and the Fangraphs staff basically are all saying only 5 teams are really in contention for the 5 AL playoff spots (with a few outliers picking the A’s) and only 6 in the NL– with an occasional person choosing the Diamondbacks. As ludicrous as this undoubtedly is, even more incredible is the fact that 40 different ESPN “experts” chose the Giants to make the playoffs, and despite the fact that they have won the last 6 playoff series they have played in, since they missed the playoffs altogether in 2011, not ONE picks them to even reach the WS, let alone win it….. It is laughable how everyone is slave to the “numbers” and their reinforcing power– talk to the A’s and Orioles about how well that will work out…..
Funny, nobody predicted the A’s winning the AL West in 2013. What a bunch of morons. Go A’s!!