JABO: Projecting Second-Half Surprises
The All Star Game is the holy line of demarcation between the first and second half of the season. Dip your toe ever so gently across it and you’ve entered the second half of the season. Beware, friend! This is the time when we know who is good and who isn’t, who should sell at the upcoming trade deadline and who should buy. It’s all cut and dried, like beef jerky. Just look at the standings and, like listening to Donald Trump, all the secrets of the world will be revealed! By now, we know a lot about the season, much more than we did in March. Except, actually no, no really we don’t.
Last season’s standings featured the Orioles, Tigers, A’s, Nationals, Brewers (yes, seriously, the Brewers), and Dodgers in first place at the All Star break. During the second half of the season, the teams with the best records in those divisions were the Orioles, Royals, Angels, Nationals, Pirates, and Dodgers. There are certainly some similarities between those lists, but they’re clearly not the same either. The A’s and Brewers completely fell apart while the Royals and Angels got hot. Things aren’t always as they seem after one half season of baseball.
As FanGraphs’ Jeff Sullivan wrote here last week, pre-season projections are, on the whole, a better indicator of how the second half of the season will go than the games played in the first half. Even this late in the season, good projections can help us look past the noise in the data that comes from one half season of baseball. This is an important point because it’s so easy to look at the standings and start to cross teams off the list of prospective playoff contenders. Instead, we’re going to cast a larger net by looking at some projections for the rest of the season, and explore how they jive with what we’ve seen so far.