Welcome back baseball! This offseason was excruciatingly slow, but we’ve finally made it to Opening Day.

This year, we’re introducing a complete revamp of how these power rankings work. The old model wasn’t very reactive to the ups and downs of any given team throughout the season, and by September, it was giving far too much weight to a team’s full body of work without taking into account how the club had changed, improved, or declined during the season. Instead, we’ve decided to build our power rankings model using a modified Elo rating system. If you’re familiar with chess rankings or FiveThirtyEight’s defunct sports section, you’ll know that Elo is an elegant solution that measures teams’ relative strength and is very reactive to recent performance.

To avoid overweighting recent results during the season, we weigh each team’s raw Elo rank using our coinflip playoff odds (specifically, we regress the playoff odds by 50% and weigh those against the raw Elo ranking, increasing in weight as the season progresses to a maximum of 25%). As the best and worst teams sort themselves out throughout the season, they’ll filter to the top and bottom of the rankings while still being reactive to hot streaks or cold snaps.

First up are the full rankings presented in a sortable table. Below that, I’ve grouped the teams into tiers based on both their outlook for this season and the long-term state of their organizations. You’ll notice that the official ordinal rankings don’t always match the tiers — for example: The Reds, Tigers, and Pirates are ahead of the Angels in the rankings, but the Angels are grouped with the Red Sox in the fifth tier while the aforementioned trio is among the up-and-coming clubs in Tier 6 — but generally, the ordering is consistent. (Note: The playoff odds listed in the tables below are our standard Depth Charts odds, not the coinflip odds that are used in the ranking formula).

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The Braves haven’t budged from the top of these rankings thanks to their deep and talented roster. They made it through spring training without any major injury scares, and even added a bit of depth to their outfield by reuniting with Adam Duvall just in case Jarred Kelenic doesn’t pan out. Chris Sale has looked healthy and strong this spring, and Spencer Strider added an exciting new pitch to his already dominant repertoire. This team is ready to compete from day one and anything less than a championship at the end of the season will be a disappointment.

The betting scandal involving Shohei Ohtani and his former interpreter Ippei Mizuhara will dominate the headlines surrounding the Dodgers until it is resolved. That will overshadow a team that has a bit more volatility than you’d expect from a roster that’s projected to win 93 games. Mookie Betts’ unexpected move to shortstop could have some disastrous effects on the defense on the left side of the infield, and the injury question marks in the starting rotation won’t be answered anytime soon. Still, if the two-game opening series in Korea showed us anything, it’s that this offense is capable of covering all manner of woes.

The Astros head into the season with a handful of pitching injuries to navigate. Justin Verlander’s shoulder issue delayed his ramp up this spring and José Urquidy is out with an ominous-sounding forearm strain. It sounds like Verlander’s injury isn’t that serious, and the midseason recoveries of Lance McCullers Jr. and Luis Garcia should provide some reinforcements later on, which is why Houston’s preseason projection wasn’t affected all that much. With Yordan Alvarez, Jose Altuve, and Alex Bregman, among others, the Astros still boast a potent offense, and they bolstered their bullpen with the addition of Josh Hader. Once again, Houston is the team to beat in the American League.

The season hasn’t even started and the Yankees are already in a precarious spot. An elbow ailment likely will force Gerrit Cole to miss the first couple of months of the season, exposing the lack of depth in New York’s starting rotation. Pair that with Aaron Judge’s mysterious abdominal discomfort — as well as a few other spring knocks to DJ LeMahieu and Anthony Rizzo — and the injury issues that sank the team last season have already started to rear its ugly head. Even with Juan Soto poised to contribute in his contract year, the Yankees feel like they’re sitting on a knife’s edge. They’re not facing the worst-case scenario yet, but it won’t take much to get them to that point if anything else goes wrong.

If you look at all the individual projections on the Rays roster, you probably won’t walk away that impressed. But they’re simply better than any other team at seemingly maximizing the production of every single player in the organization. That’s how they’re projected to win 86 games despite heading into the season a little light on pitching after trading away Tyler Glasnow and following the injuries of Shane McClanahan, Jeffrey Springs, Drew Rasmussen, and Taj Bradley. Could it all collapse this year? It’s possible, but their track record speaks for itself.

The fear that the Mariners could squander Julio Rodríguez’s youth and one of the best starting rotations in the game is ever present. It got a little more real after the team announced Bryan Woo would start the season on the IL with a minor elbow issue. Seattle will also have to overcome a few injuries to some of its best relievers early in the season. That said, the Mariners look more talented than they have the past couple of years — on paper, anyway. There’s plenty of risk present in the lineup, so they’ll have to lean heavily on their elite run prevention unit and their homegrown superstar to carry them through a long season.

After a quiet offseason, the Twins are still the favorites to defend their AL Central crown. Despite that healthy lead in the projections, it doesn’t feel like their path to the playoffs will be as smooth as it was last year. They’re already facing some injuries in their pitching staff, with Jhoan Duran’s oblique the most concerning of the bunch. Health was always going to determine how successful they would be this year, and thankfully, Carlos Correa, Royce Lewis, and Byron Buxton all emerged from spring training ready for Opening Day.

The expectations for the Orioles are sky high after their surprising rise to the top of the American League last season. We’ll have to wait a little bit before watching Jackson Holliday, who ranks no. 1 on our Top 100 Prospects list, make his debut, but their roster is packed with young talent and should be plenty entertaining until he arrives. Baltimore was smart to trade for ace Corbin Burnes, because even with him, there are some questions about whether this starting rotation is deep enough. Even if the O’s can’t recapture last year’s magic, they should be right in the middle of the playoff picture this season.

Why fix what isn’t broken? After back-to-back NLCS appearances, the Phillies seemed content to simply stick with what’s worked. They’ve eliminated the Braves from the postseason each of the last two years, so even if they’re unable to chase down Atlanta for a division title during the regular season, they’re confident they’ll be able to make a deep run in October.

The Cardinals’ depth will be tested early this season as they’re already missing Sonny Gray, Lars Nootbaar, Tommy Edman, and Dylan Carlson because of injuries. Their lineup should be able to weather those temporary absences but there’s a lot less wiggle room in the starting rotation. Thankfully, it sounds like Gray will be able to make his first start of the season within a week or two.

The Diamondbacks capped off an encouraging offseason with the last-minute signing of Jordan Montgomery. That addition, along with fellow newcomer Eduardo Rodriguez, elevates their starting rotation into elite company among the game’s best (though Rodriguez will begin the season on the IL with a lat strain). With MVP candidate Corbin Carroll leading the offense, Arizona looks poised to follow up its surprising World Series appearance with another competitive season.

The Blue Jays have a lot riding on the shoulders of Vladimir Guerrero Jr. If he’s able to rebound after a down year in 2023, Toronto should be just fine. If not, well, the Blue Jays didn’t bring in much outside help this offseason to support him. They’re also banged up in their bullpen following elbow injuries to Jordan Romano and Erik Swanson. Extended absences for the two high-leverage relievers would further reduce the slim margin for error that Toronto already has in an extremely competitive AL playoff picture.

When they signed Blake Snell 10 days ago, the Giants finally made the big splash to put a cap on an active offseason. Before adding Snell, San Francisco also added third baseman Matt Chapman, center fielder Jung Hoo Lee, slugger Jorge Soler, righty Jordan Hicks, and catcher Tom Murphy. The Giants spent more than $325 million on free agents this offseason, the second highest total in baseball behind the Dodgers. All those moves put them solidly in the mix in the competitive NL Wild Card race.

Unsatisfied with a step-back season after trading away Juan Soto earlier in the offseason, the Padres did an about-face and landed Dylan Cease from the White Sox two weeks ago. That stabilizes a rotation that was in flux throughout the offseason and provides some more high-level talent for the roster. Is San Diego better off now than it was with Soto in the mix? The projections see it all as a wash, though the Padres still have a critical lack of depth across their roster. In that sense, they’re essentially in the same position as they were last year: They have a ton of talent but very little room for error.

The Cubs finally addressed the Cody Bellinger-sized hole in their lineup by simply re-signing the man himself. And with Shota Imanaga looking impressive during spring training, there’s some cautious optimism surrounding this ballclub. Chicago has essentially pulled even with the Cardinals in what should be a competitive race for the NL Central, and if the Cubs fall short in the division, they could sneak into the playoffs via a wild card berth.

The Rangers are betting they can hit well enough to stick around in the AL playoff picture until Max Scherzer, Jacob deGrom, and Tyler Mahle are healthy to reinforce their starting rotation. There’s plenty of risk involved, but that’s not necessarily a bad bet. Corey Seager and Josh Jung have progressed enough from their spring injuries and will be ready for Opening Day, and Texas should also enjoy full seasons from its pair of highly regarded rookies Evan Carter and Wyatt Langford, our no. 2-ranked prospect. Even so, as things stand, the Rangers’ potent offense might not be enough to carry them to the playoffs.

The worst-case scenario for the Marlins appears to already be in full swing. They were already going to miss Sandy Alcantara for the entire season after his Tommy John surgery, and now Eury Pérez, Braxton Garrett, and Edward Cabrera are all on the IL to start the season with various injuries. Max Meyer, their second ranked prospect, should be able to step in to fill some of the gap, and Miami is also having lefty A.J. Puk, who to this point has pitched exclusively out of the bullpen in the majors, handle a starter’s workload. Suddenly, the clear strength of this roster doesn’t look so strong.

Like the Marlins, the Brewers’ starting rotation, once a clear strength, is looking a little diminished this season, after they traded Corbin Burnes and lost Brandon Woodruff to injury. On top of that, Devin Williams, their best reliever, is expected to miss the first half of the season with a back injury. All eyes will be on young Jackson Chourio to see if he can quickly acclimate to the big leagues after turning 20 years old just a few weeks ago. Milwaukee will be competing in the wide open NL Central, so anything is possible, but it certainly seems like this season is being treated as a stepping stone to the team’s next competitive window.

After a couple of big splashy offseasons, the Mets were fairly quiet, making some targeted additions to their depleted pitching staff and opportunistically signing DH J.D. Martinez a week ago. There’s enough talent in the lineup for them to make a surprise run at the NL Wild Card if the health of the pitching staff holds up, but that feels like a longshot at this point. The reality is that this is an evaluation year for new president of baseball operations David Stearns as he begins to put his stamp on the organization.

It was just a couple of years ago that the Guardians won the division with the youngest roster in the majors. With the core of that team still around, Cleveland hopes that a few more prospect graduations will help push it back to the top of the AL Central after falling short of the postseason last season. There’s still too little power in this lineup — sending Kyle Manzardo to the minors to start the season isn’t helping in that arena — which makes the Guardians a little too reliant on their batted ball results swinging their way. That’s a volatile blueprint for building an offense, and the projections reflect that reality.

The two teams in this tier feel a little lost, stuck in that limbo of not yet rebuilding but not being good enough to compete this year. Boston’s chances of making some noise in the AL Wild Card race took a hit when Lucas Giolito was lost for the season with an elbow injury. The Red Sox signed Brayan Bello to an aspirational six-year extension, and they’re hoping the early returns are promising. They’re also expecting the adjustments Nick Pivetta made late last year carry over, and maybe Tanner Houck and Kutter Crawford take a step forward. That’s a lot riding on a bunch of hypotheticals. Boston won’t be bad, but it doesn’t seem to be good enough where it counts, either.

The same could be said for the Angels. With Shohei Ohtani out of the picture, the Angels decided to invest heavily in their … relief corps? There were so many other areas on their roster they could have bolstered that their commitment to spending on so many relievers was a bit comical. Of course, the success of their season will hinge on whether Mike Trout, Anthony Rendon, and Taylor Ward are healthy and contributing. But even if they are, and the lineup is scoring runs, the pitching staff is weak enough that it probably won’t matter.

The infield logjam the Reds were expected to have has suddenly disappeared after Noelvi Marte was suspended for PEDs and Matt McLain underwent shoulder surgery. While the playing time picture is a little more clear without so many players needing to get at-bats, I’m sure the Reds would rather navigate that headache than have two of their most promising youngsters sidelined for months. The rest of the roster has a number of health issues as well — TJ Friedl, Nick Lodolo, and Brandon Williamson are all starting the year on the IL — which makes Cincinnati’s ascendancy a little less likely.

The Tigers’ starting rotation was the talk of spring training. Tarik Skubal looks like a legitimate Cy Young candidate, a number of their pitchers have added velocity to their fastballs, and Jackson Jobe’s mouth-watering stuff has a lot of people asking how soon he’ll make his major league debut. An elite rotation would give Detroit a solid foundation, but the development of its offense appears to be lagging behind. Spencer Torkelson, Riley Greene, and Kerry Carpenter still need to prove they can produce over an entire season, and the supporting cast is still merely OK.

After missing almost all of last season with an ankle injury, Oneil Cruz looked fantastic during spring training, and his return has given the Pirates some much needed optimism as they head into the season. There’s a universe where Cruz leads the offense, pitching prospects Paul Skenes and Jared Jones solidify the starting rotation, and Pittsburgh makes some noise in the race for the NL Central. The reality is that the Bucs are probably a season or two from truly making the leap, but there’s clear forward momentum for the franchise for the first time in a long time.

There’s plenty of hype surrounding Cole Ragans after his tremendous late season run last year, and Maikel Garcia is getting in on the excitement too after a strong showing in Winter Ball and spring training. Developing some additional high-end talent to support franchise cornerstone Bobby Witt Jr. is a critical piece of the puzzle for the Royals. There isn’t much coming through the minor league system, though, so they’ll need to get creative to try and speed up this rebuild.

The seemingly never-ending relocation saga will loom large over the A’s this season, and their play on the field won’t provide much, if any, relief. A few youngsters are worth watching to see if they can develop into franchise mainstays, but by the time this team ends up in Las Vegas (if that ever comes to pass), the likelihood they’re still in the organization is pretty slim.

After trading away Dylan Cease, Luis Robert Jr. remains the lone piece that could bring back a sizable haul of prospects to jumpstart the White Sox rebuild. He’s young enough and under team control for long enough that it’s possible they’d want to hold onto him as a bridge to the next competitive window. His contract situation is favorable enough that he’d fetch plenty of prospects if ever they do decide to trade him.

The Nationals have filled their roster with veteran bounce-back candidates to surround the few youngsters who have already made their major league debuts. It’s not a bad idea to see if Jesse Winker, Joey Gallo, Eddie Rosario, and Nick Senzel can rediscover their swings so that Washington can flip them at the trade deadline. And the show that top prospect James Wood put on this spring gives the Nats a promising glimpse into their future, even if that’s still a year or two away.

After a very quiet offseason, the Rockies finally woke up and signed Ezequiel Tovar to a long-term extension earlier this week. It doesn’t raise the talent level of the roster, which is projected to be among the worst in the majors, but it’s a solid move to lock up a promising piece of their infield. Tovar isn’t the second coming of Troy Tulowitzki, but he’s one of the best defenders in baseball and his bat still has some room to grow. Beyond that, Colorado is hoping for a healthy season from Kris Bryant and for Nolan Jones to hold onto the gains he enjoyed last year.

It’s probably no surprise to you that I’ve always loved baseball. It hasn’t always been in the way I love it now. These days, I read about the sport all day and watch more games than I can count every week. It’s a self-enforcing cycle; the more I like it, the more baseball I get exposed to, which makes me like it more, on and on like that.

That’s not what made me like the sport in the first place, though. I’ve loved baseball for as long as I can remember. Every March, as I anxiously await the start of the season, I find myself reminiscing about how I ended up here. This year, those memories have come on even more strongly, because my dad’s birthday lines up with the start of the season and he’s turning 75 this year. I’m feeling so strongly, in fact, that Meg was kind enough to let me write about what got me hooked on the sport when I was a kid.

I didn’t grow up in a “baseball market.” We didn’t get Cardinals games on TV; for most of my childhood, we didn’t even have cable. But most of my fondest memories of being a kid revolve around the sport anyway. My parents got to work early on me, and they kept it up until I was a lifelong fan.

No baseball on TV? It was no problem, because my uncle taped a St. Louis promotional spot titled “Ozzie, That’s a Winner” and mailed it to us. It was a gas station advertisement, if I’m remembering correctly, with clips of great defensive plays interspersed around The Wizard talking about where he filled up his tank. I didn’t care about that part even a little bit. I watched that video until the tape wore out and tried to mirror Ozzie’s moves in our family room. Credit my mom and dad for sitting there without laughing while a small left-handed child tried to make himself look like the best defensive shortstop of all time, because they never once told me how doomed my dream of being the next Ozzie was.
Read the rest of this entry »

After an offseason marked by big trades and a slow free agent market, the 2024 season is almost upon us; we made it. And on this, the morning of Opening Day, we engage in our annual tradition of asking our staff to open themselves up to public ridicule by trying to predict the year in baseball. Some of these predictions will prove to be prescient; others will make their forecaster feel a little silly. Such is the prognostication business.

We asked the staff to predict the playoff field, as well as the pennant and World Series winners, and the individual award recipients. Folks from FanGraphs and RotoGraphs weighed in. Here are the results. Read the rest of this entry »

Logan Webb was my pick for NL Cy Young last season, and while the prediction didn’t come to fruition, the San Francisco Giants right-hander did come close to capturing the honor — this despite an 11-13 record. (We’ve come a long way, haven’t we?) He finished second in the voting to Blake Snell, who is now his rotation mate, and while Webb’s major league-leading 216 innings certainly captured the attention of the electorate, many of his other numbers stood out as well. He ranked fourth among qualified National League pitchers in both ERA (3.25) and FIP (3.16), and his 1.29 walks per nine innings was second to none. Moreover, his 62.1% groundball rate was the highest in either league.

He hardly came out of nowhere. Webb was already good, as his stats over the past three seasons attest. Since the beginning of the 2021 campaign, he has a 3.07 ERA and a 3.00 FIP, and his signature sinker-changeup combination has been responsible for a 59.9% groundball rate. A comparably humble 23.1% strikeout rate over that span (21.4% last year) notwithstanding, the 27-year-old worm-killing workhorse is one of the best pitchers in the game.

Webb sat down to talk pitching at San Francisco’s spring training facility earlier this month. He’ll be on the mound later today when the Giants open the regular season in San Diego.

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David Laurila: How have you evolved as a pitcher since coming to pro ball?

Logan Webb: “I’ve changed probably four different times. I was a sinker guy when I first started. Then I had Tommy John, and when I came back, so did the velo — it was back to the reason why I was drafted.”

Laurila: You were drafted [by the Giants in 2014] because you threw hard? Read the rest of this entry »

If you were searching for evidence of the changing of the guard in the major leagues — or of the occupational hazards faced by starting pitchers — look no further than this year’s slate of Opening Day hurlers. As the 2024 season launches with what was supposed to be a full schedule on Thursday — the Brewers-Mets and Braves-Phillies games have both been postponed until Friday — the absences of so many of the game’s most renowned pitchers due to injuries and other issues loom large. If there’s good news, it’s that we still have plenty of top arms on tap.

Consider, for example, the fact that neither of last year’s two Cy Young Award winners, Gerrit Cole and Blake Snell, will be taking the hill on Thursday. After being diagnosed with nerve inflammation and edema earlier this month, Cole — one of just two pitchers to throw at least 200 innings in both 2022 and ’23 — will start the year on the injured list and won’t even begin throwing again until early or mid-April. A best-case scenario has him returning around the start of June; in his place, the Yankees will start Nestor Cortes. Snell, who reached free agency after winning his second Cy Young last year with the Padres, didn’t even sign with the Giants until March 19 and isn’t built up enough to be on the Opening Day roster, let alone take his turn. Instead, Logan Webb will get the call for San Francisco for the third straight season, though that might have been the case even if Snell had signed in a timely fashion.

This is more or less a once-every-couple-of-decades occurrence. According to ESPN’s Tim Kurkjian, the last time neither Cy Young winner started the following Opening Day was in 2005. That year, despite their hardware, both the Astros’ Roger Clemens and the Twins’ Johan Santana yielded to teammates with longer tenures with their respective clubs, namely Roy Oswalt and Brad Radke. Before that, you have to go back to 1982, when neither the Dodgers’ Fernando Valenzuela nor the Brewers’ Rollie Fingers (a reliever) started. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the past week and a half, we’ve published our annual season preview, ranking the league’s players by position and team based on a blend of our projections (a 50/50 split between ZiPS and Steamer) and our manually maintained RosterResource playing time estimates courtesy of Jason Martinez. If you happen to have missed any of those installments, you can use the navigation widget above to catch up.

Today, I’m going to summarize the results. We’ll look at some tables and pick out a few interesting tidbits in a moment, but first, it’s important to remember that this exercise captures a snapshot of how we project teams to perform now. Teams aren’t static. Since we began publishing our rankings, Wyatt Langford, our no. 2 overall prospect, officially made the Rangers’ Opening Day roster, while Jackson Holliday, our no. 1 overall prospect, learned he’d be starting his season at Triple-A Norfolk. Cardinals outfielder Dylan Carlson suffered a sprained AC joint in his left shoulder during a collision with teammate Jordan Walker. He’ll start the season on the IL, paving the way for speedster (and no. 83 overall prospect) Victor Scott II to debut. And mere hours after our starting pitching rankings went live, Jordan Montgomery signed with the Arizona Diamondbacks, pushing them from 13th all the way up to fourth. Heck, while I was writing this summary, news broke that Reds infielder Matt McLain underwent shoulder surgery, putting his season in jeopardy. Read the rest of this entry »

Some 49 hours before their first regular season game, the Arizona Diamondbacks brought up the house lights to end the 2023-24 Hot Stove League. Jordan Montgomery is headed west on a one-year contract with a vesting option.

The 31-year-old Montgomery had been a well-regarded high-volume starter, but the 2023 postseason brought him to the verge of stardom. The Texas Rangers traded for Montgomery at the deadline, and with Jacob deGrom and Max Scherzer battling injuries, it was the big South Carolinian who emerged as the team’s ace. He won three games in the postseason, including Game 7 of the ALCS in a multi-inning relief appearance on two days’ rest, and was one of the World Series champion’s breakout stars.

That championship, of course, came at the expense of Arizona, his new team. The Diamondbacks, having come so close to winning it all, had already brought in reinforcements by trading for third baseman Eugenio Suárez and signing outfielder Joc Pederson and lefty starter Eduardo Rodriguez. Last October, this was a team with an improvised rotation; with Montgomery, Rodriguez (once he returns from his season-opening IL stint), Zac Gallen, Merrill Kelly, a full year of a maturing Brandon Pfaadt, and a healthy Tommy Henry, it’s among the best in the sport. Read the rest of this entry »

After all the rumors and money and projections, here we are, back at 0-0, with every team having at least some theoretical level of hope for the coming season. Beginning Thursday, actual games will turn these projections to shreds, but this is the best algorithmic projection I have the ability to make for 2024. Just a note that I have not committed an act of decimal cheating; ZiPS does not know that the Padres and Dodgers are 1-1.

The methodology I’m using here isn’t identical to the one we use in our Projected Standings, meaning there naturally will be some important differences in the results. So how does ZiPS calculate the season? Stored within ZiPS are the first- through 99th-percentile projections for each player. I start by making a generalized depth chart, using our Depth Charts as a jumping off point. Since these are my curated projections, I make changes based on my personal feelings about who will receive playing time as filtered through arbitrary whimsy my logic and reasoning. ZiPS then generates a million versions of each team in Monte Carlo fashion (the computational algorithms, that is — no one is dressing up in a tuxedo and playing chemin de fer like James Bond).

After that is done, ZiPS applies another set of algorithms with a generalized distribution of injury risk that changes the baseline PAs/IPs for each player. Of note is that higher-percentile projections already have more playing time than lower-percentile projections before this step. ZiPS then automatically (and proportionally) fills in playing time from the next players on the list to get to a full slate of plate appearances and innings. The model’s had a lot of updates since the pre-spring projections, so probabilities may have moved slightly more than you might have expected from the changes in wins.

The result is a million different rosters for each team and an associated winning percentage for each of those million teams. After applying the new strength of schedule calculations based on the other 29 teams, I end up with the standings for each of the million seasons. This is actually much less complex than it sounds.

The goal of ZiPS is to be less mind-blowingly awful than any other way of predicting the future. The future is tantalizingly close but beyond our ken, and if anyone figures out how to deflect astrophysicist Arthur Eddington’s arrow of time, it’s probably not going to be in service of baseball projections. So we project probabilities, not certainties.

Over the last decade, ZiPS has averaged 19.7 correct teams when looking at Vegas preseason over/under lines. I’m always tinkering with methodology, but most of the low-hanging fruit in predicting how teams will perform has already been harvested. With one major exception, most of ZiPS’ problems now are about accuracy rather than bias. ZiPS’ year-to-year misses for teams are uncorrelated, with an r-squared of one year’s miss to the next of 0.000562. Now, correlations with fewer than 20 points aren’t ideal, but the individual franchise with the highest year-to-year r-squared is the Mariners at 0.03, which isn’t terribly meaningful. If you think that certain franchises have a history of predictive over- or underperformance, you thought wrong, and I’d bet it’s the same for the other notable projection systems.

If you want to check out the pre-spring projections, which talk about the biggest things to happen up to that point, here are the links to the AL and NL projections. Since it has been requested, for these official 2024 projections, I’ve also added 80th and 20th percentile win totals to the standings tables.

Since the last set of projections, the movement here can mostly be attributed to starting pitching. Corbin Burnes provides a huge boost to the Orioles, but some of the benefit of his addition is negated because of less optimistic innings totals for the injured John Means and, more significantly, Kyle Bradish. The injury to Yankees ace Gerrit Cole diminishes their outlook a bit, though they still have the American League’s third highest playoff probability. Lucas Giolito wasn’t expected to pitch the Red Sox to the postseason, but his injury makes a Boston playoff berth even less likely.

People might still be shocked to see the White Sox with a 1.5% chance of making the postseason, but one of the things I’ve learned after doing this for 20 years is that people – even the most sophisticated ones – tend to underrate how often improbable things happen. Luckily, with so many years in the books, I’ve had the ability to do a lot of calibration! In most simulations, the division features a fairly tight race between the Twins and Guardians for the title and the Tigers finishing third. And because the Central is relatively weak, a Royals playoff appearance would be unlikely but not unreasonably so.

The big change here is a slightly more negative distribution of the innings for Astros pitchers, narrowing their lead over the Rangers and Mariners. I appreciate ZiPS’ bringing the M’s just that much closer to the Seattle Mariners .540 meme. The A’s now project to finish a fraction of a win ahead of the White Sox in the AL basement, which is some kind of victory, I guess.

ZiPS does give the Braves a 1% chance at winning 116 games! Atlanta lost a bit in the probabilities because of some changes in the generalized playing time model that fills in the backups. Even if ZiPS sees the playoffs as a bit less certain for this team than it did six weeks ago, the Braves still have the highest projected win total in the majors. The Marlins took a sizable hit after some negative injury news, a pretty big deal for them since the pitching staff is their source of upside. It sure ain’t the hitting!

ZiPS loves Pete Crow-Armstrong and is suspicious of Cody Bellinger matching his 2023 numbers, but bringing him back was still enough to push the Cubs into a near-statistical tie in what was already projected to be a very close race. The Brewers took a hit with the loss of Burnes, and as a result, they slightly boosted the projections for the other four teams in the division.

The NL West contenders fighting with the Dodgers – which means the three other teams that are not the Rockies – all received a boost because, since the pre-spring projections, they each added one of the top starting pitchers available, either in free agency or via trade, this offseason. The Diamondbacks, Giants, and Padres are better after having acquired, respectively, Jordan Montgomery, Blake Snell, and Dylan Cease, but the moves haven’t changed the relative positions of these teams in the projected standings. Even so, these deals — along with San Francisco’s signing of Matt Chapman — have created more scenarios in which the Dodgers can be bested for the divisional title, though they remain the favorites.

One thing you see a lot on social media, especially from sites that repost these projections, is outrage that “the best team will only have X wins.” The Orioles are projected to have the best record in the AL, at 91-71, but that doesn’t mean that ZiPS projects 91 wins to lead the AL. Those 91 wins represent Baltimore’s 50th percentile performance in those million simulations, and it is astronomically unlikely that all 30 teams hit their 50th-percentile projections. On average, you should expect three teams to hit their 90th percentile, six to hit their 80th, nine to hit their 70th, and so on and so forth. But again, it’s rarely going to be that neat. So here’s the percentile matrix for the number of wins it would take to secure each of the six playoff spots.

I’m not a bold predictions kind of guy. Maybe it comes with the territory of writing so much: On average, my views are pretty down the middle because I just have so many views. There’s so much baseball bouncing around in my brain all the time that it tends toward the mean. Or maybe that’s just a cop out, a way to pre-excuse my lack of boldness. Because it’s time for my annual attempt at it. Here are five things I think will occur that hopefully will shock you a little – but not too much, because I’m hoping that at least two or three of these actually will transpire.

1. The Mets Will Lead Baseball in DH WAR
Our projections hate J.D. Martinez, and there’s a reason why: He’s 36 and squarely in the back half of his career. Over the past four years, he’s posted a 120 wRC+, which is great but not otherworldly, and he struck out 31.1% of the time in 2023. This kind of general trajectory is what projections feast on; they recognize early and commonly shared signs of decline and then extrapolate from there.

Doubting those projections wouldn’t really count as a bold claim in my book, though, because Martinez is a very good hitter. Also, the way that projections work means that he’ll exceed those numbers roughly 50% of the time even if they’re a good approximation of his true talent. We need to be much bolder than that. So let’s kick it up a notch and imagine how good Martinez could feasibly be.
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Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley remind people to vote in their preseason predictions game, discuss the completion of the season preview series, and then (10:15) analyze Shohei Ohtani’s remarks from Monday and preview the rest of the 2024 Los Angeles Dodgers season with The Athletic’s Fabian Ardaya, followed (1:15:31) by a 2024 Colorado Rockies preview with The Denver Gazette’s Luke Zahlmann, plus a postscript on the Diamondbacks signing Jordan Montgomery (1:55:50) and a recap of preview guests’ goals for each team this year (2:01:25).

Audio intro: El Warren, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio interstitial 1: Tom Rhoads, “What Did Shohei Ohtani Know?”
Audio interstitial 2: Justin Peters, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Daniel Leckie, “Effectively Wild Theme”

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