Quick FAN Standings
I was having some fun with the FAN projections and thought it might be neat to attempt to see where the visitors here at FanGraphs have collectively ranked the teams based on the individual player projections.
Just some quick notes:
– Everything had to be scaled back considerably and evened up for playing time. Pitchers as a whole are projected at about 4 wins too high per team and batters are projected at about 6 wins too high per team. Fielding stats were the most realistic and were only about 1 win too high.
– These standings are also simply based on wins above average (calculated FanGraphs WAR style) and for the most part use the entire projected player pool. Some players with well below 0 WAR were left out and players needed at least 5 ballots to be included.
– I should also note, that I’m posting these as a launching off point for discussion and not much more.
Team Wins Yankees 98 Red Sox 94 Rays 92 Orioles 78 Blue Jays 71 Twins 82 White Sox 79 Tigers 78 Indians 76 Royals 73 Rangers 84 Mariners 83 Athletics 81 Angels 80 Braves 89 Phillies 84 Marlins 80 Mets 78 Nationals 72 Cardinals 88 Cubs 78 Brewers 78 Reds 77 Astros 72 Pirates 68 Rockies 87 Diamondbacks 87 Dodgers 84 Giants 80 Padres 79
And there you have it.
If anyone wants to give these a go, you can always export the FAN Projections and try it out yourself.
David Appelman is the creator of FanGraphs.
Now we know why Vegas only thinks the Twins win 82 games; we apparently think it, too/
Does this include a correction for the unbalanced schedule?
I.e. the crappiness of other teams in your division helps you more than a team in another division.
I think adjusting for that, twins get a considerable boost.
This was done without looking at a schedule. They’re more or less WAR based standings.
The fans knew the schedule when projecting WAR. In theory, that should all ready be accounted for. In practice, I think you’re right, some adjustments do need to be made.
These really don’t look too bad to me, other than the Phillies at 84. Its certainly possible, but I imagine they will be closer (and probably ahead of) the Braves.
I very much like the AL West being a 4 team race separated by 4 games.
Interesting that only 3 teams are pegged to win 90+ games… although I guess it’s not entirely surprising.
Awesome that the Rays would miss the playoffs with the 3rd most wins in the Majors. Terrific.
I love the Rays as much as the next guy but there is no way they are winning 92 games in that division. They have 36, count ’em, 36 games against just the Yankees and Red Sox. What about all the games they are going to play against the other very good teams like the Mariners, Angels, Twins, and Tigers? I’m sorry but I just don’t think they upgraded enough to gain 8 wins from last years 84-78 record.
Do these include both team fans and other fans? If…
1) There’s a relative optimism bias among the team’s fans compared to other fans
2) The number of player projections for each team roughly correlates to the popularity/market of the team (e.g. there are more Yankee fans then Reds fans, and thus more Yankee player projections from Yankees fans than Reds player projections from Reds fans)
3) The effect in #2 is not seen to the same degree among ‘other fans’ (e.g. the distribution of projections among other fans is less correlated to market size/ popularity)
Then, we’re likely to see the most popular teams fare better than they otherwise might. In short, it would be interesting to see the standings using only projections made by people who are not that team’s fans, one made using just team’s fans, and one with both. And then of course it will be fascinating to see who’s the most accurate.
Good points. These use all the projections and don’t even consider who is a fan of a team and who is not. This could certainly be the case with the Yankees & Red Sox. You’d think the Mariners would have won the division though in this case, because there are more Mariners fans making projections than any other team.
i gotta say, the phillies win total seems to me to be the most off. maybe they just have generally pessimistic fans? that includes me. I picked utley to get hurt and only play about 130 games, and jimmy to still not be great.
Philadelphia fans pessimistic? Well I never!
Ugh. Another “close, but not close enough” year for the Cubs.
*raises glass*
Here’s to an outbreak of Mono in the St. Louis clubhouse!
78 wins vs. 88 for the Cards doesn’t really qualify as close :p
I thinkg the Cubs are going to win closer to 85 than 74…and still lose to the Cards!!!
I’d love to see such close races in late September. Plus, as a Jays fan, it would be a sellers market at the deadline and “we” could get a decent haul for our expendable players ie. Overbay, Gonzalez etc.
Nobody’s getting close enough to the playoffs to want to trade for someone without having a 1B better than Overbay.
You know you’re a Jays fan when you’re excited about your team missing the playoffs before the season has even started.
I broke 1999-2008 up into as close to 6 piles of 50 teams as I could based on wins: Here are those groups of team along with the %%% of teams falling within for the ’99-’08 period compared to the distribution from the Fan Standings:
WINS .. 99-08 .. Fans
=94 17% 7%
While 34% of teams from 1999-2008 won between 75 and 87 games, *70%* of the teams from this are in that range.
Crap… my ‘table’ didn’t appear to copy and I’ve already dumped the data 🙁
Anyways, with or without the data, the last statement still applies– twice as many teams are being projected to fall at +/- 6 wins of average than are likely to end there…
So, you’re just saying the standings are unrealistically close? That’s certainly possible, but I don’t know if this is something unique to these projected standings.
I guess on average there are about 7-8 teams that get over 90 wins since 1998, and this only shows 3.
And then below 70 there’s about 6 teams and only 1 in these standings.
This could be a result of something I’m doing when re-adjusting the standings to account for the fans optimism, or it could just be how projections usually work out. Just looking at CHONE and PECOTA, I see a similar spread, but that’s just me eyeballing it.
The reason the projections look so much closer to .500 than actual past results is that the results are the sum of true talent and variance, while the projections only forecast talent.
To take an extreme example, let’s say I project the upcoming season for a rock-paper-scissors league where everyone is picking their throws at random. I will project every entrant to win exactly half its contests, but will the season actually end in a 30-way tie at 81-81? Bloody unlikely. Someone is going to get lucky and win 90+ times by chance alone, and someone else will lose 90+. I’m not sure of the RPS equivalent to the 2009 Mets season (freak arm injury that tips off each throw in advance?) but injuries/breakouts/collapses add even more uncertainty in baseball.
So, even though the worst team projection is for 68 wins, it’s same to say SOMEONE will finish 67-95 or worse. We’re just not sure who.
This is exactly right. Some team is going to have a key player get injured (for example), that team will lose more games than it is currently projected to, and those lost games will show up in the win column for some other teams, Thus the field widens. Random events aren’t biased towards making teams worse, of course, but teams are doing everything they can to make themselves better right now and those factors are built into the FANS projections — meaning the random things the fans don’t project will tend to be downside risks not upside opportunity.
One problem with any projection system is that a team doing poorly or a team doing well will often make moves that further it down those respective paths. A team out of contention will start to run out its minor leaguers to get a sense of where they are at while trading away proven talent for more prospects. Teams that are succeeding will do the opposite. And that makes them a very different team than opening day.
I’d take the under on the Padres too b/c their biggest WAR machine will likely be out the door before the season is up.
I’ll take the Phillies (over 84), Halos (over 80), Padres (under 79). *Heads to Vegas*
i think fangraphs should open up a fan projection for team records separate from the player projections.
Yeah the Phillies have pretty much proven that they are barely a .500 team over the past couple of years.
ha somebody found the sarcasm key on the keyboard..
It’s right next to my “any” key.
Where’s the Any key? I see esc, catarl, and pig up, but no any key. All this computer hacking is making me thirsty, I think I’ll order a Tab… Oh! No time for that, computer’s starting!
Interesting that in both the AL and NL there are three competitive teams in the East, one in the Central, and four in the West. This trend is a little less distinct in the NL but nevertheless I would agree that the 8 playoff teams are going to come from these 16 teams. The West is going to be very fun to watch this year as more teams will be vying for playoff spots, particularly in the AL where the wild card is almost certainly going to the second best team in the East and all four teams in the West will be fighting for that one playoff spot at the top of their division.
I don’t think it’s surprising that this method would project more teams to be roughly average than actually is likely to occur. First of all, it doesn’t take into account mid-season trades. Good teams will be buyers and get better, while bad teams will be sellers and get worse, skewing the distribution. In addition, some of these teams will face significant injury to high value players (like the Mets did last year) and underperform their preseason talent levels.
This is a good point but I think it needs a little developing. All the risk/reward gambles are (roughly) equally accounted for here. Without checking, Texas and Oakland are likely getting comparable projections for Harden and Sheets, both balancing out the upside with the downside. There’s really no predicting which, if either (or both!), gets hurt, so they both get dinged similarly for their health risks. But, if Sheets goes down for the season in April and Harden pitches the whole season that bumps Oakland down a handful of wins and adds a win or two to Texas, even though there’s really no predicting that happening (as compared to predicting the opposite).
Re: the Angels (80)
The Angels have a long history of outperforming “the sum of the parts”; many give at least partial credit to Scioscia, and I count myself among them. It is, however, interesting to see the sum of the parts.
Thanks, David.
I personally have the Rockies at around 95 – 97 wins, I think that having Tracy as the skipper will help keep the team focused and motivated. Not to mention De La Rosa and CarGo are both poised for potential break out seasons and a healthy Francis is better in my opinion than Marquis.
In 2009 the Rockies were coming off of injuries and a terrible season and seemed to have lost faith in Hurdle, now they’re poised to be a truly dominant force in the NL West and the National League as a whole. Not to mention that LAD didn’t exactly get a whole lot better, SF failed to get that big bat that they needed so badly and managed to downgrade their defense in the process, Arizona’s off season is at best a wash by adding LaRoche for that second half run but losing Sherzer for Jackson, and well, San Diego is San Diego.
I see no reason for the Rockies to finish that low this year, especially after their terrible mess going 18-28 last season and still managing to post 92 wins.
I’ll have my predictions done by late September. I know that seems far off, but my predictions are usually spot on and therefore worth the wait.
How’s that working out for your investment/retirement portfolio?
I think 79 wins from the Padres are a bit optimistic. Even though they won 75 last year only 4 teams had a worse run differential them so it appears they were fortunate to even win that much and they only won 63 the year before. And I really don’t really see where they improved at. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were a lot closer to 70 or even slightly below it.
FAN projections seem to have done pretty bad in the NL Central and West predictions. I wonder how individual projections did compared to systems like CHONE and the like? A couple articles outlining how well the FAN projection system did globally as well as individually would be nice.