Seven Takeaways From Our Playoff Odds
Earlier this week, as is tradition, FanGraphs founder David Appelman went into his garage, turned off all the lights except for some candles, and performed a dark and arcane ritual. Then he went back inside, pushed a few buttons on his computer, and now we have playoff odds for 2021!
Okay, fine, that isn’t exactly how it went down, but it’s close. Our playoff odds incorporate little pieces of a lot of features you’ve already seen on the website. We start with a blended projection that incorporates ZiPS and Steamer’s rate statistic projections. We add in playing time projections from RosterResource, which incorporate health, skill, and team situation to create a unified guess for how each team will distribute their plate appearances and innings pitched.
With playing time in hand, we use BaseRuns to estimate how many runs each team will score and allow per game based on our earlier blended rate statistic projections. That gives us a schedule-neutral win percentage for each team, because you can turn runs scored and runs allowed into a projection via the Pythagorean approximation. From there, we simulate the season 10,000 times, with an odds ratio and a random number generator determining the outcome of each matchup. Voila! Our playoff odds.
Why am I telling you all of this? First, so you can look at them. They’re accessible from the main page, but you can also click here to dive in. Second, because I’m going to walk through some projections I found interesting, as well as a few places where the gap between common perception and our odds merit an explanation. Let’s get started!
The Ultra-Competitive American League East
The Yankees are really good. We project them for 96 wins and a 70% chance at a division title. Some of that is because we’re bullish on their rotation, full as it is with injury-prone but talented pitchers. Most of it, though, is that we just think the Yankees are great. We think they’re a clear cut above the rest.
After that, things get murky. The Blue Jays’ offseason overhaul is real; we think that they’re more than 50% to make the playoffs, narrowly ahead of — wait, the Red Sox?? Turns out, starting your team with Xander Bogaerts and Rafael Devers gives you a high floor. We think the Red Sox have holes on their team — first base and right field look rough — but star power and a sneaky-good rotation (10th in our projections, with help from an optimistic view of Chris Sale’s return) go a long way.
That leaves the Rays, the defending AL champions, on the outside looking in. What gives? An inverse of what we project for the Red Sox. The Rays are deep, but they’re also low-ceiling, at least according to our projections; every spot in their lineup is projected for a WAR total between 1.3 and 2.8. The Red Sox have four positions with higher projected production than Tampa Bays’ 2.8 WAR second base number, and the Blue Jays have six. It’s hard to overcome a lack of top-end talent, though that does mean that the two teams ahead of them have more to lose from injury issues.
None of this is to say that the Rays can’t make the playoffs. They made the playoffs last year without an overwhelming individual offensive performance, though Brandon Lowe was excellent. But with Blake Snell and Charlie Morton gone, the pitching simply looks weaker than last season. However good the reinforcements are — and they’re excellent — their rotation to start the year looks like it will be Tyler Glasnow, Ryan Yarbrough, Chris Archer, Michael Wacha, and Josh Fleming. Not exactly what you’d hope for in a talented and competitive division.
A Note on Distributions
Now that I told you why our odds don’t like the Rays, here’s a follow up: I think we’re underrating the Rays. Why? It has to do with the way we construct our odds. We run the season 10,000 times, as I mentioned, but that’s only to determine the outcome of each game; the underlying talent is the same in each simulation. In other words, the Yankees are a true-talent .595 team every single time — they just get lucky or unlucky sometimes.
In real life, that’s not how things work at all. Players get injured or don’t. Prospects pop, and veterans sometimes unexpectedly decline. The Rays, for example, have about seven pitchers with a chance at being excellent this year. If one of them absolutely shoves, he’ll ascend toward the top of their rotation, and in that universe, their pitching will look better. We’re looking at an average outcome for each player, but that’s not how things will actually work in real life. Some players will get better, and some will get worse.
Similarly, the more depth you have, the easier it is to replace players lost to injury. DJ LeMahieu is getting 651 plate appearances in every single simulation, and Gerrit Cole always throws 200 innings. When we say the Yankees project to win the AL East 70% of the time, we aren’t including injury-related washouts in the equation at all. The Rays have a perfect storm of two factors — plenty of available and volatile prospects, and enough depth that injuries are less likely to scuttle them — that our odds don’t account for. We have the Rays at 19.3% to make the playoffs, but I think that’s as much a consequence of the way we build our odds as an indictment of their team.
The Twins Hang On
The White Sox got a lot better this offseason, but we still have them fractionally behind the Twins in the race for AL Central supremacy. At 39.7% to win the division, the White Sox aren’t pretenders or anything, but the Twins are deeper and more well-rounded than you might think. Eight of their nine positions (eight fielders plus DH) project for more than 2 WAR, and left field, where phenom Alex Kirilloff is taking over, isn’t far off the pace. The pitching is precarious — a few injuries could be worrisome — but this Twins team is no mirage.
The true surprise for me in the AL Central is how close the Royals are to .500. We think they’re only 8.6% to make the playoffs, the 10th-best mark in the AL, but they’re only three projected wins behind Cleveland, a remarkable turnaround from a few years ago. With exciting pitchers in the rotation and plenty of room to make additions if they’re in the hunt for a playoff spot in July (the whole outfield and bullpen, basically), the Royals might surprise some people this year. They also might not — again, we think they’ll only make the playoffs 8.6% of the time — but that’s a step in the right direction for a team that won 58 games in 2018 and 59 in 2019.
Trout Alert
I know, I know, the Angels never make the playoffs. This year, however, they just might. Oakland, the division winner in 2020, has spent the offseason doing a whole lot of nothing — Marcus Semien and Liam Hendriks have been replaced with bubble gum and hope. Houston lost George Springer. The Angels lost Andrelton Simmons, but other than that, they’ve had a solid offseason.
Raisel Iglesias is the best reliever they’ve had in years. José Iglesias is a cut-rate Simmons coming off a career offensive year. José Quintana’s floor is decent and his upside is an innings-eating monster. Dexter Fowler, Alex Cobb, Aaron Slegers, Juan Lagares, Kurt Suzuki, and Alex Claudio are useful pieces. As an added bonus, we’re projecting Albert Pujols for only 371 plate appearances this year, which would be the lowest number of his (non-2020) career.
Of course, we’re projecting him for -0.7 WAR in that limited playing time, so the Angels’ Pujols problem isn’t over yet. It’s smaller now, though, and the combination of less Pujols and more competent veterans does a lot to sand off the worst parts of the roster from years past. Sure, they’d be more interesting if they had landed another talented starter, but at long last, it appears that Trout has a puncher’s chance at a division title, or at the very least a Wild Card slot.
We Love the Mets
Sometimes it feels like FanGraphs and the Mets are in an on-again, off-again relationship. We laugh at their overall Metsiness, and we also cover their attempts at team-building more than we maybe should. They’re just so darn interesting, whether their planning works or not.
This year, we project that the planning will work. They aren’t head and shoulders ahead of Atlanta, but both teams look like the class of the National League East. The Nationals have too many holes (second base, rotation depth, and infield corners) for Juan Soto to carry them. The Phillies have a Nats-esque offense with a worse pitching staff. The Marlins had a fun run in 2020, but I didn’t need a projection system to tell me they’ll struggle to replicate that success this year.
The Mets aren’t without issues. They’re still defensively deficient — we have Dominic Smith getting 500 plate appearances in left field, Brandon Nimmo with nearly 500 in center, and J.D. Davis getting most of the time at third base, which is rough to say the least. They’ll hit enough to make up for it, though, and their rotation is both star-laden and deep. When we’ve poked fun at the Mets for not using their financial resources to go from intriguing to dominant, this is the kind of team we envisioned. It would be a shock if they don’t make the playoffs this year despite a deep division and strong Wild Card opposition.
Central Sadness
Wow, the NL Central projects poorly. The Brewers’ signing of Kolten Wong got them back even with the Cardinals… at a desultory 81.4 wins. We aren’t alone — pretty much any computer model in the world is going to be skeptical of a bunch of teams that haven’t played well in years and didn’t do enough adding to offset the effects of aging.
Milwaukee has a superstar, but that’s kind of it. Wong projects as their third-best position player, and while I think that’s too pessimistic of a view on Keston Hiura, it’s still not great. For comparison’s sake, Atlanta has six players who project for more production than Lorenzo Cain, the Brew Crew’s second-best projection as a hitter. It’s not like they make it up with pitchers, either; the Corbin Burnes/Brandon Woodruff top of the rotation is great, but the back end is a little dicey. One thing worth monitoring: with Josh Hader and Devin Williams anchoring the bullpen, the Brewers might be able to outperform their run differential with clever reliever usage.
In St. Louis, the problems are much the same. Nolan Arenado and the various Pauls (both DeJong and Goldschmidt) are the offensive highlights, and Dylan Carlson has a shot at being great, but the vaunted Cardinals depth has slipped a little bit in recent years; we don’t think Tommy Edman, Yadier Molina, or Tyler O’Neill will be average regulars, and that’s a lot of ballast to carry. The team is famous for its Devil Magic, so don’t count these guys out, but they combined to hit .232/.297/.363, good for an 82 wRC+, last year, so they’ll all need to excel on defense or surprise on offense to give the Cardinals a boost.
The Cubs have a shot, too. Their pitching staff is cover-your-eyes awful, even after adding a one win bump for the inevitable Kyle Hendricks underprojection (some things never change). They’re relying a lot on Shelby Miller and Tyson Miller. With such a low bar, though, their dynamic position player core of Anthony Rizzo, Kris Bryant, Javier Báez and friends gives them enough offense that we see them as 20% to make the playoffs.
The Reds are the clear fourth-best team in the division, and their offseason, as Dan Szymborski recently chronicled, did nothing to make things feel better. They’re projected for -0.6 WAR at shortstop, and even that feels optimistic considering the players they’re trotting out there.
Nick Castellanos was quietly disappointing last year. Joey Votto can only fight father time for so long. Shogo Akiyama was underwhelming in his first year in the majors. The offense has now been bad for two years, and there’s no one coming to save it. That puts too much pressure on the pitching, and while their pitching is good, it’s not that good. Despite that, we still give them a 14.7% chance at winning the division, which should tell you everything you need to know.
How bad is the NL Central? We project the Red Sox, only 12.8% to win their division, as more likely to win the World Series than the Cardinals and Brewers combined. We think the Blue Jays are as likely to win the World Series as the entire NL Central. On our projected standings page, you can see each team’s true-talent win percentage before accounting for their schedule, and all five NL Central teams are below .500. Not great!
Update: This article originally listed the Brewers as slightly ahead of the Cardinals in NL Central odds. They are now behind them, but in a statistical tie; the odds are re-run daily, so expect variance to continue to swap which of those teams has a higher win projection.
More Like NL Best
You didn’t need a projection to tell you this, so I’ll keep it brief. The Padres and Dodgers are ridiculous. They both have stars and depth all over. The Dodgers won’t have quite the position-player bounty that they’ve had in recent years unless they bring Justin Turner back, but they added Trevor Bauer and will presumably be getting David Price back as well. It’s silly.
Meanwhile, the Padres are weak at first base and wonderful everywhere else. Their pitching staff is ludicrous. They have superstars, sure, but they also have so much depth that Jake Cronenworth, Ha-seong Kim, and Jurickson Profar will all be scrapping for playing time — we think Cronenworth will get the most, but that none of them will hit the 500 PA mark. The Profar signing in particular gives them a high floor in case of injury. Both teams are juggernauts.
There’s plenty more to dig into in our odds, and the offseason isn’t over; as teams continue to sign free agents and make trades, their projections will continue to change. These seven things, however, have most caught my eye so far. Does something else grab you? Do you wonder why we hate your team, and love your rival? I’d love to hear it — baseball is just around the corner, and I’m having fun contemplating another season of it.
Ben is a writer at FanGraphs. He can be found on Bluesky @benclemens.
Thanks!
Under on 87 wins for the Sawx, thanks.
Came down to say the same…the projections seem to me to be pretty, pretty optimistic about that rotation.
boston and tampa’s projections feel like they should be swapped
So basically the baseball prospectus projection for the ALE.
Seems like there’s some compression of the top and bottom of the distribution. I can easily see LAD and SDP winning more than 97 and 95 games, resp, and the Orioles winning fewer than 64 games. Particularly when we factor in ASB trades from sellers to buyers.
I think the projections for the Royals and Giants for ~78 wins are really optimistic. The Royals actually have a respectable lineup but Mondesi is the high point at 2.6 wins. I think the projection is underestimating Merrifield at only 2 wins and maybe Soler at 1.7 wins. Similar for the Giants, Yaz is their tops at 2.2 wins. I like Gausman at 3 wins and Minor looks like a real nice signing for KCR at 2.5 wins. Neither team’s farm system is all that great, so I don’t see reinforcements pushing up their win totals.
I wouldn’t quite put it that way (in that I’m not ready to argue about the projections), but I definitely also noticed the increased parity this year.
Only three teams projected for fewer than 70 wins, and only two projected for more than 95. Projection systems always underrate the likelihood of extreme events; only a really historically bad team would get a 100-loss projection, or whatever. (I think a couple years ago the Astros were projected for 100 wins and everyone’s eyes bugged.)
But it definitely feels notable and surprising that teams like the Rangers, Marlins, Royals, and Tigers are projected to NOT be abjectly awful this year. This gives me hope that we won’t see as much terrible play from tanking teams this year. It also gives me hope that, as a Dallas resident, if I can catch a game in the new park this summer, the visiting team won’t be the only team playing baseball.
To be fair, some of that is the nature of projections. But I do think that there are some weird results here. There’s a lot of optimism on the Rangers that I don’t think is really warranted and I think it’s pretty light on the Padres–the depth they have stockpiled at both position players and in the rotation makes them incredibly resilient to injuries.
Agreed – by their nature projection systems typically won’t project teams at like 105 wins, or 55
I suspect if you could look at the 10,000 individual projected seasons for each team, you’d see a fair number of 100+ win and 100+ loss teams. But when we merely see the 30 averages, those get lost.
For example- I just simulated 16,384 sets of 20 coin flips. If I look at them individually, I get a range of 2 to 18 heads.
But if I look at averages of groups of five, the range is much smaller (6.8 to 13.4). In groups of 20, the range is 8.2 to 11.5… etc.
In 2019, the Yankees, Twins, Astros, and Dodgers all won more than 100 games and the Tigers, Orioles, and Marlins all won 47, 54, 57 games. Maybe that was a unique year where a few teams were at the rock-bottom of their rebuild. Fangraphs projected the Yankees at 99, the Astros at 98, and the Dodgers at 92 wins. It projected the Marlins at 60, the Orioles at 61, and Tigers at 68 (!!).
I think it would be helpful to compare past projections to actuals. I’m not sure how we could divide the delta’s between averaging and actual error on estimating a team’s talent. I suppose that would be the standard deviation and the residual error, resp.
For many reasons, we should be careful about relying heavily on 2019 numbers (W/L records, especially) as trends or indicators
also worth noting how crazy the cardinals season was last year due to them having to take 2 weeks off and make up those games later. definitely sapped a lot of guys.
I’m not sure if you have this data available… but in how many of those 10,000 simulated seasons did all 5 NL Central teams finish below .500?
Some of yall may not be old enough to remember this haha but this National League feels like a 2006 to me. Padres go neck and neck with the Dodgers and claim a division title just to get bounced by an 83-win Cardinals team in the first round. Mets have the best regular season record but of course can’t get it done in the playoffs. That division everyone said was so weak? They win the playoff lottery and are World Series champs.
Edit: of note, I hate the Cardinals haha I just thought this was funny.
I’m 80% confident the 2006 Cardinals were the worst of the Cardinals teams in the 2000’s. How that team won a WS when much better teams fell short blows my mind.
Haha. But in fairness I will admit…They were coming off back to back 100 win seasons and were one of the preseason WS favorites. So 83 wins looks bad but there was some talent on the roster. Funny to think about though!
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Luger was awesome in 88 should have been booked to beat Flair for the title
I feel like 87-88 was the height of the NWA, with mostly-prime Flair, up-and-coming Sting and Luger,, not-horrible-out-of-shape-yet Dusty, Nikita Koloff, Arn and Tully, etc.
Part of it was because while the 2006 Padres had pitching, their offense was so weak that even the Cardinals’ pitching could shut them down, while the Mets’ rotation had been ravaged by injuries to the point that it was even weaker than the Cardinals’. I still have no idea how they beat the Tigers, though, aside from their pitchers having apparently skipped out on fielding practice.
In any case, the 2007 Cardinals were definitely worse than 2006. They were the only team in the decade to finish under .500, their starting rotation made the previous year’s group look amazing, and Edmonds and Rolen both declined even further than they had the previous year.
If Duaner Sanchez never gets in a taxicab accident in 2006, the Mets go on to make and win the World Series. That will haunt Mets fans for a long time.
Same with a few of those Giants WS teams in the early 2010s.
Thanks for triggering my ptsd from the ‘06 nlcs
Love this! Some of my fondest memories were from the ’06 season. I was 11 years old and my favorite player was swinging at everything thrown at him.
Braves fan here as well. Frenchy was fun haha.
Great article and thanks for the additional insights behind the methodology Ben. I’m sure this would be incredibly complicated and way above my pay grade, but it would be great if the methodology weren’t run based on the same playing time levels each time and factored in varying levels of injury risk. As you essentially said yourself, the current methodology overly rewards teams with top end talent (Red Sox) and overly punishes teams with depth (Rays). I got to think the difference between the Sox and Rays is much closer than the standings project. I’m a Sox fan and if I had to put money on which of those teams is going to make the playoffs this year, I would take the Rays.
It’s above my pay-grade also haha but doesn’t Szymborski run his ZiPS projections like that? To be honest, at the end of the day it probably doesn’t make *that* much of a difference but I do like a model like that a little better.
In a word, yes. It would be doable, but it would be a lot more work. One of the really nice things about the way we do it now is that we only need to come up with playing time projections (and therefore run projections) once. Redoing injury randomness before each simulation would mean that instead of building each team’s RS/RA once, we build each one 10,000 times, so it wouldn’t be impossible, but also wouldn’t be easy. I might look at some logic for it as a side project, but I don’t think it’s imminent, because there’s a big difference (sadly) between a little side project run on my computer and a robust model that Applelman has built that works, on demand, every day.
Obviously I don’t know everything behind the scenes here, but it may be easier to have some abstraction between playing time projections (which from my understanding are manually input) and talent level in any simulation. Since the FanGraphs team inputs an expected playing time, the output talent level should be the mean talent level based on that input and the projections. If we can also create a variance based on the current input and projections, then we can draw the talent level from a beta distribution based on these 2 parameters that were estimated from one set of inputs (here is a nice solution to reparameterizing the beta based on these statistics: https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/12232/calculating-the-parameters-of-a-beta-distribution-using-the-mean-and-variance), or alternatively, a truncated normal if symmetricity around the expected talent level is desired.
I realize that may be a bit jargony and perhaps I am underestimating the difficulty in creating a variance measure at the team level, so here is the simpler point: if the concern is that using the point-estimate of the mean underrates/overrates teams with a high/low floor, it seems fairly easy to put a distribution centered around that value by specifying just 1 more parameter.
This is, I believe, how Dan runs his projections on ZiPs and I think it’s a much better solution. In addition to the Rays, I’m not seeing a lot of downside on the projection for the Padres; they have built a team that is extremely resilient to injury.
I should clarify this–in terms of pre-season projections, Dan’s approach is definitely superior. The problem comes when you need to update the projections after every game. I’m not sure how feasible it is to run a full playing time simulation for the entire league every night, but I do think that it’s the kind of thing that could be updated every week. Maybe have a couple of different projections?
I came to ask something similar. I thought your comment on the Rays was very interesting and I was wondering if you had any thoughts on what could change in the projection system to correct the issue. Seems like a pretty interesting problem that lies with a gap in how individual projections are translated to team performance.
EDIT: Whoops, I meant to reply to Ben.
Another effect of using a point estimate for winning percentage, I suspect, will be to make the projections overly certain about the very good and very bad teams. If a team is projected at 95 wins +/-10 true talent they’ll lose more playoff probability from the -10 than they gain from the +10 (and vice versa for a 75 win team). Something to bear in mind if using them to bet real money.
Another superb article Ben! Being a former Cardinals fan myself (swapped allegiance when STL did Pham dirty) I was just curious as to your opinion on Mozeliak trading away: Mercado, Arozarena, and Pham around the same time he committed to Bader, o Neil, and carlsen? Notice a theme there? I certainly do…
When they’ve had a Latino player as basically the face of the team for over a decade and they keep signing him back even though he’s like 100 years old? haha. Yeah I think that’s a stretch man.
You think treating one minority decent simply because he is breaking his back for the team means stl treats minorities fairly? I think not. Between the poor treatment of Pham, Fowler, arozarena, Mercado, and the glorification of Fat Adams, Randal Grichuk, Tyler o Neil and Harrison Bader, it is painfully obvious that Stl is run by a bunch of racists…
I don’t get how you think guys like Arozarena or Mercado were treated unfairly. Just because they were traded? Grichuk and Adams were also traded, but you think the Cardinals “glorified” them? Nothing you’re saying makes any sense. The Pham trade was terrible but the players they received were both minorities who will be on the roster this year. And most everyone thought Liberatore for Arozarena was a massive win for the Cardinals at the time.
As for Fowler, they’re literally doing him a favor by trading him. He would have rotted away on the bench so they ate basically his entire salary to give him a chance to start for someone else. They gave him $80M, allowed him to start every game even as he put up 3 consecutive replacement-level seasons, and then ate his contract rather than force him to sit on the bench… and that makes them racist lmao.
While I’m not going to argue the Cardinals didn’t do Pham dirty, he was also a 30 year old with two above average replacement level seasons and a degenerative eye condition.
Mercado was quite clearly the worst player out of those six, both as a prospect and so far in the majors. It’s hard to see Arozarena looking better than Bader- when Arozarena was 24, he played 19 games in the big leagues. When Bader- was 24, he put up 3.5 wins in 138 games. Trading Arozarena over O’Neill? Yep, probably a miss.
If there is a pattern here, I think it is the Cardinals misevaluating the upside of their younger guys, especially compared to veterans on the team.
Thanks for the reply. If you can’t admit what happened to Pham was dirty then how about Dexter Fowler. Mozeliak literally came out publicly questioning his effort then paid to trade him away. Also stl fans showed their true colors during Ferguson riots. Also, stl was a long time sponsoring partner with Monsanto, the whole town and organization are rotten to the core…
Ferguson…Monsanto…there’s a lot of ground covered there
To be fair, Bader and Carlson currently look like they’re worth the commitments, more so than Mercado at least.
It looks to me that STL is projected just a bit higher than MIL, did something change since this was posted?
Yes indeed, the odds re-ran last night. They’re so close that it’s going to flip reasonably often — you can see in our ‘Coin Flip Mode’ that at 10,000 simulations, you get some noise-related win projection shenanigans.
Just out of curiosity, what is the point of the Coin Flip Mode? IJust to be used as an “If everyone went .500 the rest of the season this is what their record would be”
Yeah it’s more interesting late in the season, doesn’t really do much before any games have been played.
If we ignore their 60 game flukey 2020 season, the Redsox projection is not that crazy.
I’ve been beating this horn for months, but that roster is not bad. Dare I say, it is kinda good.
They had the perfect storm in 2020 that lead to a disasterous season. I mean, Ryan Weber was their #3 starter and they were throwing out AAAA starters 3/5 games. It was like the weirdest, worst, flukiest rotation i have ever seen. Right now, their #7 starter (Andriese) is better than their 2020 #3 starter (Weber)
I think it’s true that 2020 was an unspeakable disaster for the team, and was probably like a 5th percentile outcome for their talent level.
But I also think that 87 wins is about a 65th percentile outcome for their team as presently constructed. Not out of the realm of possibility by any means but would be a slight upside surprise. I look at them and see an 80ish win team as presently constructed; 85-88 if things (like health) break well and 70-73 if the wheels fall off again.
FWIW Vegas seems to be generally in agreement, the early win line on Boston is 80.5
idk if their roster is ‘good’ per se but they probably have the highest variance in range of outcomes in all of baseball. like if they 2018’d it i wouldn’t be too shocked and if they 2020’d this season i wouldnt be too shocked either. or anywhere in between really.
on the whole ‘devers + xbox = high floor’ idea…they had both last year and finished bottom 5. unless the article was talking specifically about the projections.
The Sox have never made sense to me. For the past ~decade and a half they have been either elite or awful, it seems. And despite the lows they win the WS every 5 years
While I tend to agree that they are better on paper than people realize, I have major concerns about their depth. Their rotation is improved but I think lacks upside and is filled with injury question marks, and they have little position player depth on their roster or in the upper minors. Some teams are able to survive an injury to one of their best players by having useful bench players but I don’t see the Sox breaking .500 if Bogaerts or Devers were to miss a significant period of time.
Not that I disagree that the Blue Jays/Red Sox could be equally good this year, I think projection systems aren’t prepared for what the Rays are going to try and do this year with their pitching. They are assigning too many innings to their starters, when by the looks of it nearly every game will be a bullpen game. In a sense that is the same with their position players as they are going to be trying to optimize every single lineup, as well.
Glasnow will go his usual 4+, and they seem to like Yarbrough as a traditional starter these days, but I think we are going to see a lot of Wacha/Archer/Fleming/Patino/McClahanan/Richards/Honeywell/Baz/McKay in short 2-3ip with a lot of up and down between the minors for a few of those guys. But the projections see a lot of those guys as starters with mid to high 4 eras. That is where they seem to be off on the Rays, imo.
Thanks. Having trouble with the player pages, but am I an idiot? Seems I am stuck only seeing fielding values…
A few thoughts on these:
I think the Cardinals are the favorites for the NL Central by default. The Brewers are going to have a lot (a lot!) of problems scoring runs. The defense should be better and the pitching looks good but here is the entire list of players projected for a wOBA greater than .330: Christian Yelich, Dan Vogelbach. That’s it. Two players. And Vogelbach doesn’t even look like he’s going to play much. That’s real bad! The Cardinals are similar, yes, but there’s far more upside there; I’d take the over on several of their non-stars (deJong, Carlson, O’Neill, Edman). The Cardinals aren’t big favorites or anything but if they had one more top pitcher they would be.
I think this methodology is particularly negative on teams with a lot of starting pitching depth and too credulous for teams with pitchers that have some serious health concerns. The Padres and Dodgers are built to sustain a lot of pitching injuries and still be among the best in MLB. It’s a lot more optimistic on Blue Jays and Red Sox (and to a lesser extent, the Yankees) for the opposite reason. Hyun Jin-Ryu has hit 174 innings twice in his entire MLB career; the idea that Chris Sale is just going to show up and be his old self seems unlikely; Kluber and Taillon could combine for over 280 innings, but I wouldn’t bank on it.
I’m going to take the over on the Marlins. It’s not a good team, but 70-71 wins is really low for a team that should have some very good run prevention. I would have guessed they’d get another 5 games or so. I think the same is likely true for the D-Backs–I’d guess maybe a little lower on the Giants and a little higher on the D-Backs–I’d think they’re the same caliber of team. I also think that the Orioles will probably be a little better–not a good team, but I think that they have enough young guys who have a chance to break out that they could hit 70 wins. It’s a tough division but I think they’re a bit better than the projections say.
I’m a little surprised the Rangers do so well in these projections. Because the Pirates play in the paper-soft NL Central I think that the Rangers have the inside track on the worst record this year. The other team that is going to struggle is the Rockies, who are going to get slammed in the NL West this year.
The Marlins seems like the easiest over of the bunch, and that division should be competitive. While they are probably the 5th best team in that division, they could be the best team if they were moved to the Central, or at least right in the race. That is a young rotation that started to breakout last year, and still has Cabrera etc in the minors. Can you imagine if all their pitchers took another step forward? They are going to need some offense at some point, but they hit a lot better than expected last year, at least.
I agree with your point on the starting pitching. I do wonder how much of Ryu going only 174ip one time has to do with the fact that he was on the Dodgers who were masters of using the IL.
I remember thinking how off they were on the Red Sox projection preseason last year, and it seems they are going back to the well for a similar projection for this season. I get it, Boagerts and Devers are stars, and Verdugo very well could be, but the lineup gets week in a hurry. Benitendi has been downright horrible, and the rest of the guys are marginal at best. I have been saying the same thing for a couple years now but JDM’s decline starting a while ago, and would of been a lot more noticeable if he didn’t post the GOAT line vs LHP in 2019 .404/494/887 for a 242 wRC+ with 19 hrs in 141 at bats. He has been among the league leaders in EV decline every year now, and is doing the mid to late career Albert Pujols thing where he sells out for pullside power trying to mask the decline in bat speed. Thing is, Pujols came from a much higher baseline. JDM can maybe fake it a year or two more, but I would bet against it. The whole video camera thing is a red herring. Regarding that rotation, I like Eovaldi more than most, but the rest is question marks and could end up as bad as last year. They have already said they are going to bring Sale along slowly, so even when he comes back it will likely be 2-3ip initially.
Brewers are going to be pretty bad on offense, but if Yelich is more 2018/2019 than 2020 a 7 war superstar is at least a start. The Cardinals at least have some upside in the OF, but on paper their best outfielder was Fowler and they just dumped him.
I mean, losing Fowler is not really a big deal. I’d expect all of Bader, Carlson, and O’Neill to outperform him this year.
I also don’t think the Marlins would have a very good shot at the division title if they played in the NL Central but it certainly would be possible; I think they’re probably on the same level as the Reds.
I’m looking at their projections and I think they’re pretty low on whichever one of Aguilar/Cooper plays first base and on Starling Marte. Alcantra was also way, way better last season than he has been previously, and has a really good shot of being a 3-win, #3 starter, and that Pablo Lopez also could be in that same category. You kind of have to think that all three of those guys were playing way over their heads last year to think that they’ll combine for 5.9 wins, and while they might regress a bit I think at least some of that is real.
I think some of the Marlins starters have upside even beyond that, but who knows.
In regards to Fowler, I disagree. I never understood why people thought he is bad. Guy has a career 107 wRC+, and 21 career war. It isn’t off the charts of anything, but he has been a solid regular for a long time. I think it was his injury-ridden disaster 2018 where he put up -1.1 WAR, but his bat has been mostly fine since then. It isn’t what you are looking for as a corner outfielder, but Carlson has a career 65 wRC+, Bader 95, Oneil 91. While they are all better with the glove, I don’t think any are going to immediately be a massive improvement over Fowler with the bat. They all have upside he doesn’t possess, and they should be getting the at bats, but I also don’t think the Cards outfield as is now is going to be any good. I think it is going to be very bad.
Fowler was pretty good until 2018. Guys who get on base above .360 regularly (and often as high as .390) and run the bases well are pretty rare, but it’s exactly who you want on top of a lineup. I guess ideally you’d have a guy who gets on base even more, like Brandon Nimmo, but those even rarer.
In 2018, his exit velocity cratered, and it never came back. Both projection services put his OBP at .320 or so, similar to last year. When you’re that big a liability in the field you’re not an everyday guy.
He was fine in 2019 and 2020 as well. I am not saying they shouldn’t be playing the younger guys, simply saying that Fowler get a bad rap because of 2018, that is all.
Fowler had a 100 OPS+ in 2019, and then it was 92 in 2020 despite the extremely compressed schedule and missing time to injury. How is that not still worth playing?
Meanwhile, we’re still not sure Carlson’s late season breakout is for real, and O’Neill still has never proved that he can hit Major League pitching on a consistent enough basis to be handed a starting job. On a contending team, O’Neill should have to prove he can hit in limited playing time before he gets played more over a proven veteran like Fowler.
This is a terrible take. Fowler has been worth 0.4 WAR over the past 3 seasons. He projects for negative WAR in 2021, which is also his last season under contract. I’m going to just ignore the comment about Carlson, who is a top 15 prospect and arguably the most important player in the organization for the Cardinals’ future. Of course he needs to be starting. O’Neill still has big offensive upside, and his defense and baserunning give him a high floor. He’s been better than Fowler offensively and defensively over the past 3 years, but more importantly he needs ABs for the Cardinals to figure out what they have. 2020 was O’Neill’s first “full” season, and even with a BABIP under .200 he was on pace for a better year than Fowler has had since 2017. He’s almost surely a better bet than Fowler in 2021, but either way the worst case scenario is that he falls on his face and the Cards gain information. Playing Fowler would get them nothing.
The thing that’s a bit tough to fathom is how precipitous of a decline the depth charts forecast for a bunch of St. Louis’ 25-27-year-olds. The quartet of Edman, Bader, O’Neill and DeJong has accrued just over 3,800 plate appearances and collectively averaged 3.7 WAR/600 per Fangraphs, and an even 4.0/600 at B-Ref. So, if they continue to perform exactly at previous MLB levels, they’d be worth a cumulative 15-16 WAR if given 600 PA’s apiece.
But depth charts has them totaling 6.8 WAR if given 600 plate appearances each. With zero age-related decline to bake into their projections (DeJong is the old man at 27), it’s hard to see where the dramatic decline comes from — for any of them, much less all of them. They were all good-to-excellent in AA & AAA, so their minor league track records can’t account for it.
As for Fowler, they’ll miss him in the clubhouse perhaps, but he’s 35 and been barely replacement level over the past three seasons. Now was a good time to move on.
Fowler was worth well over replacement level in 2019, and he didn’t get much opportunity to rack up WAR last year in 58 games, many of which he missed due to injury, yet he still put up a 92 OPS+. Stop holding that fluke year of 2018 so much against him!
Anyway, I agree with you on Edman, Bader, and DeJong, but O’Neill has never been very valuable in MLB, so his projections are no surprise.
O’Neill outperforming Fowler?! Not very likely! O’Neill is a AAAA player who’s never had Major League success aside from an occasional extra-base hit, while Fowler has long been a decent player aside from one disastrous year in 2018.
Fowler no longer has much upside, but he’s a least good for a likely 1 WAR floor, whereas O’Neill is something like 80% likely to not even be that valuable.
Besides, even if O’Neill or one of the others does manage to break out (also assuming Carlson continues to play well), Fowler would’ve still been the best 4th outfielder option ahead of the ones who don’t break out instead of paying almost all his salary anyway to play for the Angels.
Don’t take my word for Tyler O’Neill’s productivity. Fangraphs has him at 2.5 WAR per 600 PA’s so far in his MLB career, and Baseball-Reference rates him a chunk better at 3.1 WAR per 600.
Whether it’s O’Neill or Edman or DeJong or Bader, St. Louis has several guys right now who don’t LOOK like excellent defenders by body type, but they nevertheless apparently are — again, that’s according to the publicly available metrics at the most respected analytic websites. I only know what B-Ref and Fangraphs tell me, and that’s what they say. No devil magic; just boring old good glovework & baserunning.
As far as Dex goes, even if we generously throw out Fowler’s worst season and keep all the others, his career average still doesn’t get to the low-end estimate of 2.5 WAR per 600 of O’Neill’s career thus far. And Fowler’s nearly a decade his senior. O’Neill might fall on his face in 2021, but that decade difference makes him the much better risk in my opinion.
The teams you called out as upside surprises (AZ, MIA, BAL) all play in brutally tough divisions. I think a function of this methodology is that by not adjusting for playing time (via injury risk or projection variance), you’ll see the teams projected at the bottom of good divisions get beat up on by their divisional counterparts simply because everyone’s true talent level remains the same. So, to your point, I would buy the over on those teams if I thought the Yanks injury risk was higher than the model or the Sox projection for sale is too high or if the NLE is filled with more imperfect teams than we believe.
Yeah I’m not buying the Yankees / Red Sox / Blue Jays being this good. Not because of the talent, but because I just don’t think the health is going to hold out in the rotation. I think one of those three teams is going to way, way underperform the projections, and the other two will be around them.
To a certain extent, I feel the same way about the Braves and the Mets. Those teams are awesome if everyone is healthy, but I’m not that bullish on Carrasco and Stroman in terms of health and the Braves have a lot of age / injury / workload question marks. I just don’t feel that way as strongly.
With the D-Backs, I think they and the Giants are a lot of more similar, and I’d average them out. But I also think that the Padres and Dodgers are really good and they’re going to beat up on out-of-division teams in the NL Central and in the AL West a lot more than this reflects.
I’m curious why you use BaseRuns for runs allowed. Don’t the projection systems already spit out RA for each pitcher?
The odds within each postseason round don’t look to be correct.
Consider the Padres. Compare their odds of winning division, winning wild card, making LDS, winning LDS, & winning LCS. They don’t make sense as they currently appear. It shows their odds of winning the LDS being higher than their odds of making the LDS. Something isn’t right.
Do changes still need to be made to reflect the absence of the 2020-style wild card round, perhaps?
That’s a visual bug; it’s displaying the team’s odds of reaching the divisional series via winning the wild card round. Should be corrected before too long, but for now, you could either add that number to their division title odds or just ignore it.
Glad for this corrective to BP/Pecota’s irrational Phillies optimism. Maybe someday they’ll use all that money to get back to the playoffs, but it won’t be this year.
Record vs Baltimore and Record vs Pittsburgh will determine AL East and NL Central champs.
It’s a blunt tool, but look at the 2019 NL East, when there’s a big cluster of win projections in a division with a super tank team it’s the team that goes 14-4 against the dud that takes the division.
It’ll be interesting to see how the new ball effects things and guys like Marte & Yelich go back to being 15-20 homerun hitters. Same for pitchers who saw their HR rates spike.
Dang the Rays at 0.7% to win the Series. Not what I was prepared for. I’m not sure what that says about me, how they operate, the strength of the division, the turnover for them this offseason, the Arozarena effect, but that is the number that most stands out to me.
I’d love to see the distribution of expected wins for each team. Is that a by-product of the season simulations?
(Really what I want to know is: “how likely is it that the Pirates lose 100 games, 105 games, 110 games, etc.?” Only thing to root for this year is another number 1 overall draft pick and some Ke’Bryan Hayes highlights.)
Is this Trout’s best chance at the playoffs during his prime going forward even with the AL West looking to be the NL Central after this season? I don’t think the Angels spending and prospects will be able to cover all the depth that will be leaving after this season.
I’m not sure I agree there. They do lose a few interesting pieces to free agency (Iglesias, Quintana, Bundy, Heaney) but they also shed $45M in salary in Pujols and Cobb. In total, their decreasing payroll by about $85M (probably not quite that much once ARB raises are factored but it doesn’t look like anyone is in line for a significant raise). Plus they’ll only have one more year of Upton at $28M. I would expect them to be very active in free agency and, if they’re willing to spend to get back up to 2020 payroll levels or higher, I would imagine they’ll be stronger in 2022, especially if Adell and/or Marsh pan out.
You forgot to factor in that Rendon ($8.5M) and Upton ($5M) get a combined $13.5M raise in 2022 compared to 2021.
I am estimating they will drop by about 11 WAR after FA losses and farm additions. If they spend to the luxury tax, they should have about $75M in spending money after this season. Maybe slightly more. Adell or Marsh will need a huge breakout to minimize FA losses as $75M just isn’t enough to make up 11 WAR externally. If it is $85M, that probably isn’t enough, but may be able to break even with a little luck and longer contracts to lower the AAV.
I’m confused, at least for the personal player ZIP / Depth Charts projections, the number of ABs factors in injury risk so the AB amount is an average expected outcome. This is not the case for playoff odds?
ZiPS does, but Depth Charts does not. Mike Trout, for example, is projected for 679 PA by Depth Charts and 593 by ZiPS. Even if we did use the lower numbers, though, it wouldn’t have the shape we want — we’re interested in the distribution of injuries, not the average. For example, if Trout is healthy 9 times out of 10 and injured once, that one time is probably a 0% playoff shot for the Angels, but using blended playing time would underestimate the other nine. It could come out in the wash, but it doesn’t necessarily HAVE to.
I see the Royals and Tigers losing a few wins each, with the White Sox picking most of those up. I see them winning over 90 games, possibly as high as 95. That team is built to win now, and they’ll get to play a healthy number of games against weaker competition.
I can’t squint enough to see Texas winning 70 games. I think they are in a ton of trouble this year, and I would not be surprised to see them challenge Baltimore as the worst team in the American League. 64 or 65 wins feels about right to me.
In the NL, I do wonder in the Cubs will surprise people and win 85 games to take the division. They have a nice lineup filled with proven MLB bats (Rizzo, Bryant, Contreras, Baez, Heyward, Happ, Pederson). If Davies is Hendricks-lite then I think they win the division. I’ll take the over on their 79-win projection, that’s for sure.
The Rockies will lose 100 games because they deserve to, though enough of their SP is sneaky talented so perhaps not. But I’ll be rooting for it to happen.
I can’t believe how well Preller has done. In his first season he seemed overmatched. Now the Padres are the 2nd best team in the NL?
Even a blind squirrel finds the occasional nut
Great article! I have one suggestion though:
“When we say the Yankees project to win the AL East 70% of the time, we aren’t including injury-related washouts in the equation at all.”
Is this something we can start including? Maybe assign an injury risk discount to each player based on position and age, or something like that?
No cause it would devalue guys who aren’t injured and is still likely to be just as wrong on the ones that are injured.
If I were Bryce Harper, I’d be depressed
What a pity Cohen chose to bring Alderson back. Alderson had $85m to spend and a nucleus of deGrom, Stroman, Lugo, Diaz, McNeil, Conforto, Alonso, Smith, and Giminez to work with, but with serious weaknesses on overall defense and at CF, C, and starting pitching Alderson’s big move was at… shortstop.
And what did he get? A 3 win upgrade overall there, for around $22m without actually upgrading defense at SS, and in dealing away two guys who can play 3B for a guy who will never play 3B he also wounded the IF depth turning 3B from a tolerable 4-man platoon into a problem–and he did this when Ha-Seong Kim was going for an AAV around $8m.
Such a pity. Alderson also seemed to have no idea that guys like Lynn, Snell, Darvish, and Musgrove were hitting the market. The Carrasco pickup was very nice, but even so the Mets will be giving half their starts to pitchers strong contenders would want nowhere near their rotations at the beginning of the season, and at Carrasco’s age and with his health he’s more similar to picking up Paxton than anyone else, a move no one at the start of the offseason thought was the one main move these Mets should be making. Meanwhile starting pitchers the Mets could really use in the #4 slot were going for $8-9m AAV
As for McCann at C, this was reminiscent of the Wilpon years. Realmuto, 3-4 wins better than McCann, went for just $13m by AAV and one season more but Alderson missed this possibility as well.
The Mets are now comparable to the Braves, but with that nucleus and that money as of last October, how could they not be? The only real question is, Why aren’t they significantly better?
There are 2 things certain in life. A Kyle Hendricks Underprojection and a .500 A’s projection they will inevitably outperform.