The Obscenely Late, Obscenely Early ZiPS Projected Standings

It seems like years ago at this point, but the last time we posted preliminary projections a month before the start of a baseball season, it went, well, you know, not great! Now comes our second attempt at preliminary standings projections, previewing what will likely be the oddest baseball season of our lives, at least until the robots take over and the league consists of 1200 Mike TroutBots.

The 60-game season is anything but familiar. MLB’s regional schedule has emerged victorious, with teams primarily playing their own divisions while also facing off against the corresponding geography-based division in the other league instead of their normal out-of-division games. Teams will play 10 games against each of their divisional rivals (40 total) and four games against each of the corresponding divisional teams (20 games total). The standings will work as they normally do, just with the odd twist of many of the teams that will compete in the Wild Card races not playing each other during the regular season. The designated hitter rule is universal for the rest of the 2020 season (and likely for the rest of baseball’s existence as a sport).

Not only will 60 games result in a more volatile season than 162 games would, there are factors that make it even more unpredictable than you’d expect. The injuries that every team suffers could really swing the numbers since the injuries themselves don’t “scale down” in a shorter season. Every injury that would normally place a player on the 60-day Injured List will essentially be a season-ending one, as will many less serious injuries, especially without the ability to play in rehab games in the minors.

And the injury effect that’s beyond the current reckoning of ZiPS is the unknown of COVID-19 itself. We simply don’t know how well the quarantines and safety protocols will hold up, how many players will test positive, or, most critically, how well players will recover. Even players who generally feel asymptomatic might experience subtle differences in the quality of their play. Since we just don’t know how COVID-19 will affect the performance of high-level athletes engaged in the rigors of a baseball season, even a 60-game one, I either have to tell you what I can’t do or just make it up, so I’ll go with the former.

One thing that seemingly will be familiar, at least, is the playoff structure. Without the agreement of the MLBPA to alter the format of the postseason and barring a new agreement before Opening Day 2.0, the usual playoff system will hold, with the six division winners advancing to the respective divisional series of their league and the four Wild Cards playing each other in winner-take-all games.

With the divisional alignments and the built-in inability of teams to play themselves, here’s the strength of schedule for each team’s opponents for the 2020 season:

As expected, the Central divisions project to be the weakest overall, and without playing East/West teams, the expectation is that the actual win-loss totals (for eight of 10 teams) will come out above the projected strength of their rosters. This wouldn’t matter so much in a self-contained Central “league,” but does when Central contenders are competing for the same Wild Card spots as the East and West contenders that have tougher schedules. Of course, maximizing health and safety is more important than trying to squeeze out every last bit of competitive fairness.

Below are the projected standings by division:

Even without the expansion to a 16-team playoff format, 2020 will go down as the season in baseball history when the relative talent of the teams was the least important in determining the playoff field and the eventual champion. The devastating circumstances of this strange season likely lend some valuable perspective on how important any of this is on a relative basis, but this year has to be a bit of a bitter pill to swallow for fans of teams like the Dodgers and Reds that largely bucked the trend of doing “just enough” last winter.

To get an idea as to how things have changed since late February, here are the teams ranked by the change in the percentage points of playoff and championship probability since that ZiPS run. This includes all the changes of the last few months, including the new schedule, the universal designated hitter, anticipated returns from injury, and new maladies that will keep players out, like Chris Sale‘s and Noah Syndergaard’s Tommy John surgeries:

The teams with the most positive change in their fortunes are the midwestern teams, and the teams that were on the very edge of Wild Card contention, such as the Rangers and the Blue Jays. The league’s basement dwellers’ playoff chances improve as well, but clubs like the Orioles and the Tigers just aren’t good enough to take as much advantage of it, in the sense of a binary playoff/non-playoff result, as these other teams. On the flip side, the elite teams and the coastal teams suffer the most. Every team that has seen their shot at the World Series trophy fade is a 2019 playoff team…or has Noah Syndergaard.

If baseball can get through 2020 with the players and team and ballpark personnel remaining healthy, it’ll be a victory no matter what the results are on the field. Flags fly forever, but freak flags only fly for 2020, so strap in and embrace the weirdness.