Your Opinions of the Team Projections (National League)

Hello again! This is the National League version of the American League post from a little earlier. In case said American League post contained certain calculation errors, those same calculation errors will be repeated in this very post, as both posts have been written back-to-back and pre-scheduled. In case no such errors are present, you’re welcome, for the absence of errors. This is a link to the NL voting post from last Monday. I don’t know why that would be of use to you now, but there’s a lot of things I don’t know.

So, in this post, a data review, in the same format as the AL post. The same caveats apply: I might’ve biased some of the voters. The pool of voters isn’t identical across the board in identity or size, and about those sizes — the sample sizes don’t number in the hundreds of thousands, or millions. Still, the information will be analyzed, because if the information were not analyzed, what would have been the point of the posts last week? Let’s tie up loose ends, together.

Starting, as before, with raw vote data. For another refresher, here’s what the polls looked like:

Okay.

Team	W	Low, more than 3g	Low, up to 3g	Good	High, up to 3g	High, more than 3g	TOTAL
Braves	73	180	371	538	167	65	1321
Brewers	77	175	374	433	104	29	1115
Cardinals	87	177	370	542	197	33	1319
Cubs	83	121	238	538	448	252	1597
Diamondbacks	74	44	84	433	315	166	1042
Dodgers	91	131	262	541	230	71	1235
Giants	83	98	290	487	189	67	1131
Marlins	81	94	241	438	234	85	1092
Mets	79	451	336	370	182	91	1430
Nationals	87	346	381	329	62	19	1137
Padres	78	170	286	391	171	53	1071
Phillies	69	45	89	535	204	179	1052
Pirates	86	36	123	512	314	56	1041
Reds	75	192	261	425	105	29	1012
Rockies	78	32	58	243	360	220	913

I know it’s hard to make sense of all those numbers. You don’t need to make sense of all those numbers — I’ll show you percentages in a moment. But of some note: the average AL team received more than 1,600 votes. The average NL team received less than 1,200 votes. A huge part of this is that the NL post went up more than three hours later, on a Monday in a holiday week. So, fewer people were paying attention, and that’s probably the bulk of the explanation. I doubt people are just less interested in the NL than the AL, but I’d be willing to listen to the argument.

No NL team generated more votes than the Cubs. They cleared the second-place Mets by almost 200. The Cubs are a fascinating team, with a saber-friendly front office, and a massive fan base, and while their prospects have been hyped for a few years, now the team has also transitioned into trying to win right away, so the Cubs are under a lot of microscopes. At the other end, no NL team generated fewer votes than the Rockies. They fell about a hundred short of the runner-up Reds. The Rockies are bad. Last year they lost almost 100 games. The year before, they lost almost 90, and the year before that, they lost almost 100. The Rockies also can’t compete with certain other fan bases, but this is a blend of several factors, including voter fatigue. On the day, I asked for 30 votes. The Rockies’ poll was the very last, alphabetically.

Now for the more fun stuff. Below, percentages, and my calculation of the “average” vote, after having assigned each vote a number between 1 and 5. An average above 3 indicates the audience thinks more highly of the team than the Steamer projection. An average below 3 does not do that. In fact, it does the very opposite. The table should be sortable! Sortable tables always require exclamation points.

Team	Low, more than 3g%	Low, up to 3g%	Good%	High, up to 3g%	High, more than 3g%	Avg.
Braves	14%	28%	41%	13%	5%	3.33
Brewers	16%	34%	39%	9%	3%	3.50
Cardinals	13%	28%	41%	15%	3%	3.35
Cubs	8%	15%	34%	28%	16%	2.70
Diamondbacks	4%	8%	42%	30%	16%	2.54
Dodgers	11%	21%	44%	19%	6%	3.12
Giants	9%	26%	43%	17%	6%	3.14
Marlins	9%	22%	40%	21%	8%	3.02
Mets	32%	23%	26%	13%	6%	3.61
Nationals	30%	34%	29%	5%	2%	3.86
Padres	16%	27%	37%	16%	5%	3.33
Phillies	4%	8%	51%	19%	17%	2.64
Pirates	3%	12%	49%	30%	5%	2.78
Reds	19%	26%	42%	10%	3%	3.48
Rockies	4%	6%	27%	39%	24%	2.26

Let’s start positive. Let’s start with the Nationals. It’s the Nationals who have the highest average vote in the league, by a pretty good margin. They’re also projected for one of the league’s best records, so, as much as Steamer likes the Nationals, fans seem to like them even more. Almost 1-in-3 voters thinks the win projection is low by more than three games. Another 1-in-3 thinks the projection is low by as many as three. Just 7% of voters think the Nationals’ projection is too high. No other team in the NL is below 12%. For every voter who thought the Nationals projection high, there were nine who thought it low. The next-best ratio in the NL? 4. People like the Nationals. Or maybe more accurately, people think the Nationals are really good. They also seem to be in a fairly weak division, although…

…the Mets! The Mets have the second-highest average vote. Though Steamer likes the Marlins more than the Mets — and therefore thinks the Marlins are more likely to give the Nationals any kind of challenge — it appears the audience thinks the Mets are better poised to be a divisional nuisance. More than half the voters thought the Mets projection was low by some amount. Only the Mets and Nationals came in north of 50% in that category. Even if 2015 doesn’t turn out to be the Mets’ year, they’re going to have Matt Harvey again. David Wright should be better after having surgery. Jacob deGrom should clear his low projection. Zack Wheeler and Noah Syndergaard are around and exciting. There’s reason to believe WAR is too harsh on Mets pitchers. I personally side with the bulk of the voters, here.

After the Mets, we find the Brewers and the Reds, more or less tied. The Brewers have had perhaps the quietest offseason in baseball, but they return an awful lot of talent, so it’s hard to accept them as an 77-win team. And though the Reds have a low team projection, they have an enviable amount of talent given health, and given returns to previous talent levels. Throw in the fact that WAR doesn’t seem to understand Johnny Cueto, and you can see why people think the Reds projection is a bit pessimistic.

Speaking of pessimism, at the other end, the Rockies have the lowest average vote. Not just in the NL — the Rockies have the lowest average vote in baseball. They’ve been given a 78-win projection, but the audience doesn’t believe in that, with a quarter of all the voters thinking the projection’s high by more than three games. Two-in-three voters thought the Rockies’ projection high, against one-in-ten thinking it low. For the sake of comparison, 64% of voters thought the Rockies’ projection was too high. The NL runner-up: 46%. The MLB runner-up: 57%. Rockies fans aren’t high on the Rockies, and non-Rockies fans aren’t high on the Rockies. On the plus side, Troy Tulowitzki’s really great, and he doesn’t get hurt on paper. He might get hurt by paper.

The next-worst average vote belongs to the Diamondbacks, who Steamer thinks are rather bad. As a matter of fact, the three lowest average votes in the NL belong to three rather lousy ballclubs, if you agree that the Rockies don’t look well-positioned. It’s not just that people think the teams are bad — it’s that they think the teams are even worse than the projections think they are. On one hand, fans gave a higher average vote to the Diamondbacks than they did to the Rockies. On the other hand, Steamer projects the Diamondbacks to win four fewer games. So, beware the bottom of the NL West, is the point, apparently. Beware in the non-threatening way, not in the threatening way.

The Phillies have the third-lowest average vote, despite the worst projection in baseball. Just 12% of voters think the Phillies’ projection was too low, with more than half buying it as it was. Some of this could just be Phillies pessimism, and maybe fans were also thinking about future trade possibilities. I’m not sure. All I know is, Steamer hates the Phillies, and few people are buying them as an absolutely astonishing pennant dark horse. Note that this was before the Marlon Byrd trade. The Marlon Byrd trade only made the Phillies worse.

I’m just a little surprised by the Padres result. The Padres have kind of been the NL’s version of the White Sox. The White Sox got the second-highest average vote in baseball, with a 78-win projection. The Padres are around the middle of the pack, also with a 78-win projection. I’m not saying the voting results are bad; I’m saying they surprise me. Padres fever is a thing, but White Sox fever has been plenty more contagious. Padres fever appears to present with more mild symptoms.

Let’s close with a table of vote distributions. Standard deviations for each team:

Team	Standard deviation
Mets	1.23
Cubs	1.13
Padres	1.07
Marlins	1.04
Braves	1.02
Dodgers	1.02
Rockies	1.01
Reds	1.00
Phillies	1.00
Giants	0.99
Diamondbacks	0.99
Cardinals	0.97
Nationals	0.97
Brewers	0.95
Pirates	0.85

The Red Sox were the AL leader in voter disagreement. The Mets stand as the MLB leader in voter disagreement. Though more than half the voters think the Mets are better than their projection, just a quarter of the voters think the projection is right on, meaning there’s a sizable fraction of people who think the projection is high. Then we’ve got the Cubs, and, this time unsurprisingly, the Padres. Both these teams seem like they’re pretty volatile — the Cubs, with their young talent and new direction, and the Padres, with their different talent and new direction. It’s hard to know what to make of Wil Myers. It’s hard to know what to make of Matt Kemp. Those are two pretty important players, as far as the Padres are concerned.

There’s relatively little disagreement over the Pirates. In the AL, the Tigers were the most agreed-upon team. In MLB, the Pirates are the most agreed-upon team, as just 9% of voters think the projection is off by more than three games in either direction. There’s also limited disagreement over the Brewers, which makes sense, given how little has changed with their roster. They’re easier to figure out than a team that’s undergone a roster overhaul, or at least that’s the public perception. Who knows if it’s actually true?

As before, you can think of this as a proxy for uncertainty, or unpredictability. Countless people out there have wished that projections would include error bars. Our projections don’t include error bars, but if they did, they might follow the rough order displayed above. The Pirates might have the smallest error bars. The Mets might have the biggest. That’s about what you might’ve expected. Or, it’s not at all what you expected. I don’t know what you expected. I just know how the lot of you voted. Thank you one more time, for your participation. I literally couldn’t have done this without you!