The Cardinals are awful, the Dodgers are the best, and other PECOTA projections

Once a year, in February, the PECOTA groundhog emerges from its hole and gives us projections. It’s up to us to determine if there are six more weeks of winter, or if the projections can keep us warm until the spring training games start. It’s more than a little sad to wait for them this eagerly, but you should be used to February by now. It’s an awful baseball time, and I’ll take what I can get.

Baseball Prospectus creates fancy projections, then they plug them into the projection blender, and projected standings come out the other side. Last year, they projected the National League postseason teams to be the Mets, Nationals, Cubs, Giants, and Dodgers. Which is what happened. Don’t look at the American League. The AL is always a mess for everyone. But you can pan for nuggets with these projections. They’re imperfect, but usually better than your dumb predictions.

The 2017 projections are out, and we have projected standings. With these simulated standings, I have actual thoughts. Here are some of those thoughts:

In Dave Barry Slept Here: A Sort of History of the United States, the author has a running gag where he writes “This was widely believed to be the end of his career” after every Richard Nixon mention. Project the Cardinals to be awful and finished at your own peril.

Also, take a moment to breathe that Nixon/Cardinals comparison in for a little bit. Mmm, yeah, that is invigorating.

The Cardinals aren’t just projected to be in third place. They’re projected to finish with the same record as the Braves and White Sox. They’re just a game over the Phillies and Athletics. A mediocre projection would be a refreshing adjustment, but they’re supposed to be outscored by nearly 50 runs on the season.

The problem? There’s no real star in the lineup, for one, with Matt Carpenter’s bat looking a little less valuable when he’s matched up with Paul Goldschmidt instead of David Freese, positionally. They look like they’ll have troubles getting on base, with only Carpenter and Dexter Fowler projecting for an OBP better than .331, and they don’t have the power to make up for that.

Also, PECOTA is extremely bearish on the rotation, with ERAs all in the 4s and Mike Leake (!) leading the staff in WAR. I’ll take the over on Carlos Martinez, Alex Reyes, and, well, all of them. But for whatever reason, the computers are spitting on the lineup and rotation, even though we know that Dask Underbrow will come up from Double-A and slug .500 this year, if he doesn’t pick up 17 wins. He might do both. Don’t sell the Cardinals or Dask short.

The Rays are always hanging around, neither contending or rebuilding, tinkering with spare junkyard parts in the basement of baseball. They traded Logan Forsythe, but they traded him for a majors-ready pitcher. They avoided most of the free agents, as usual, but they signed Colby Rasmus to help win in 2017. They’re a quantum superposition of a baseball team, and they’ll probably finish with 70 or 80 wins, neither in nor out of it.

PECOTA has them making the postseason, though. Or, at least, the playoff game to see who makes the postseason. It doesn’t sound exciting, but it’s a step up from last season. It wouldn’t take much, apparently, for them to challenge for the AL East, even though they might have traded their best position player away.

The secret is in not having a secret. Kevin Kiermaier is projected to be a defensive deity again, and Chris Archer and Evan Longoria are still supposed to be excellent. After that, though, they’re stocked with solid players, up and down the roster, from the lineup to the bench to the rotation to the bullpen. Blake Snell blends into Alex Cobb, who blends into Nick Franklin, who blends into Brad Miller.

It doesn’t add up to a 90-win division favorite, and there’s risk in spreading everything around in an even, boring way. But they should keep your attention.

They’re almost the worst team in baseball, just a couple wins better than the Padres, who are filling their rotation via a reality show on Freeform. It’s one thing for the Blue Jays to get dinged in the projections and slip back to .500, considering they lost one of their best hitters. But the Orioles are projected to go from 89 wins to 89 losses, even though they didn’t really change a whole lot.

Let’s go through a list of players PECOTA hates!

Tillman has an ERA+ of 108 over the last four years, including a 118 mark last year. He’s also performed better than his FIP suggests, though, and apparently PECOTA sees some speed bumps ahead. And one of those speed bumps is apparently Chris Tillman.

Regardless of that dire, second half-fueled projection, the Orioles are supposed to have troubles pitching, which we might have guessed, and PECOTA isn’t expecting them to get a lot of help from anyone who isn’t Adam Jones or Manny Machado. Zach Britton is a) projected to be one of the best relievers in baseball and b) mortal, which is both the same and different from last year.

I’ll take the over on the Orioles and this projection. But danged if it’s not making me reconsider my preseason predictions. What does that computer know?

Well, not the class of baseball. Have you heard Tommy Lasorda tell a story? He’s a repugnant human being, and now Vin Scully isn’t around to balance him out. But the Dodgers are PECOTA’s absolute darlings, and it isn’t even close. They aren’t just projected to win the NL West. They’re projected to blow through it. They aren’t just projected to have the best record in baseball. They’re projected to be five games better than the second-best team, and seven games better than last year’s juggernaut, the Cubs.

A reminder of the Dodgers’ biggest moves this offseason:

Forsythe is a good player, but he isn’t an MVP candidate, so it seems odd that the Dodgers are suddenly expected to improve by a bunch. Until you see who’s getting the boost, that is. Julio Urias, Corey Seager, Joc Pederson, and even Yasiel Puig are getting some PECOTA love, which makes sense when you remember how young they all are. Clayton Kershaw is supposed to be roughly twice as valuable as your standard good pitcher, which is a heckuva head start, and the rest of the rotation is supposed to be above-average or better.

The Dodgers are the best example of the cumulative effect of PECOTA’s projections. It’s not like Kershaw is projected for 17 WARP and, blammo, there’s the difference. It adds up, player over player, and not just for the 25-man roster. The whole organization chips in a little value over a handful of at-bats or innings pitched, right down the line. Are they really that much better than the Cubs? Seems hard to say that definitively. But they’re definitely one of the best teams in baseball, and considering that most of us knew that already, it shouldn’t be that surprising.

Oh, it probably won’t happen quite like this. We’ll look up in August and, what the heck, the Phillies will be four games back, or some nonsense. The Cardinals will be on their way to 95 wins, just like the Cubs, and we’ll forget all about the preseason projections.

As of now, though, here are the margins of projected victory for the first-place team in every division:

AL East - Six games
AL Central - Eight games
AL West - Six games

NL East - One game
NL Central - 10 games
NL West - Eight games

It’s almost exciting to root for wild card races. Almost. But give me the visceral thrill of a close divisional race, with teams that hate each other after 18 games. And it’s worth remembering that a six-game difference can be a three-game difference in August with a different feel, with exciting series and results that mean something.

Still, on the final day of the season, the computers are telling us that we’ll need to pay attention to the Mets and Nationals, but very little else. That’s a shame.

Disappointed in your team’s projections? Note that PECOTA missed the Rangers last year, and they projected the Rays and Astros to win their respective divisions. The Blue Jays were supposed to lead the world in runs scored, and the Orioles were supposed to lead the world in runs allowed. Baseball is a twitchy clown with a nervous grin, and that’s why we love it and fear it. It’ll surprise us. It’ll surprise the computers.

Until then, look at these projections. This was widely believed to be the end of the Cardinals’ decades-long run of success.

You won’t have the Cardinals to kick around anymore.