Projecting 2014 team records

We'd all like to know the future sometimes. We'd all like to pull a Marty McFly and know how our team will do that year. Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on your point of view, this isn't possible. We just have to wait until the future occurs, which according to Einstein will be ``soon enough."

But it's still nice to have a general idea of what might occur, and that's where the business of projections comes in. Everyone has their projection system. Baseball Prospectus has one. FanGraphs has one. And of course, I have one.

So that's where the rest of this is going. I'll give a little background on what I'm doing here, and then give the results of the projections. And as always, remember what Yogi Berra (Or Neils Bohr) said: ``Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future."

So in my predicted standings, I ran 10,000 simulated seasons to see how each team did. In these 10,000, I tried to integrate out as many sources of variability as possible. These sources of variability were 1) Variability in how many runs a team scores/allows, 2) Variability in whether the pitching team or hitting team is responsible for the number of runs scored, and 3) Variability in average runs scored and variance of runs scored. These values were changed throughout the 10,000 simulations around a central expected value.

To get the mean values for the runs scored/allowed, I used a weighted average of ZiPS, Steamer, and my own projections for players adjusted for expected playing time. I won't detail my own projections because that'd take a little while. The probability that the pitching team is responsible for the runs scored is a shade over 50% according to 2013 estimates (50.3% to be exact).

So that's enough explanation. Now onto the actual projected standings. Included are the median wins and minimum/maximum reasonable wins (Defined as the 2.5 and 97.5 percentiles). And as always, remember the words of Yogi.

So this looks similar to what is seen on Baseball Prospectus and FanGraphs, with a few exceptions. My projections like the Angels, Mariners, and Marlins a lot less, while liking the Pirates and Indians a bit more. However, again, things look pretty similar around the projections.

So that's it. Now all that remains is to play out the season. I'll probably get a few of these right, but a bunch wrong (And wrong by a lot), which will just another reminder of how difficult all this is to get right with high precision.

. . .

Statistics courtesy of FanGraphs.

Stephen Loftus is an editor at Beyond The Box Score. You can follow him on Twitter at @stephen__loftus.