Click here for the full – Fangraphs projections
It’s MLB season-win-total-projection-week (MLB-SWTPW) on the internet and that means another year of fangraphs pissing people off. One of the great constants in the baseball offseason is the collective overreaction to forecasted mediocrity.
The Phillies are better than last year. Idk why we would be projected to win 8 less games
— John Seigle (@SeigS_) February 7, 2025
They think the White Sox won’t lose 100 games?! THIS is the story everyone should be talking about.
— Paul Scanling (@pscanling) February 7, 2025
Guardians got better this offseason and are projected to 77 wins?
— Kenny Lofton is a Hall of Famer (@LoftonToHOF2) February 7, 2025
The dodgers are not only 34 games better than the white sox
— JGoldy03 (@JGoldy03) February 7, 2025
What a crock of shit
— DeanJayson (not a bot, really) (@jayson98085) February 7, 2025
It keeps going and it’s awesome.
The reality is that fangraphs is way more conservative in player projection and evaluation compared to some of the other projections. So you end up with 20 teams projected between 76-86 wins when last year there were 12 such teams, 11 in 2023 and just 7 in 2022. So naturally you can say it’s unrealistic to project 20 teams to be in that range.
That’s the weird thing about projections. It’s just some fancy math equation very few of us understand and I’m a fringe AAAA math guy. Even so I have no idea how to justify the logic, but I’m smart enough to trust it. The fangraphs folks don’t hate your favorite player or team as much as they just think everyone is closer to average.
I think the same about baseball and life so far be it from me to dissent now. Rather let’s just talk about the Cubs 84 win total:
1 – 84 wins is good enough for the NL Central according to the projections, another sign not to take them at their exact word/number. Instead it’s representative of the relative gap between the Cubs and the rest of the division, which isn’t very big. Of the six divisions, only one is projected with a 10-game difference (NL West). The next biggest is the NL East (Phillies 6 games ahead of Mets) while the remainder of the league’s divisions are somewhere between 1-3 wins.
2 – Collectively, the NL Central projects to be the 2nd deepest division behind the AL East. That’s no surprise because there’s no basement dwellers, a fact made significantly less painful by both expanded playoffs and the updated schedule format that shaved division games for interleague play. So while a good division would have previously been annoying and detrimental to playoff aspirations, now it’s a quasi-source of pride closer to my Big Ten allegiance. I like that about the NL Central.
3 – Personally I would like to see 90 wins but I’m conditioned to mediocrity right now. I was so positive last year out of the gate and I rode it right into the worst June in modern club history. Or certainly the most embarrassing. Either one, I fell off the horse so hard on the Cubs last year and I never really got back on. It sucked the life out of the summer and as such, I’m notably more guarded this time around. Even with Kyle Tucker and Ryan Pressly and Matt Shaw and PCA adding to an already solid core. There’s a lot to be significantly more positive about this year and I refuse to accept it on the basis of emotional fragility. All of that to say the fangraphs projections endorse this line of thinking and help me stay grounded, so thank you.
4 – Finally, Craig Counsell better win more than 84 fucking games this year or there’s going to be hell to pay – that I can guarantee
Read more about the projections here:
PS – where does the word Shabby come from and why do I love saying it so much?
[…] to pile on but this is a real holy shit moment, largely for reasons discussed extensively in our Fangrapghs Cubs blog just an hour ago: they’re heavily skewed towards mediocrity on both ends of the spectrum. […]