March 30, 2017 - by David Hess
It must be spring, because our 2017 MLB preseason ratings and 2017 MLB projected standings are ready for release!
As always, the main purpose of our preseason MLB ratings is to provide a data-driven starting point for our MLB projected standings.
They also drive our MLB postseason seed projections and our other MLB season projection details. These include fully automated win-loss predictions, playoff chances, and World Series win odds.
We’ll update these every day to reflect the latest results and most up to date MLB power ratings.
For football and basketball, we use our own data and models to come up with independent estimates of team quality. We then compare those to the market, and to other projections, and make final adjustments.
We treat baseball a bit differently, though. So far at least, our methods for projecting MLB aren’t as cutting edge, relative to other sports.
So rather than trying to create our own preseason ratings, and deriving a season projection from those, we base our initial MLB projected standings on a weighted average of betting market info and projected standings from other well respected sources.
Essentially, we combine projected win total info from various sources into a consensus win total projection for every team. Then we figure out what preseason team ratings would lead to those exact projections.
We’re still publishing these, so that you know what the initial rating in our projection system was for each team. But at this point we can’t recommend using these MLB projected standings to go place preseason bets, for example, if for no other reason than we haven’t done extensive backtesting of our approach.
You may look at the projections below and think that they aren’t extreme enough. In a way, you’d be right — the best team in the league will almost certainly win more than the 93 games we’ve forecast for the Cubs, and the worst (we’re looking at you, Padres, Reds, and White Sox) will likely lose more than 95.
However, picking which teams will wildly exceed expectations is rather tricky. On average these conservative predictions should provide a less biased starting point than more aggressive ones.
If you’d like to see our more aggressive best case and worst case scenarios for each team, check out their team projections page. Here are the New York Yankees projections as an example. Follow that link to find a chart showing the projected odds of the Yankees winning any specific number of games. It also includes a list of their toughest & easiest games, and a table showing how their chances of winning the World Series change depending on what seed they get in the playoffs.
Last year, we highlighted an interesting trend in the ratings. Starting with the market projected standings and working backwards to ratings gave us implied ratings where the NL took up the bottom 8 spots. This year isn’t quite so extreme, but there’s still a strong trend:
On the other hand, the top of the rankings is tilted towards the AL:
Just like last preseason, the world at large thinks the top of the AL is great, and the bottom of the NL is terrible.
Here is how the playoffs would play out, if these projections are spot on (to be clear, that’s very unlikely):
2017 TeamRankings.com MLB Preseason Projected Standings
American League
AL East W L TR Rank Playoffs Win Div Top Seed WS Champs
Boston 90 72 2 61.5% 41.3% 17.2% 8.5%
Toronto 84 78 8 39.6% 20.6% 7.3% 3.9%
NY Yankees 82 80 12 32.6% 15.9% 5.2% 2.9%
Tampa Bay 80 82 13 25.8% 12.3% 3.4% 2.0%
Baltimore 79 83 14 21.7% 9.9% 2.6% 1.7%
AL Central W L TR Rank Playoffs Win Div Top Seed WS Champs
Cleveland 91 71 4 70.4% 60.1% 20.2% 9.2%
Detroit 81 81 17 29.4% 17.9% 3.7% 2.1%
Minnesota 76 86 23 15.6% 9.0% 1.5% 0.9%
Kansas City 76 86 22 15.2% 8.6% 1.2% 0.9%
Chi Sox 72 90 27 8.2% 4.3% 0.4% 0.4%
AL West W L TR Rank Playoffs Win Div Top Seed WS Champs
Houston 90 72 1 63.5% 43.1% 18.8% 9.0%
Seattle 85 77 7 44.1% 23.0% 8.0% 4.4%
Texas 84 78 10 38.6% 19.7% 6.7% 3.6%
LA Angels 79 83 16 21.9% 9.7% 2.7% 1.7%
Oakland 74 88 20 11.8% 4.5% 1.0% 0.7%
National League
NL East W L TR Rank Playoffs Win Div Top Seed WS Champs
Washington 90 72 6 63.4% 44.3% 14.0% 7.1%
NY Mets 88 74 9 56.1% 36.1% 10.5% 5.5%
Miami 76 86 24 16.8% 7.9% 1.4% 0.9%
Atlanta 75 87 25 14.9% 6.6% 1.1% 0.8%
Philadelphia 74 88 26 11.7% 5.0% 0.7% 0.5%
NL Central W L TR Rank Playoffs Win Div Top Seed WS Champs
Chi Cubs 93 69 3 76.4% 60.1% 25.1% 10.9%
St. Louis 83 79 15 36.6% 17.5% 5.0% 2.7%
Pittsburgh 82 80 18 35.4% 16.7% 4.4% 2.5%
Milwaukee 72 90 28 8.9% 3.3% 0.5% 0.4%
Cincinnati 71 91 29 6.6% 2.3% 0.3% 0.2%
NL West W L TR Rank Playoffs Win Div Top Seed WS Champs
LA Dodgers 93 69 5 73.6% 53.3% 22.8% 9.6%
SF Giants 87 75 11 52.0% 27.8% 9.6% 4.5%
Colorado 79 83 19 24.0% 9.8% 2.4% 1.3%
Arizona 78 84 21 20.0% 7.8% 1.9% 1.0%
San Diego 67 95 30 3.7% 1.3% 0.2% 0.1%
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