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March 22, 2018 - by David Hess
Opening Day is only a week away! March 29th is the earliest Opening Day date in history, and it’s the first time in 50 years that all teams will begin their season on the same day.
And we’re ready. Here are our 2018 MLB preseason ratings and 2018 MLB projected standings.
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 probably win more than the 97 games we’ve forecast for the Astros, and the worst (we’re looking at you, Royals, Tigers, and Marlins) may lose more than 98.
But if a team wins (or loses) 100 games this year, it’s going to be because things have gone better (or worse) than could have reasonably been expected to start the season. And picking which teams will wildly exceed (or fall short of) 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.
For the past two seasons, starting with the market projected standings and working backwards to ratings gave us implied ratings where the NL took up most of the bottom spots in the rankings, and the AL took up most of the top spots. The world at large thought the top of the AL was great, and the bottom of the NL was terrible.
That trend is over, and this year’s preseason ratings are more balanced:
Here is how the playoffs would play out, if these projections are spot on (to be clear, that’s very unlikely):
American League
AL East W L TR Rank Playoffs Win Div Top Seed WS Champs
NY Yankees 95 67 3 77.4% 50.8% 21.4% 10.2%
Boston 91 71 7 67.1% 35.5% 13.3% 6.8%
Toronto 80 82 17 25.6% 8.6% 2.0% 1.3%
Tampa Bay 76 86 21 12.5% 3.4% 0.6% 0.5%
Baltimore 72 90 26 7.2% 1.8% 0.2% 0.2%
AL Central W L TR Rank Playoffs Win Div Top Seed WS Champs
Cleveland 95 67 5 82.4% 72.7% 21.7% 9.5%
Minnesota 83 79 16 37.4% 20.7% 3.4% 2.0%
Chi Sox 71 91 27 7.0% 3.3% 0.2% 0.2%
Kansas City 68 94 28 4.0% 1.9% 0.1% 0.1%
Detroit 67 95 29 3.0% 1.3% 0.0% 0.1%
AL West W L TR Rank Playoffs Win Div Top Seed WS Champs
Houston 97 65 1 84.6% 68.4% 30.0% 15.1%
LA Angels 83 79 12 34.8% 12.9% 3.3% 2.3%
Seattle 82 80 13 30.8% 10.9% 2.5% 1.9%
Texas 76 86 19 13.9% 4.2% 0.6% 0.6%
Oakland 75 87 20 12.3% 3.6% 0.6% 0.5%
National League
NL East W L TR Rank Playoffs Win Div Top Seed WS Champs
Washington 92 70 6 72.1% 61.0% 17.5% 8.1%
NY Mets 82 80 15 33.2% 19.9% 3.6% 2.1%
Philadelphia 78 84 18 20.3% 11.5% 1.7% 1.0%
Atlanta 75 87 22 12.7% 6.7% 0.6% 0.5%
Miami 64 98 30 1.6% 0.8% 0.0% 0.0%
NL Central W L TR Rank Playoffs Win Div Top Seed WS Champs
Chi Cubs 93 69 4 72.1% 52.4% 21.1% 9.2%
St. Louis 86 76 9 44.9% 22.7% 6.9% 3.4%
Milwaukee 84 78 11 36.5% 17.3% 4.8% 2.5%
Pittsburgh 74 88 24 10.8% 3.9% 0.7% 0.4%
Cincinnati 74 88 23 9.9% 3.7% 0.6% 0.4%
NL West W L TR Rank Playoffs Win Div Top Seed WS Champs
LA Dodgers 95 67 2 79.5% 58.7% 28.8% 13.4%
Arizona 85 77 8 41.5% 17.6% 6.4% 3.6%
SF Giants 83 80 10 33.0% 12.7% 4.0% 2.4%
Colorado 80 82 14 24.7% 8.9% 2.8% 1.6%
San Diego 72 90 25 7.1% 2.1% 0.5% 0.3%
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