2021 MLB Projected Standings & Preseason Ratings

March 29, 2021 - by Jason Lisk

Max Muncy and the Los Angeles Dodgers will try to defend their World Series title (Photo by Dustin Bradford/Icon Sportswire)

After an unusual 2020 MLB season that didn’t start until July and lasted for only 60 games, we are ready for the return of a more normal schedule in the 2021 season. That season kicks off in a few days, on Thursday, April 1st, with all 30 teams in action. Today, we unveil our 2021 projected MLB standings and power ratings.

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 those projections every day to reflect the latest results and our most up to date MLB power ratings.

How We Create The Preseason 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.

A Seemingly Narrow Win Distribution

You may look at the projections below and think that they aren’t extreme enough. Only three teams are projected with at least 92 wins, for example, and only one team is projected for more than 100 losses. In a way, you’d be right —when the dust settles on the season, there will likely be several division winners, and maybe a few wild card teams, that have won more than 92 games.

But for most teams, besides the heaviest favorites, if a team wins that many games, it’s going to be because things have gone better than could have reasonably been expected to start the season. And 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.

More Team Projection Details

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 LA Dodgers projections and the Colorado Rockies projections as examples.

Click through to find a chart showing the projected odds of the Dodgers or Rockies winning any specific number of games. From the details in the Rockies’ chart, you can determine that we project about a 4.6% chance for them to win 50 or fewer games in 2021.

The projections detail page also includes a list of each team’s 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.

2021 MLB Projected Standings Highlights

It was not too long ago that the American League was the dominant league, with most of the top teams. This year, though, we project the defending World Series champion Dodgers to be the best team, and for four of the top five teams to be from the National League. The New York Yankees are the only American League team in our preseason top five.

Some other highlights:

The San Diego Padres are a clear contender for the World Series, and rate as the third-best team. Because they are in the same division as the Los Angeles Dodgers, though, they have a lower percentage chance of winning their division (and thus avoiding the Wild Card Round) than seven other teams that we rate below San Diego.
No team in the NL Central is rated above No. 15 in our power ratings, and four teams in the NL East are rated higher than anyone from the NL Central.
The defending AL Champs, Tampa Bay, are not currently projected among the five most likely playoff teams in the American League, though they are only slightly behind the two projected wild card teams, Toronto and the Chicago White Sox.
The Los Angeles Angels and Oakland Athletics are rated the same, but the Athletics have a slightly higher win projection, and a 3% greater chance of reaching the playoffs. Why? Because the Angels get an extra 3-game series with the Dodgers, while the Athletics get two more games against the Giants and an extra game against the Diamondbacks compared to the Angels. We will see if those handful of differences in the schedule matter in a playoff chase.

2021 MLB Projected Playoff Results

Here is how the playoffs would play out, if these projections are spot on (numbers below refer to the team’s playoff seed within their league).

Wild Card Round:

#5 Toronto Blue Jays over #4 Chicago White Sox
#4 San Diego Padres over #5 Atlanta Braves

Division Round:

#1 New York Yankees over #5 Toronto Blue Jays
#3 Houston Astros over #2 Minnesota Twins
#1 Los Angeles Dodgers over #4 San Diego Padres
#2 New York Mets over #3 Milwaukee Brewers

League Championship Series:

#1 New York Yankees over #3 Houston Astros
#1 Los Angeles Dodgers over #2 New York Mets

World Series:

#1 Los Angeles Dodgers over #1 New York Yankees

Full Preseason 2021 MLB Projected Standings

American League
AL East	W	L	TR Rank	Playoffs	Win Division	Top Seed	WS Champs
NY Yankees	96.8	65.2	2	87.8%	66.2%	42.3%	16.1%
Toronto	87.1	74.9	7	49.5%	16.5%	8.0%	3.7%
Tampa Bay	85.6	76.4	9	41.7%	12.3%	5.7%	2.7%
Boston	80.2	81.8	17	19.7%	4.9%	1.9%	0.9%
Baltimore	64.5	97.5	28	0.5%	0.1%	0.0%	0.0%
AL Central	W	L	TR Rank	Playoffs	Win Division	Top Seed	WS Champs
Minnesota	89.7	72.3	8	65.5%	49.0%	12.9%	5.8%
Chi White Sox	87.1	74.9	11	51.8%	33.1%	7.1%	3.5%
Cleveland	81.6	80.4	18	25.9%	13.7%	2.2%	1.2%
Kansas City	74.6	87.4	24	7.7%	3.5%	0.3%	0.2%
Detroit	68.2	93.8	27	1.5%	0.8%	0.0%	0.0%
AL West	W	L	TR Rank	Playoffs	Win Division	Top Seed	WS Champs
Houston	89.2	72.8	6	63.3%	49.0%	11.4%	5.8%
Oakland	84.9	77.1	13	41.0%	24.9%	4.2%	2.6%
LA Angels	84.2	77.8	12	38.0%	23.0%	3.8%	2.4%
Seattle	72.6	89.4	25	4.7%	2.3%	0.1%	0.1%
Texas	67.9	94.1	26	1.5%	0.8%	0.0%	0.0%

National League
NL East	W	L	TR Rank	Playoffs	Win Division	Top Seed	WS Champs
NY Mets	91.2	70.8	4	67.3%	42.9%	8.9%	8.0%
Atlanta	89.4	72.6	5	58.6%	33.3%	6.2%	5.9%
Washington	83.7	78.3	10	30.5%	13.0%	1.7%	2.0%
Philadelphia	81.9	80.1	14	24.6%	9.7%	1.0%	1.4%
Miami	71.7	90.3	23	3.2%	1.1%	0.0%	0.1%
NL Central	W	L	TR Rank	Playoffs	Win Division	Top Seed	WS Champs
Milwaukee	84.2	77.8	15	40.7%	32.8%	1.7%	2.1%
St. Louis	84.0	78.0	16	39.4%	32.3%	1.6%	2.0%
Cincinnati	80.2	81.8	19	23.2%	18.0%	0.7%	0.9%
Chicago Cubs	79.8	82.2	20	22.1%	16.8%	0.5%	0.9%
Pittsburgh	59.6	102.4	30	0.1%	0.1%	0.0%	0.0%
AL West	W	L	TR Rank	Playoffs	Win Division	Top Seed	WS Champs
LA Dodgers	102.1	59.9	1	96.1%	69.5%	55.5%	21.7%
San Diego	95.5	66.5	3	83.8%	29.8%	21.7%	9.7%
Arizona	74.8	87.2	21	5.5%	0.4%	0.2%	0.1%
San Francisco	74.1	87.9	22	4.7%	0.3%	0.2%	0.1%
Colorado	63.6	98.4	29	0.2%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%