Ow, ow, ow
DMZ · March 29, 2007 at 11:33 am · Filed Under Mariners
Nate Silver’s got the PECOTA projected standings for the AL West up, and… they sting. The raw numbers: Angels at 86 wins, Oakland and Texas at 80, Seattle at 73.
73.
Oh, and if his playoff predictions pan out, Bob Melvin will win a World Series this year.
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On the one hand, it’d be nice to get the current guys out of the front office and managerial positions, but on the other, I have absolutely no faith in the team’s ability to bring in anybody better. I suspect you could project 73 wins for the next 10 years and not miss the mark by much.
Q: Is Howard Lincoln part-owner of the team?
Q2: If so, does this mean there is zero chance of him being replaced as long as he keeps the team profitable?
who cares what they predict? did anyone predict detroit making it to the world series? doubt it…and arizona winning it this year? hell no…i can’t wait till we finish first or second and everyone shuts the hell up…
Once upon a time I refused to shave until my favorite team was either victorious or vanquished in the playoffs. As a newspaper reporter doing a story for the M’s opening day, I’m curious if you all have any rituals and if you’ll be doing anything extra to help the M’s this season.
You sure you’ve dialed into the right site?
The only way the 2007 Mariners will finish first or second in the division is if an earthquake causes California to slide into the ocean.
That’s depressing.
I don’t subscribe to BP, so I can’t read the full article, but I assume they don’t see the new additions doing much. Nor must they imagine any improvements by Lopez, Betancourt, or Beltre.
That seems like a lot of bad things to expect. Guillen, Vidro, Batista, and Ramirez have to be seen as upgrades over their 2006 counterparts. And even if we don’t do nearly as well in the interleague games as we did last June, it’s still hard for me seeing the team having a worse record than it did last season.
for me to see* the team…
or if the angels have injury issues and no offense (weaver, colon, rivera, figgins)…the rangers have no pitching…or if the a’s overachieving ends…yep…looks like we could win it…looks wide open to me…
So PECOTA is projecting that all MLB teams will post winning %s that fall between .400 and .600? That hasn’t happened too often.
I’m sure some team will will suck more/be much better than anticipated, so forgive me if I’m not convinced.
But hey, at least 73 wins will get Beavis and Butthead sacked.
Hey Derek…I just got your book in my mailbox at work (man, that was brilliant having it sent to my work so I could read all day instead of getting some actual work done). I’ve just flippe dthrough a few pages so far, but I absolutely love teh Author Bio….101st most beautiful person….classic!
Not to turn this into some sort of silly what-if discussion, but basically you’re arguing that in order for the M’s to win the division, everything has to break right for them AND everything has to break wrong for the other teams in the division.
My theory about California sliding into the ocean is probably a safer bet.
73 wins seems low. I’m thinking more around .500, or somewhere around 80-84 wins. If a few things go right for the M’s, and a few things wrong for others, we could be in the 90ish range, which almost guarantees a playoff race. I’m not counting on playoffs, by any stretch. I’m hoping for an interesting race into September, though.
The impression I had was that many seemed to favor this view as well.
Look, I’ll be honest. I have no math or stats supporting my view. But I do feel that the team has improved from last year. Do I like the way it improved? No. Do I think $110 million was spent extremely poorly? Yes. But I do think they are a bit better than last year, which puts them around .500.
OK, but did Pecota take into consideration the M’s deeply thought out and much revered “catch lightning in a bottle” strategical approach to building this team? I think not.
I think bakomariner is actually Chuck Armstrong.
i, for one, think we’ll be in the race in september…it will be a three team race, with the rangers an easy last place…but maybe i’m an idiot…and a homer…
4. Every year a couple of friends and I buy new ball caps. Just before the start of the first game we hold a “retirement” ceremony for the old hats, and the new ones get put on right after the national anthem. (our “tradition” originated in 2001, and if asked, we will gladly take credit for the 116 wins
)
I don’t think that PECOTA factors in that the M’s have “Pitch to Win” T-shirts. No more pitching to lose for us!
Seems fair to me. Our rotation still sucks (bar Felix); our lineup is only a tick better – assuming both Vidro and Guillen stay healthy enough to out-do Everett and Reed; and our bullpen is quite a bit worse.
I can’t see 73 wins being too far from the mark. 80 or 82 is attainable, but Grover’s dodgy close game management tactics should see the M’s underperform by 4 wins.
It’ll be around 75-78 wins realistically, but if everything, and I mean EVERYTHING goes right for us, we’ll have a legitimate chance for 90 wins.
But there really isn’t a realistic reason to think this team will compete again until Grover and Bavasi are out, unfortunately.
Yeah… managers definitely don’t make as much of a difference as the person constructing the team. Melvin was often derided here for his managerial ability, and yet he’s poised to coach a potentially great team this season. Hargrove is quite possibly one of the worst managers ever, but the blame for this team has to fall largely on Bavasi’s (and the rest of the FO) shoulders. His letting Hargrove have any say in roster construction is just icing on the cake.
The online sports books are putting the over under at 78.5 wins for the M’s…73 seems crazy low. I would gladly bet the over on a 73 line.
A mathematical prediction system isn’t going to predict who will be better or worse than anticipated (of course, no one else can reliably do so either). Mathematical prediction systems are inherently conservative. PECOTA tries (and succeeds better than most systems) to gauge what will happen if everything happens as it has in the past. Naturally, not everything will break that way. There will be outliers that PECOTA fails to predict; but over the entirety of major league baseball it will do a very good job of predicting the overall results.
The Mariners could be one of the teams that overachieves — and I’m sure that PECOTA has several seasons in its projections in which the M’s win the division. But they could also underachieve and be bloody awful, and you can come up with good reasons to bet either way. PECOTA doesn’t think Seattle can’t win 90 games. Think of 73 as being the over/under PECOTA is setting.
F-Rod slipped in while I was typing that.
Is it possible that PECOTA underrates Seattle’s infield defense? Does it use BP’s flawed defensive metrics?
In my opinion, 90 (or more) wins will require five things:
1) Vidro and Guillen stay healthy and reasonably productive;
2) Only one of Batista, Ramirez, or Weaver stinks;
3) There is no major injury to Ichiro, Johjima, J.J. or Felix;
4) Beltre and Sexson’s run production stays essentially the same as last year; and
5) Grover is fired by no later than June 15.
I doubt all five conditions will be met. Therefore I am in agreement with the general consensus of 80-84 wins and a third place finish.
Isn’t it amazing how a last place team last year, projected to finish 3rd, can come into Spring training with every position locked in plus all 5 starting pitchers set?
From what I understand, PECOTA goes a step further than averaging past performance, and is basically a trend analysis – evaluating the probability of increase or decrease based on non-statistical variable such as age, years of service, etc. The more of a history for a particular player, the better the projection (presumably).
I’m just guessing, because my only exposure to PECOTA is via this blog, but that is how I would do it.
What I want to know, is whether extensive analysis of PECOTA’s predictive power has been performed?
Have we gone back over the past 5 years and compared PECOTA projections to actual results to gain an understanding of the method’s reliability?
but I thought it had to be Texas’ year, as they dumped Buck …
not to mention the suave new author photo, as well.
PECOTA has been repeatedly compared to the other projection systems and has consistently arrived at or near the top, as to individual players. Here’s an example of one such comparison: http://tinyurl.com/3ofbe.
What PECOTA also does for individual players, though, and what isn’t included in these win/loss projections, is provide the range of possible outcomes, based on the percentage of probabilities. If you did that, I’m sure you’d see that the M’s have something like a 5% chance of winning 95 games (and 5% chance of losing 100)… You have to think of all these projections in that light. The teams aren’t all going to do the most probable thing… That would be improbable.
I still think the Angels are going to collapse and finish last. I’ve been saying this for months, and I honestly have no idea why I think it will happen, but I do.
We’ll finish third. Ahead of the Angels.
+ Nor must they imagine any improvements by Lopez, Betancourt, or Beltre.+
Of the three, I’d only expect improvement from Lopez.
I will say that having Ordonez as the next option is one of the few ways to make sure savvy fans root for Bloomquist to be the guy on the field.
You sure you’ve dialed into the right site?
I know I have, and I don’t ever take PECOTA’s record predictions seriously. I tend to take their individual player accomplishments seriously because that’s a little easier to predict. But trying to predict what 25 men will do, against 30 other teams of 25 men, trying to account for the randomness that could happen, PECOTA’s inability to predict Ichiro, new players busting out finally, etc… it’s just a lot harder to nail it. As such, I’ve always looked at PECOTA’s win projections as a pessimistic view or something along the lines of “this is what they should AT LEAST win this year”. It’s not a cosmic alignment of stars, it’s basically what should happen if every Mariner has a ho hum year and fits into a stereotypical mold.
But I am really convinced Beltre destroys the AL this year. Everything I’ve seen in Spring Training so far leads me to believe Good Beltre from June – September last year has come back. Ichiro will be God again. Felix will be closer to the #1 starter we think he is then what he was last year. Guillen will hate (HATE, I say!) the Angels enough to improve his numbers. Etc.
We’ve already been talking about this since the beginning of Spring Training, but quite a few things have to go right for the Mariners to win 90 games. Fewer things have to go right for the Mariners to win 80-83 games, and I’m banking on the fewer things above going right.
We’ve seen Bavasi and Hargrove go into each season with plans based on hope that older players will regain their old form. But “hope” is not a plan.
The algorithm is simply looking at the fact that we are depending on Vidro, Guillen, Sexson, Washburn, Weaver, Ramirez, and Batista, and it finds them wanting. We can hope they play well, but the trend analysis isn’t good.
BTW, last year PECOTA projected the Tigers to be 83 and 79, but Nate said this:
“The Tigers are generating some buzz, and Jim Leyland looks to be on board, appointing Curtis Granderson and Justin Verlander to starting roles with relatively little bloodshedding. The Tigers, actually, are somewhat reminiscent of last year’s White Sox–an offense that has no superstar, but also no real dead weight, and a pitching staff with a couple of breakout candidates that should be supported by a very good defense. Could Joel Zumaya be this year’s Jenks?”
The PECOTA projection for the 2006 Mariners was 77 and 85. Actual performance was 78 and 84.
The PECOTA projection for the 2006 Mariners was 77 and 85. Actual performance was 78 and 84.
This is what bugs me. 77 wins last year, 4 worse this year. Does replacing Carl Everett with Jose Vidro, Joel Pineiro with Horacio Ramirez, Gil Meche with Miguel Batista, etc make this team four wins worse?
I’m not huge fans of the guys we brought in either, but I’m not THAT down on them.
I suspect the issue is that Sexson, Washburn and Ibanez are all a year older, and that we are bringing in additional dead weight like Weaver.
PECOTA relies heavily on the age of a player to predict performance, and all of those guys are on the wrong side of 30.
The PECOTA was reasonably accurate for 2006, but how could they have possibly predicted Hargrove’s incompetence (unless the manager REALLY doesn’t matter, which none of us wants to believe).
Oh, and isn’t 50 the new 30 (and 40 the new 25 in baseball years?)
I can see that. But I can’t see those four doing much worse (or much better) then one of their “average” seasons next year. Ibanez, of course, has discovered the Fountain of Middle Age, so I don’t want to even bother predicting him anymore.
Listening to the split squad game through the Padres announcers and these guys are nuts. Top of the 9th inning and “its the top of the order for the Mariners. (Brad) Johnson, Valbuena, and… some other guy… Guzman!… They’re minor leaguers. Can’t tell ‘em apart without a score card, folks!”
Hee hee hee…
LOL
I remember Hargrove telling KJR that, if Vidro and Guillen just had their average years [which they had several years ago] then the Ms would be fine. By that logic we should sign Rose, Brett, Aaron, and Schmidt. They had pretty good average years too.
So, the Mariners better hope like hell that 35 is the 25.
More from the Padres announcers:
“(last year) by the end of May the Mariners were 6 games out. But.. they got pretty competitive after that. And that probably saved Bill Bavasi and Mike Hargrove’s jobs, because they were on double probation. But it became apparently clear this last offseason…” yada yada.
Man, even the Padres announcers, OUR HATED RIVALS!!!, know the writing on the wall.
#34: This is what bugs me. 77 wins last year, 4 worse this year. Does replacing Carl Everett with Jose Vidro, Joel Pineiro with Horacio Ramirez, Gil Meche with Miguel Batista, etc make this team four wins worse?
But you also have to consider what went right last year that likely will not be repeated. Particularly, the Mariners had extremely good health last season, particularly among position players.
If you want to project this year from last by making adjustments such as Vidro for Everett, you also need to incorporate elements such as abnormally good or bad health.
That’s one of the key areas in which the Mariners need to be ratcheted down from last year, particularly with key players in the aging portions of their careers. When you look at the bench, that is a pretty ugly scenario.
While the changes you cite might not make the team four wins worse, a couple of injuries to key players will. For example, Ibañez played the last portion of 2005 with a bad hammy. What happens if that flares up again and he sits for four to six weeks, and is less than full performance after that.
Amongst the split squad game, which is mostly our advanced minor leaguers, there’s Greg Halman. 1-3 with a single and a stolen base. Do the Mariners think he’s that good that they can put him against such higher quality pitching? Makes me wonder if he ends up in AA at the start of this year.
#41:
You can’t predict injury (unless it’s Pokey Reese).
Part of why the Mariners made their PECOTA last year had nothing to do with the predictions of the individual players. The Mariners just flat out had a monster June, then had a absolutely abysmal August. Along the way, Ibanez blew his PECOTA out of the water, as did Ichiro. Mark Lowe and JJ Putz came out of no where to improve the team by leaps and bounds. Gil Meche, for most of the year, did much better then he ever has.
Joel Pineiro did not, Eddie Guardado did not, Sexson did not (until late)…
What I am trying to say is that while PECOTA may have been right in the end, it’s equation was wrong. 2 + 2 + 4 + 5 + 3 = 16, but in this case the Mariners of 2006 were more like 1 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 9 = 16. I think that PECOTA is a useful tool, but we shouldn’t sing praises for it because it got “lucky” last year. It was right, but not right at the same time.
#22
Vegas has the M’s at 78.5, Pecota has the M’s at 73…Do you know why there’s a difference?
I was just in Vegas and *every* team line was high. I think if you’d total them all up you’d see an average of about 84 wins per team.
Here’s why: Many of the people betting on a team are fans of that team, and most of them bet with their hearts instead of their heads. They all want the Favorite team to succeed. When betting they certainly don’t want to bet their favorite team to fail, if they can at all avoid it. (Who wants to bet on anything they love to fail?) The line is influenced by the fans wishcasting success for the home nine.
All Vegas is trying to do is get half of all betters placing bets on each side of the 78.5 win line. A lot of those “extra” 5.5 wins can be explained by irrational thinking, otherwise known as “optimism”.
Want to see some distorted (high) lines? Check Boston, either of the New York teams, the Cubs, and probably the Dodgers… any team you might regard as an “institution.”
Squares always bet favorites.
Didn’t PECOTA predict a 0% chance of collapse for Zach Greinke in 2005?
PECOTA is reasonably accurate, but by no means are the predictions assured of happening, so let’s not rush to stick the nail in the coffin for 2007- oh wait, I forgot what blog I was on.
My bad.
44. I hear futures are sucker bets in general. C/D?
PECOTA doesn’t make “predictions” – it makes “projections”. No one can “predict” the details of an injury, but one can certainly project that players of a certain type get hurt at a certain rate, and factor that rate into weighted-mean projections. PECOTA projects a range of performances (including non-performance), so the fact that Ichiro and Ibanez and Putz were on one end of that range, and Pineiro and Sexson and Guardado were on the other doesn’t prove anything. That is, in fact, exactly what you’d expect – a range of performances, many in the middle and a some at either end of the range of expected performances, all adding up to a final won / loss record. I just don’t see how you can make a rational argument against the PECOTA projected won/loss records without pointing out specific players where it’s way off. And it is, perhaps, in the case Ichiro, but what’s that, 2 games in the standings? If you’re arguing that it’s impossible to project MLB teams’ won/loss records at all, that’s equally ridiculous. You clearly can, to a certain degree, or Vegas wouldn’t let people bet on the games.
According to PECOTA, Ibanez and Putz fall back some from career years in 2006; Ichiro, Sexson, Lopez, Betancourt, and Washburn either stay the same or decline slightly; Guillen, Vidro, Batista, Ramirez, and the rest of the Soriano-less bullpen suck; and relative improvements by Felix, Beltre, Johjima, and Weaver are not enough to offset the mediocrity.
As mentioned above, PECOTA’s blind spots include defense (which affects Betancourt and Lopez directly and groundballers Batista and Ramirez indirectly) and historically unique players (Ichiro), and it is usually skeptical of players coming off major injuries (Guillen) or breakthrough improvements (Putz and his splitter). These factors might cause PECOTA to underestimate the M’s some, but none of the individual projections appear completely unreasonable.
Well, I’m not ready to put a nail in our coffin. Let’s play the games and hope for the best.
If the M’s beat their PECOTA projection does that count as a moral victory? Maybe we can hope the team beats its PECOTA projection by a greater % than any other team. Is it possible to have a moral victory against a computer?
Boy, I sure didn’t see another “USS Mariner is so negative” thread coming!
Nobody is saying that the PECOTA projection is, definitively, how the 2007 Mariners are going to perform. Nor are people saying that that’s how we HOPE that they perform, or how we WANT them to perform.
What we are saying is that it’s a pretty good guess as to how they’re LIKELY to perform, given the historical data we have available.
We all WANT the Mariners to win 162 games and then sweep the playoffs.
It’s just not particularly likely to happen.
Or Junior Griffey.
It’s true that we can’t predict injuries for individual players. But we can make this prediction for teams: almost all of them will suffer from at least one serious injury to one of their main players, where “serious” means that either they’re disabled, or their performance suffers significantly, for a significantly long period of time.
To assume that a team will go through a season without suffering from an injury problem is … well let’s just say it goes against what history shows. We can’t know who it’ll be, but there’ll be someone who gets injured.
43: But what you call PECOTA getting lucky is simply what happens when you aggregate more data: unexpected performances tend to balance out.
I would expect PECOTA to be more accurate, on average, on predictions for individual teams vs individual players. Assuming a system is a good projection system to begin with, more data should mean more accuracy.
Is it possible to analytically compare PECOTA’s historical accuracy on projecting players vs projecting teams? Or is that a monstrous amount of work?
#46
Personally, I don’t like football futures because key injuries happen all the time — like 2 or 3 years ago when the Seahawks were starting 3 rookie middle linebackers at the same time. This last year Trufant got hurt and the Seahawks were literally signing guys who were bagging groceries the previous week — to play in the playoffs.
I don’t like basketball futures because it’s so hard to quantify that sport — I don’t like gambling with my gut that much. The Pro game is better for that than the college game though. With the pro game there’s no surprising “rookie” like Tyrus Thomas 2 years ago — he got a review like: “great leaper who may make an impact” — all of about 7 words — in a preseason magazine I had.
Finally, I’m not a fan of baseball futures because there are enough tools to know which teams *should* be good, and which teams *should* be bad. The good teams have odds that are too short (ie: don’t pay enough for the risk), the bad teams you’re throwing your money away — the Tigers won a bunch of games but they didn’t win the WS. If Pecota has you at 73 wins…forget it till next year.
Anybody know when the last time a team predicted (or projected) to win 73 games won the WS?
It happened in the NL the last two seasons, and in the majors overall in 2000. And it’s FREQUENTLY been just a couple of games away from happening. It’s not an unreasonable place to start at all. It’s much more likely than to have a extreme outlier. Baseball is a parity sport, much more so than the others. Something about those 162 games….
Gagne hits the DL for Texas. I think we need to add a win to the M’s projection.
http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/spring2007/news/story?id=2817649
I was just in Vegas and *every* team line was high. I think if you’d total them all up you’d see an average of about 84 wins per team.
This can’t possibly be right since you can bet the under on these lines. If the average was 84, you’d make a killing betting unders, even paying 12:10. I just checked the first two online sites I found — one had an average of 81.7 wins, the other 81.8 wins.
Yes, as you said optimism and the tendency to bet over (I think my team is better than that) pushes the lines above average a bit, but the effect is slight. And since the lines are fixed, if the betting is heavy one way, they change the odds.
And I agree some of those lines look like easy money betting the under — White Sox 87.5, Angels 90, Dodgers 88.5, Yankees 97 (!).
Ok, the lines in Vegas weren’t quite as “high” as they felt — they still felt high.
The Over/Under for the M’s is 78.5 wins. Furthermore, let’s say in advance of the year you know that the M’s are going to score 650 runs and allow 720 runs, a 73 win ratio. What’s the standard deviation of wins based around the Pythagorean Formula? That is — if you bet the Under *knowing you were “right”, how often would you actually win? Would that cover the 12:10 required to play?
On whether futures bets are worth it: I wrote about this last year (specifically, the chances a team will outperform expectations) and while in general I don’t like them, you can make really good money – I my over/under picks last year would have made a ridiculous return for readers in Vegas.
The good thing I find is that if you find a team that for whatever reason public perception is way out of line with their actual fortunes, you can bet your way and get a huuuuuge cushion to be wrong. That’s pretty nice.
Check out the lines on Tampa Bay and Arizona this year. Taking the over on either one of those seems like a very safe bet.
This could possible be the worst $110M I’ve ever seen spent on a ballclub. Most of the roses collectively add up to about $30M (Ichiro, Johjima, Beltre, and the youngsters).
That means there’s about $80M worth of dreck…
But what you call PECOTA getting lucky is simply what happens when you aggregate more data: unexpected performances tend to balance out.
But that’s exactly what I mean by getting lucky. The systematic agorithm takes in a wide variety of variables and possiblities and projects an outcome based on what it knows at the time. But if the variables change over the course of the season, and last season’s July / August / September / October team was not the same as the one that PECOTA originally projected, how can we credit PECOTA’s outcome as being accurate when it was?
I’m just saying that looking at PECOTA’s past results for teams and applying it to current projections for teams is irresponsible unless one looks at the entirety of the data.
And before anybody else jumps in here to make offhanded comments, I’m not knocking PECOTA at all, nor am I claiming USSM is pessimistic. I’m knocking our interpretations of the results of PECOTA’s projections and our general laziness to question when it’s needed.
Huh- so, basically, PECOTA is projecting the AL West to be the 2007 version of the NL West in 2005 or NL Central of 2006- the division being collectively pretty weak and well under .500.
Since that aligns pretty much with what I’ve been thinking since the offseason, OK, then.
As for the Mariners being terrible, well, PECOTA hates Ichiro, always has, probably always will. I take the 73 as the probably low end scenario- Guillen’s a shambles, all the veterans decline collectively, and so on. The problem is that for a team payroll that has 9 digits, we should be looking at a win total that’s much closer to three digits than what we’re getting.
What this DOES seem to say is nobody in the AL West is going to blow the doors off anyone else…
I guess I have a couple responses:
- Obviously, you have to acknowledge that doing this is pretty much taking a lot of forecasts and playing time guesses and putting it all in a blender, and doesn’t reflect what will happen
- To the issue of teams not being the same, that’s certainly true, but for the most part, team composition doesn’t change that much in the aggregate. No team gears up or tears down entirely in any single year.
Look at this as more of a start-of-season rough cut: “If these guys perform at their weighted mean forecasts and we’re more or less right about who gets what playing time, here’s the relative strength of the teams.”
I don’t view these as having any real predictive value – but they are still interesting.
Derek, I’d be interested to reread your post on betting but wasn’t able to find it. Do you have a link handy?
Accuracy with Pecota is dependant on context. Offensively, i’m very, very confortable with it’s projections (correlations are over .70 typically). Pecota can’t handle pitching nearly as well though (projection correlate to actual roughly around .45) which makes sense I guess.
So if there is any saving grace here, its that the Ms can make up wins because Pecota has missed on the pitching side of things. Looking at the staff though, I’m thinking that’s more a case of hope springs eternal.
Then there is some marginal stuff you can consider that might pick up a few wins. Having Guillen’s arm in right with Ichiro’s in center might be collectively good for 7-8 runs (maybe a win?). Then you can hope that the two do something special in high leverage situations that could get you another win or two…
Of course that California sliding into the ocean (while Texas is at Oakland) idea sounds like a winner…
Careful what you wish for though, the Ms might be at Anahiem that weekend….
DMZ,
Okay. I guess I’m just thinking about this shit too hard.
The NL? yes. The entire MLB? No. The NL is crappy and had/has zero outstanding teams. When it happened in 2000, the Giants had a .599 win %.
PECOTA had the Yankees maxing out at 93 wins, I’d be shocked if one team wasn’t over .600. I take those results with a salt lick.
This may explain why, 2 years after canceling my season tix, they’re STILL sending me postcards begging me to come back and telling me I wouldn’t lose my previous season ticket holder priority?
Nah, what it explains is why I’ll still be getting those postcards begging me to come back every year for the foreseeable future…
PECOTA is not predicting that no team will play .600 ball. PECOTA is not projecting any specific team to do so. Those are not the same thing. PECOTA is saying that no team is built to play .600 ball under their ordinary circumstances: that for a team to do so they will have to play over their heads.
I’m sure that if you looked at all the projected seasons that PECOTA ran, in the majority of them some team played over .600 ball. But it was a bunch of different teams, no team doing so often enough to set that as their level.
I’ll bet almost every year the best team and the worst team are better and worse than any of PECOTA’s projections. They’re telling us what each team is, more or less, at their average performance. Of course some teams will play better than their average. And of course PECOTA can’t predict which teams will do so. Their projections still tell you something useful about the relative strength of the teams, and a team projected to win 73 is a lot less likely to overachieve to .600 ball than a team projected to win 93.
Pecota also assumes that the same players will be on the final roster as the starting roster. We all know that this is not true. Every year some teams hold fire sales and some teams buy players for the stretch. I actually expect the M’s to hit around 68 wins after they do a player dump in July. Bavasi will get canned around mid July and the new GM will gut the team, trying to get anything he can for our current overpriced squad.
We’ll be playing with the kids in August & September with the expected results.