EPA/JEON HEON-KYUN
March Madness, make some room, because today America's favorite pastime enters the scene! It's Opening Day 2024 and I don't know about you, but after an offseason filled with blockbuster trades, a captivating free-agent market, and an emerging gambling scandal which just so happens to feature the greatest player on the planet, I can't wait for the regular season to begin. Baseball is, and always has been, my favorite sport. I fell in love with the game when I was just a wee lad, and my passion for all the game has to offer continues to this day. Admittedly, it likely has a bit to do with it being unquestionably the most stat and data-rich sport. I am beyond excited to dig into the stats and data this baseball season, and I have lots of ideas in mind for some great content for all of you. But today, we kick things off with my inaugural 2024 MLB Team Projections!
How These Projections Work
I will try to keep this as succinct as possible, while also giving you good insight into my process and calculations. I gathered four sets of data; Baseball Prospectus 2024 PECOTA Standings Projection, Fangraph's team WAR projections, Clay Davenport's 2024 projected standings, and the team Elo ratings from the end of the 2023 season from Neil Paine. For those of you unfamiliar with Elo, it is a rating system used to measure relative skill. Developed by Arpad Elo, it was first created for rating chess players but has since been extended by many in sports analytics to rate players and teams in Football, Baseball, and Basketball, among others. For more on the Elo system, feel free to read more here. I standardized these ratings by calculating the z-score for each projection/metric to get each team's relative place within each metric. I averaged the four z-scores for each team to get an aggregate average and then scaled them to an Elo range to get each team's pre-season rating. Using those ratings, I ran a Monte Carlo simulation to simulate the exact 2024 season 5,000 times. The team's Elo ratings were dynamic, and adjusted up or down after each game within each season simulation based on the outcome of each game. In addition to the ratings, I added in a home field advantage adjustment in each game, based on how much better the home team tends to perform at their home park relative to on the road. After the simulations were complete, I averaged together the simulated win totals for each team across all simulated season to get their final projected win totals. Now, without further ado, the moment you've all been waiting for...
2024 Projected MLB Standings
Some of these projections were of no surprise. For example, we all knew the Braves and Dodgers would land at the top, and that the dumpster fire that is the Oakland Athletics would project out for 100-or-so loses. But the Twins racking up nearly 94 wins (albeit in a weak AL Central division) and the upstart Orioles, coming off a 100-win season, only projecting for 86.5 was quite interesting. This led me to look into the teams with the biggest difference between projected 2024 wins and last year's win totals.
The Royals, who re-signed their young star Bobby Witt Jr. to a massive long-term deal and get back Vinnie Pasquantino after a 2023 marred by injury, were the biggest gainers (but let's be honest, they really didn't have anywhere to go but up). The Orioles saw the biggest fall, just below the Nationals who's "less-than star-studded" roster vastly overachieved in 2023. So, the model seems to think the Orioles overperformed a bit in 2023, and we may want to reel in our expectations on this promising but young roster (which did, in fact, just lose last year's ace starter Kyle Bradish for the start of the season to a UCL sprain).
How Accurate Will These Projections Be?
Well, the honest answer is we won't know until the season plays out and a World Series champ is crowned in October. But what we can look at is the variability in team projections across season simulations. Below is a table displaying the standard deviation of projected wins for each team across the 5,000 season simulations. The higher the standard deviation, the less consistent the team's simulated win totals were across simulations. A lower standard deviation indicates more stability and less variance in win projections from simulation to simulation.
Based on this, it looks like the Minnesota Twins may be the riskiest team to bet on going into the season, while we can be more confident that teams like the Phillies and Reds will perform to their projections.
Who knows how these projections will do. Let's hope they are spot on, but this is sports, anything can happen and that's the beauty of it! Get ready for a great baseball season ladies and gents, it's sure to be a fun and eventful one as always. In the words of the great Sarah Langs from MLB.com, "Baseball is the best"!