2017 MLB Projected Standings & Preseason Ratings

2017 MLB Projected Standings & Preseason Ratings

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.

How We Create The 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 p 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. 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.

2017 MLB Projected Standings Highlights

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:

Six of the seven lowest-rated teams are all in the NL.

On the other hand, the top of the rankings is tilted towards the AL:

Three of the four highest-rated teams are in 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.

2017 MLB Projected Playoff Results

Here is how the playoffs would play out, if these projections are spot on (to be clear, that’s very unlikely):

Wild Card Round: Mets over Giants; Mariners over Blue JaysDivision Round: Cubs over Mets; Dodgers over Nationals; Indians over Mariners; Astros over Red SoxLeague Championship Series: Cubs over Dodgers; Indians over AstrosWorld Series: Cubs over Indians

Full Preseason 2017 MLB Projected Standings

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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