The ZiPS projections for players were released a few weeks ago, but those just give us a little bit of a guide as to how they project each team for. It’s a good guide and you can get a general feel for how things will line up in terms of “this team is good”, “this team is mediocre”, and “this team is going to be bad”. But when you’ve got a bunch of teams that fall into the same tier, it’s less useful without the team projections. And that’s what we got earlier today from ZiPS creator Dan Szymborski over at Fangraphs.
There’s a lot to take in with the projection for the National League, but let’s start with the simple stuff that you probably want to see the most. The Cincinnati Reds are projected to finish 79-83 and tied for third place with the St. Louis Cardinals, seven games back of the favorites in the division – the Chicago Cubs. The projections give the Reds a 23.6% chance of making the playoffs.
ZiPS projected record of 79-83 is better than the projections from PECOTA over at Baseball Prospectus, which has the club finishing in last place at 75-87 (this has been updated since the link above was published). Fangraphs projections, which are different from the ZiPS projections even though they are published at Fangraphs, has the Reds at 78-84 and in a 3-way tie for third/last place in the division. One can parse the wording a bit if they like, but the three systems all seem to agree that the team is mediocre at best.
When you take a bit of a wider view of the projections you will see that Cincinnati is projected for the 9th best record in the National League. You will also notice that the Los Angeles Dodgers are the only team projected for 90 or more wins (97) – with Atlanta and Philadelphia next in line at 89 wins.
In the writeup about the Reds, which is just one short paragraph, Szymborski notes what was clear in the individual projections – the rotation is good, but ZiPS doesn’t like the bullpen all that much. On the position side there’s some upside with Elly De La Cruz and Matt McLain and when coupled with Hunter Greene in the rotation those three players make up a big part of the team’s above-average value. At least on paper.
The 80th percentile projection for the Reds is just for 86 wins. Basically, in a scenario where most things go right for Cincinnati, that’s their upside. That feels a little bit light to me in a “nearly everything goes right” scenario. But I also think that the projected win totals for a lot of teams is a little low – the good teams will probably wind up with more wins than they’re projected for here, while the bad ones will have fewer victories.
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