An Early Look at 2024 MLB Predictions
A brief rundown of where the models and odds agree — or not.
Spring training is officially getting underway with pitchers and catchers reporting to camp this week, and that means it’s prime season for 2024 MLB projections and forecasts. (Get excited! 🤓) This isn’t a comprehensive post — we’re all still recovering from that heart-stopping Super Bowl finish — but I figured I’d post the composite predictions from the usual variety of sources and make a few observations.
Just like we did with preseason power ratings at FiveThirtyEight, I pulled the current win forecasts for the 2024 season from the following outlets:
Wins based on Elo ratings from the end of 2023, regressed to the mean by one-third
In a different twist from the FiveThirtyEight approach, I’m also adding FanDuel’s over/under win totals to the mix, and assigning those 50% more weight than any of the other individual factors. (The markets tend to know what they are doing!) If we do that, here is the composite preseason forecast we end up with:
It’s no surprise that the L.A. Dodgers and Atlanta Braves tower well above the rest of the pack, given that they’re the only teams to have won 100+ games in each of the past two seasons. Both do, however, need to work on their postseason performance after neither made it past the Division Series in either of those years, going a collective 3-12 in the playoffs over that span.
The rest of the top teams generally involve the usual suspects, from the old standby Houston Astros to the still-ascending Baltimore Orioles. (With some regression baked in — Baltimore’s average forecast is down 12.9 wins from their 101 victories last year, despite their offseason additions.) It is interesting, however, to see the New York Yankees — whose 2023 season eventually slid into the abyss — sitting a few slots (and wins) higher than the defending champion Texas Rangers, who still have a pipeline of talent from which they’re adding. But perhaps adding Juan Soto (among others), along with a healthy Aaron Judge, is all it takes to bring the Bronx Bombers back.
If the Yankees are the most likely non-playoff team from 2023 to leap into contention this season, the Marlins and Brewers look like the playoff teams most likely to fall out in 2024. Miami was always going to be a relatively obvious pick there — no team outplayed its Pythagorean record more last season — while the Brewers spent the offseason shedding talent (Corbin Burnes is an Oriole now, etc).
Finally, judging from the standard deviations of the different win forecasts, we can see which teams might be especially polarizing in 2024 as well.
The Yankees have the second-highest standard deviation of any team, with their projections being split between Vegas at the high end; they have FanDuel’s third-highest over/under win total, last year’s dismal showing at the low end, and the stat systems sort of splitting the difference. (The Cardinals have a version of this same phenomenon going on as well, leading the NL Central projections despite last year’s nightmare.) The Dodgers and Padres are moving in different directions — no surprise, given their respective offseasons — so the disagreement in the numbers seems to be what L.A.’s ceiling is now with Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto… and what San Diego’s floor is after all of their losses.
The team with the least amount of disagreement across all the various systems is the Marlins — once again, this is a playoff team from 2023 that basically every forecast thinks will be mediocre this season. It’s also interesting to see how much alignment there is around the defending NL champion Arizona Diamondbacks winning 83-86 games and being right back in the middle of a playoff fight again.
I have to highlight the oddity of three big-market teams — the Chicago Cubs, Boston Red Sox and San Francisco Giants — also being in heavily agreed-upon mediocre territory. None of the three are projected for any more than 83.5 wins (nor any less than 77.0) by any of the component systems, which I especially found surprising because the Cubs were a 90-win Pythagorean team last season. (Granted, they did see their share of offseason departures.)
None of this is gospel, of course, particularly not at this stage of the preseason, with a lot of top free agents still unsigned as of yet. When I judged various systems — including most of these — last season, a video game (Out Of The Park) was actually the most accurate at midseason. So even the least polarizing of these picks might end up far off the right track. And who knows? Maybe that means Miami can prove everyone wrong, again.
Filed under: Baseball, Statgeekery
As a Yankee fan, I am TERRIFIED of the Orioles and Blue Jays this year. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a 90-win team in the AL East doesn't make the playoffs.