Rubbing Mud: PECOTA’s Projected Standings and the Trade Deadline

You can view this on the Playoff Odds Report page of this very website, but because there are a lot of other numbers and pretty colors there, here is PECOTA's projection of the end-of-season standings, rounded to whole numbers and distraction-free:

2015 Final Projected Standings, PECOTA-fueled Simulations

This isn't how the actual, final standings will look, of course—no projection system is that good—but it makes for an interesting exercise. Let's assume, for just a moment, that things will play out precisely this way, and talk about the implications.

The Tigers Are Not Sellers
I can't believe the number of people who, looking at a team with a sub-.500 record (however narrowly) and wanting badly to see some trades already, are willing to throw rationality to the wind. The Tigers are four and a half games behind the Twins for the final Wild Card spot, and they're quite a bit better than the Twins. In PECOTA's estimation, they'll finish a game behind the Blue Jays and Twins for that spot, but one game is a rounding error over the number of contests remaining.

More importantly, it's not that time for the Tigers yet. I see what others see: a dreary future marred by an inevitable scraping of the bottom of the money barrel, due in no small part to the albatross contracts the team gave to Justin Verlander and Miguel Cabrera much sooner than they had to. They won't be as bad off as the Phillies, because the Phillies compounded their problem by having an antiquated, backward-thinking front office and got unlucky on the scouting and player-development side, but they'll pay a hefty price for their years of ring-chasing.

Those dark days aren't here yet, though. This team still has one of the best offenses in baseball, especially if Cabrera gets back on the field. They're old, and some of them are approaching free agency, but they have a ton of talent, and the fact that the team is saddled with multiple remaining years of Verlander, Cabrera, and Victor Martinez only makes it that much more important for them to seize this last moment of potential relevance. Rather than looking to trade David Price or Yoenis Cespedes, Dave Dombrowski should—and almost certainly will, given his track record and what we know about owner Mike Illitch—look to upgrade the pitching staff at the deadline and try to beat the Twins to that last playoff berth.

Trading September for October Again
I'm stealing this turn of phrase from Joe Sheehan, but it's the best way to say it, really: MLB is trading September for October left and right. That's most clearly true in the context of the second Wild Card, of course. In this particular season, it shines through in the muddling—maybe the watering-down, maybe the ruining altogether, but for now, we'll just say the muddling—of the NL Central race.

It seems almost crystal-clear that the Cardinals, Pirates, and Cubs will all reach the playoffs (such as they are). What's unclear is which team will win, and, more importantly, whether the other two will mind much. The Cubs and Pirates, Cardinals and Pirates, and Cubs and Cardinals all play six games after September 1st, but in PECOTA's estimation, those games aren't going to be terribly important. The Cardinals are projected to run away with the title, and if that happens, the only thing the Cubs and Pirates will be worrying about will be how to hold off the Mets and Giants while carefully setting their rotations for the Wild Card game.

It seems hilariously disrespectful of the long regular season for MLB to wipe the slate clean and force two teams to play an arbitrary one-game winner-take-all, especially after that long season revealed just a single game's difference between them. Then again, we live in a world in which the regular season's validity as a test of mettle and talent is a bit more in question than it used to be. Whether we're all just more aware of the vagaries of randomness and variance and schedule fluctuations than we used to be, or whether they've truly become more confounding forces than they used to be, the fact is that we're probably past the point at which I can fairly criticize, say, a system that allows an 88-win team a clean shot at a 98-win team in a short series. Ten games sounds like an enormous margin, a yawning talent gap, and it often is, but we're beginning to see that sometimes, it also isn't. There are things not even a 162-game season can tease out, so maybe the modern approach MLB is taking—more playoffs, more head-to-head resolution, more all-in hands—matches our growing understanding of our own reality better than the old, ostensibly more meritocratic model.

At any rate, expect an exciting September. The only team even threatening to run away with their division is the Royals, and in each league, there are multiple teams vying for the Wild Card spots. It's just that hardly anyone (and sadly, not even the winner of a race that might include three of the four or five best teams in baseball) will feel much fulfilled by anything that happens that month. Success and failure are defined by what happens after that.

Which Teams Can Change Their Fortunes?
It's incredibly hard to change one's projected win total by more than two games between now and the end of the season. The Blue Jays can and should add to their pitching staff, but if PECOTA has the talent levels of everyone pegged correctly, they probably can't do enough to realistically make themselves AL East favorites. They can, however, force the teams with whom they might compete for a Wild Card to match their improvement, or fall behind.

Still, what's the huge change there? PECOTA predicts the Jays will win the second Wild Card. If they add two wins, not only won't they catch the Yankees (probably), but they won't even overtake the Astros for the right to host that one-game playoff. That's a harsh reality for a fan base that has waited more than 20 years to see their team in the playoffs, but (again, setting aside momentarily that PECOTA is going to miss on someone) it's the truth.

Now, the Astros have a real incentive to buy a significant asset. They're projected to finish just a game behind the Angels; Jeff Luhnow can erase that deficit with a good deadline. The Tigers (told you they're not sellers) are in a good position to buy and change the narrative in the race for that second Wild Card. The Cubs have an incentive to buy, although a dampened one, because one must assume they would prefer to host a potential Wild Card game against the vaunted Pirates. (Conversely, of course, the Pirates, Angels, Twins, and Blue Jays have incentive to buy, just to get a little separation from their competition for various playoff positions.)

Here's one more thing, on the flip side: PECOTA projects six NL teams to finish with 74 or fewer wins. No team in the AL is projected to win fewer than 76. With so few projected sellers on the junior circuit, if one team decides to get aggressive and do a miniature fire-sale, they might rack up enough losses to dramatically change their draft position for 2016. In this era of hard slotting, draft position matters a lot. It probably shouldn't govern too many buy/sell decisions, but that's an attractive potential fringe benefit of making a few deals to offload talent in a down year. The White Sox are the best bet to try it, if anyone does.

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Six teams are projected to finish within three games of the second Wild Card berth in the AL, which is PECOTA's way of saying: ¯_(ツ)_/¯. Even if PECOTA had perfect knowledge of player talent and health, a team's record could swing three games over the next 10 weeks based on sheer variance. Since it doesn't, what we're talking about here is an estimate of an estimate. Still, it's valuable information. It can keep us grounded, especially this time of year, when the temptation is to weigh what has happened so far much, much too heavily, and to ignore what we knew about players and teams coming into the season.