2018 MLB Projected Standings & Preseason Ratings

2018 MLB Projected Standings & Preseason Ratings

March 22, 2018 – by David Hess

Opening Day is only a week away! March 29th is the earliest Opening Day date in history, and it’s the first time in 50 years that all teams will begin their season on the same day.

And we’re ready. Here are our 2018 MLB preseason ratings and 2018 MLB projected standings.

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 Preseason 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 probably win more than the 97 games we’ve forecast for the Astros, and the worst (we’re looking at you, Royals, Tigers, and Marlins) may lose more than 98.

But if a team wins (or loses) 100 games this year, it’s going to be because things have gone better (or worse) than could have reasonably been expected to start the season. And picking which teams will wildly exceed (or fall short of) 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.

2018 MLB Projected Standings Highlights

For the past two seasons, starting with the market projected standings and working backwards to ratings gave us implied ratings where the NL took up most of the bottom spots in the rankings, and the AL took up most of the top spots. The world at large thought the top of the AL was great, and the bottom of the NL was terrible.

That trend is over, and this year’s preseason ratings are more balanced:

6 of the top 10 teams are from the NLThe bottom 10 teams are split with 5 each from the NL and AL

2018 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: Diamondbacks over Cardinals; Red Sox over TwinsDivision Round: Dodgers over Diamondbacks; Cubs over Nationals; Astros over Red Sox; Yankees over IndiansLeague Championship Series: Dodgers over Cubs; Astros over YankeesWorld Series: Astros over Dodgers

Full Preseason 2018 MLB Projected Standings

American League
AL East	W	L	TR Rank	Playoffs	Win Div	Top Seed	WS Champs
NY Yankees	95	67	3	77.4%	50.8%	21.4%	10.2%
Boston	91	71	7	67.1%	35.5%	13.3%	6.8%
Toronto	80	82	17	25.6%	8.6%	2.0%	1.3%
Tampa Bay	76	86	21	12.5%	3.4%	0.6%	0.5%
Baltimore	72	90	26	7.2%	1.8%	0.2%	0.2%
AL Central	W	L	TR Rank	Playoffs	Win Div	Top Seed	WS Champs
Cleveland	95	67	5	82.4%	72.7%	21.7%	9.5%
Minnesota	83	79	16	37.4%	20.7%	3.4%	2.0%
Chi Sox	71	91	27	7.0%	3.3%	0.2%	0.2%
Kansas City	68	94	28	4.0%	1.9%	0.1%	0.1%
Detroit	67	95	29	3.0%	1.3%	0.0%	0.1%
AL West	W	L	TR Rank	Playoffs	Win Div	Top Seed	WS Champs
Houston	97	65	1	84.6%	68.4%	30.0%	15.1%
LA Angels	83	79	12	34.8%	12.9%	3.3%	2.3%
Seattle	82	80	13	30.8%	10.9%	2.5%	1.9%
Texas	76	86	19	13.9%	4.2%	0.6%	0.6%
Oakland	75	87	20	12.3%	3.6%	0.6%	0.5%
National League
NL East	W	L	TR Rank	Playoffs	Win Div	Top Seed	WS Champs
Washington	92	70	6	72.1%	61.0%	17.5%	8.1%
NY Mets	82	80	15	33.2%	19.9%	3.6%	2.1%
Philadelphia	78	84	18	20.3%	11.5%	1.7%	1.0%
Atlanta	75	87	22	12.7%	6.7%	0.6%	0.5%
Miami	64	98	30	1.6%	0.8%	0.0%	0.0%
NL Central	W	L	TR Rank	Playoffs	Win Div	Top Seed	WS Champs
Chi Cubs	93	69	4	72.1%	52.4%	21.1%	9.2%
St. Louis	86	76	9	44.9%	22.7%	6.9%	3.4%
Milwaukee	84	78	11	36.5%	17.3%	4.8%	2.5%
Pittsburgh	74	88	24	10.8%	3.9%	0.7%	0.4%
Cincinnati	74	88	23	9.9%	3.7%	0.6%	0.4%
NL West	W	L	TR Rank	Playoffs	Win Div	Top Seed	WS Champs
LA Dodgers	95	67	2	79.5%	58.7%	28.8%	13.4%
Arizona	85	77	8	41.5%	17.6%	6.4%	3.6%
SF Giants	83	80	10	33.0%	12.7%	4.0%	2.4%
Colorado	80	82	14	24.7%	8.9%	2.8%	1.6%
San Diego	72	90	25	7.1%	2.1%	0.5%	0.3%

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