How does the latest set of projections view the D-Backs in 2025?
Now that we are just six short days from pitchers and catchers reporting, 15 days from the first Spring Training games, and 49 days until Opening Day against the Cubs, we are in prime projection season. While there are certainly still free agents waiting to find a home that will be signed over the next few weeks (as evidenced by the ill-fated signing of Jordan Montgomery last spring), the vast majority have already inked themselves new contracts and new teams. The D-Backs’ most recent acquisition, Randal Grichuk, is a welcome familiar face who should provide needed spark off the bench or in a platoon. I suspect he represents one of the final position player signings the team makes this offseason as Mike Hazen confirmed the club is still seeking some additional depth at the back end of the bullpen. However, even as there will be some roster spots up for grabs during Spring Training – especially at backup catcher and on the pitching staff – the broad strokes of the team’s roster is set and we can look at the projections a bit more seriously.
One of the most-watched of these projections is PECOTA (standing for Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm) from Baseball Prospectus that projects both on an individual and team basis. Like many other projection systems, they run a series of computer simulations (specifically Monte Carlo simulations) thousands of times to arrive at a range of possible outcomes. Those projections are combined with the expertise of the staff and the team’s projected depth chart to arrive at a modified version of Bill James’ Pythagorean Winning Percentage formula. They are very specific to remind their readers that their system does not arrive at a single point for each team or player, but instead delivers a range they expect the team to fall somewhere along. These ranges are usually visualized as normal distributions where the largest hump of each team’s projections show the most likely outcomes according to the simulations. For the record, my father, a statistics professor (among several other subjects) is likely scoffing at this simplification, but a full-fledged dive into standard deviations, standard errors, and normal distributions will have to wait for another day.
Maddeningly, as we can see above, the Dodgers have an absurd leg up on the rest of the division – and the rest of the National League for that matter. That advantage is mostly based on an incredible offense that they project will score 833 runs, the best in the majors by a sizable margin. But if that weren’t enough, the Dodgers are also projected to have one of the strongest pitching staffs in the league with a ludicrous 626 projected runs allowed for the season, which only trails the Mariners’ excellent starting rotation in all of baseball. For the record, the D-Backs are no slouches for either metric with 778 projected runs scored (third-best in the majors) and 722 runs allowed. That final number I find suspiciously high given that last year’s staff allowed 742 earned runs and the team has made substantial improvements there as an offseason priority. As far as I can tell, the site has not yet released the full projections for individual players so it’s difficult to know which pitchers they see as possible weak links for the D-Backs, but any additional improvement in that area could pay large dividends in the playoff hunt this go around.
Now, of course, we shouldn’t take these projections very seriously. They’re not predictive – even if their error rates are impressive given the sheer number of confounding variables that can come into play in an average baseball season. But even if they’re not predictive, they can give us a directional sense of both a player and a team and they undoubtedly show that the D-Backs have a pretty significant upwards arrow next to their name for the coming season. For the record, their projections for last season were relatively accurate at least in the teams that made the playoffs – even if the actual win-loss records contained some significant misses for some teams.