Which MLB Teams Do Our Models Like Less Than Vegas Does?
Boston Red Sox
Projected Wins By Our Models: 86
2018 Over/Under: 91.5
You might view this one as a bit of a head-scratcher -- Boston won 93 games last season and probably got better over the offseason -- but it is worth keeping in mind our model does still like the Red Sox.
They are eighth in our power ratings and also eighth in projected record and playoff odds -- with the ninth-best World Series odds. This comes back to the conservative and bunched-up nature of our projections. The model does not have a team winning more than 96 games or fewer than 70.
Also, it is worth keeping in mind that the Red Sox were not a true-talent 93-win team last season, but one that clustered its best performances in the most opportune moments. ThePowerRank.com tracks “Cluster Luck,” and Boston was nearly 73 runs above average (it was +33.1 on offense and +39.8 on defense).
Overall, the Red Sox were 22nd in OPS (.736) but bumped this up to .801 with men in scoring position; only two teams had a bigger difference between their overall OPS and their OPS in that split. They also ranked seventh with a 26-percentage-point increase when any bases were occupied.
Their OPS allowed dropped by 28 percentage points with runners on, the biggest decrease in baseball.
This kind of situational over-peformance tends not to be sustainable, as performance with runners on tends to regress to one’s overall level of performance. That explains why metrics like BaseRuns (which strip away sequencing) tend to be more predictive of future wins than past wins themselves.
BaseRuns had the Red Sox pegged at 87 wins last season, the ninth-most in MLB. Boston did add J.D. Martinez and Eduardo Nunez over the winter and will presumably get more than 75 innings from David Price, so it is not hard to imagine their underlying level of performance increasing.
At the same time, Boston can probably expect some degree of regression from the likes of Chris Sale (7.7 fWAR in 2017) and Craig Kimbrel (3.3 fWAR in a mere 69 innings -- too insane to even make a “nice” joke out of), which would cut into the gains produced by the newcomers.
Both Sale and Kimbrel are projected to be among the top players at their position, but they are not forecasted to again post the utterly ridiculous numbers they did last season. Sale is not expected to have another season with a 2.45 FIP, nor can Kimbrel be counted on to come a batter away from posting a 50.0% strikeout rate again, because (stop me if you heard this one before) projections are conservative by nature.
