New projections peg World Series champion Royals for last place

PECOTA still isn't a fan of the Royals. (AP Photo) Baseball Prospectus’ PECOTA projection system still doesn’t respect the Kansas City Royals.

The reigning World Series champions are headed for a 76-86 record, according to the PECOTA projections released Tuesday, which would put them in last place in the AL Central, well behind the 92-win Cleveland Indians. These data-driven projections — developed by Nate Silver in 2003 and published annually by Baseball Prospectus — forecast every player’s season based on their own past and comparable career paths, then run all the numbers to create a win-loss record for each team.

This isn’t the first time PECOTA has come in low on Kansas City. Coming off a World Series appearance in 2014, the PECOTA prediction was for a 72-win season. Of course, the Royals won 95 games in 2015, the most in the AL, on their way to winning the title. So, what gives?

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Baseball Prospectus’ editor-in-chief Sam Miller explains that not one of the site’s analysts believes Kansas City will finish with fewer than 80 wins:

Our staff didn’t want it. It’s not just that when we polled our writers for their own Royals predictions—before PECOTA had been run—not one of them went as low as 76. It’s not even that not one of them went lower than 80, or that only one of 27 responses was lower than 85, or that the plurality response was 90, or that the average was 88. It’s this: When I asked a follow-up question a few days later—“If I told you PECOTA projects them to win 76 games this year, does your answer change?”—the response was overwhelmingly “nah.” In fact… counting them out… 73 percent of staff said it didn’t change their answer at all. As one put it: “No, because the projections just seem to not like the Royals.”

Miller also attempts to put into context exactly why the projection formula consistently underestimates Kansas City, including what makes players like Wade Davis, Lorenzo Cain and Edinson Volquez difficult to project and their case as potential outliers. It’s worth a read.

We saw last year how this Royals team thrived off these sort of slights and tepid predictions and used it as motivation. Will it be the same this time around? Well, they’re much easier to dismiss when you’re the defending champions.

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