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In the first week of the baseball season, there’s a war going on in the hearts and minds of baseball fans — a battle between what you so desperately want to believe can happen and what you think will really happen. It’s the gap between the naivete of youth and the realism of experience, played out over 162 games.
I’m here to tell you it’s OK to dream a little. This is the time to think big about breakthroughs and bouncebacks, about capturing magic in a bottle and somehow prolonging it for six weeks or six months.
Los Angeles Dodgers (projected: 103-59)
Analogue: 102-60, Won WS
Atlanta Braves (projected: 94-68)
Analogue: 93-69, Won WS
New York Mets (projected: 92-70)
Analogue: 94-68, Won AL
…and so on.
Merely matching expectations feels pretty optimistic — which is crazy when you step back and think this team won’t rank 30th on this list. Projecting Chicago for merely 100 losses feels pretty optimistic — which is crazy when you step back and think this team won its division four years ago.
Heading into the season, Xavier Edwards and Jonah Bride are the only Marlins Opening Day hitters projected to be above the league average, and no offense to them, they’re not exactly Ruth and Gehrig holding up an offense.
So let’s really squint here. Sandy Alcántara is back, Edward Cabrera and Ryan Weathers will be soon, and Max Meyer was pretty good, briefly, to begin last season. The rotation could end up in the top half of the league. And it wouldn’t shock anybody if Connor Norby or Kyle Stowers or Matt Mervis or Otto López or Griffin Conine became an above-average hitter; so what if three or four of them did at the same time?
For the Marlins, a lot of things need to break right to contend for the playoffs. For the Rockies — whose 55-win projection ties for the lowest in PECOTA’s history — everything needs to go right. And there’s only one team in recent memory for whom everything seemed to go right in the regular season: the 2021 Giants.
Those Giants outperformed their projection by 32 — six more than any other team in the sample. San Francisco excelled by basically only playing good players. Simple, right? Most every at-bat was taken, most every pitch was thrown, by a player who performed above the league-average that season. Last year’s Rockies were nearly the inverse of that. And so to exceed its expectations by 30-plus games, Colorado will need the occasional big jump — say, Ezequiel Tovar and Brenton Doyle becoming top-10 MVP finishers — and scores of smaller ones: Michael Toglia hitting for the same power but getting on base more, Kris Bryant playing more than half the time, and the trio of Kyle Freeland, Germán Márquez and Antonio Senzatela turning back the clock in the rotation.
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