Dodgers News: PECOTA Projects LA to Win Division in 2023
The Dodgers have won the National League West in nine of the last 10 seasons. The one year they didn't win the division, they won 106 games. It's been quite a run for Los Angeles, and while we'd prefer to have more than the one World Series title to show for it, the LA front office consistently puts together a team that has a real chance to win every year.
It's the same old story for 2023, as the Dodgers head into spring training among the favorites in the division. The Padres have had a very strong offseason, but according to the PECOTA projections from Baseball Prospectus, it hasn't been quite strong enough to overtake Los Angeles.
PECOTA stands for Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm, although that's a great example of a tortured acronym where they just found words to fit the initials of the word they wanted. Bill Pecota was a mediocre infielder for the Royals, Braves, and Mets from 1986-94, and baseball fans of a certain age love nothing more than naming mediocre infielders from the '80s and '90s.
But while PECOTA's name may be silly, its purpose is straightforward:
PECOTA is a system that takes a player’s past performance and tries to project the most likely outcome for the following season. It looks at all of the numbers, and all the numbers that make up the numbers, to see which players are more likely to repeat their success and which ones benefited from good fortune.
And PECOTA is giving the Dodgers a little more respect than some of the other projection systems. Remember how FanGraphs' Steamer projections have Julio Urias with a 4.05 ERA this year? Well, PECOTA has his 1st-percentile ERA — meaning the worst-case scenario — at 3.77. His 50th-percentile ERA, or the most likely outcome, is 3.11. We can argue that even that's not good enough, but it's a heck of a lot better than the silly 4.05 Steamer threw out there.
Projections are always conservative, and this is no different. Julio will probably be better than his projection. Freddie Freeman's 50th-percentile OPS is .845; he hasn't been that low in eight years. The list goes on and on. But that's actually really good news, because even with those conservative projections, PECOTA has Los Angeles winning 97.4 games, the second-highest projected win total in MLB behind the Yankees' 99.3.
If you wrote off the Dodgers because of their quiet winter, this is your reminder that they still have a really, really good team.
