on the negative side, Lilly’s not likely to pitch 189 innings

in general though i think the projections are a bit more negatively skewed on “everyone’s pitching staffs”. For the Cubs I think the hitter projections are pretty fair, they’re expecting DLee to come back to earth a bit, but that to be balanced by a big bounce-back from Soto/Fontenot.

I think we’re 4-5 wins better than the overall team projection, but its not shocking to see 80. Especially when BP is so negative on the back-end of our pitching staff

That’s probably the area we have the biggest chance for improvement (back end of staff). If we get some good years out of guys like Gray, Caridad, Guzman and then get supplemented by a Cashner or Jackson being ready to work out of the pen, the staff could improve quite a bit.

I think the SP projections are fair, though slightly negative. I don’t see Lilly pitching that much, but I also would bet that Zambrano can pull his WHIP back into the mid 1.3’s as opposed to high 1.3’s.

The bottom line with all these projections is they give a reference point, not an end point. The projections aren’t saying the Cubs are an 80 win team and we should not watch the season. They’re saying as currently constructed with these playing time allotments, the Cubs are somewhere between a 77-83 win team. Obviously guys can under-perform or over-perform the projections, but the takeaway should be that this team as currently constructed would need A LOT of things to go right to be a world championship contender

for some reason i thought ’08 was the starting point

but yeah its a range and its a range based on how the Cubs are constructed right now and how the PT decisions are estimated as of right now.

Projecting a team to win 81 and them actually win 81 is some % accuracy and some % pure luck. Projecting a team to win say from 77-83 games is placing more emphasis on accuracy and less on luck (hitting the number square)

BP’s projections are “median” projections. There are scenarios out there which they’d run the simulations and the Cubs win 90 games, its just not the most likely scenario.

Assuming any projection system is going to project the exact number of something is holding it to an unreasonable standard. As an example, if I project Soto to hit 30 HR’s this year and he hits 28 was I wrong? I projected a significant increase over his production last year, but I didn’t hit the number exactly

What this projection is saying is the Cubs are mildly worse than last year on paper

Like all statistics, the numbers are meant to serve as a guide. It is not an absolute number.

In reality, you are looking at a range, or a standard deviation. In this case, the standard deviation is a little over 5 for the seven numbers. So when the projections for Cubs wins was run, about 70% of the time the Cubs had between 72-82 wins the first time (77 being the average) and 75-85 wins the second time (80 being the average). 95% of the time, they were within two deviations (67-87 for 77 wins, 70-90 wins for 80 wins).

Keep in mind, the standard deviation of 5 is based on a small sample size. A better way of doing this is to include all their projections for all 30 teams.