2014 MLB Predictions

This will (hopefully) be the least-analytical thing I post here for quite a while. I could, of course, build a projection system and make my picks that way, except for the fact that I’ve sworn never to build a baseball projection system, for the following reasons:

1. Assembling a projection system would take a significant amount of time and effort. And since there are already systems out there that are significantly more sophisticated than anything I would build, that time and effort would be a prodigious waste, even moreso than the rest of my unpaid work already is.

2. I would enjoy the sport less as a result. Whenever I make predictions, I find myself rooting for them to come true instead of hoping for entertaining or surprising things to happen. The primary rule of baseball projection is “this guy will keep doing roughly what he has done before.” But one of the best parts of baseball is the fact that players don't always follow that rule. When the next Jose Bautista or Chris Davis hits 50 homers or something, I don’t want to be the guy who insists on predicting that this year’s breakout star is bound to regress to the mean; I'd rather hang on and enjoy the experience while it lasts.

So my picks are generally made with as little study as I can manage, which in turn allows me to slide by with minimal emotional investment in them. It also ensures that they will turn out to be thoroughly incorrect – but then, everyone else’s usually are as well.

AL East

Having decried the statistical tendency to incessantly project regression from players who leap forward, I’m naturally starting off the picks with a prediction of decline from Chris Davis. And with Manny Machado coming off of a knee injury, Baltimore’s two best players are likely to backslide after a year in which the team already went home before October.

Toronto missed the playoffs by considerably more than the Orioles; they might improve with anything resembling health from Joses of the Reyes and Bautista varieties, but not enough, especially with two of their top starters aged 39 and 35, respectively.

The Yankees added several big names in free agency, which is a startling and unprecedented development. They upgraded at catcher and multiple outfield spots, and brought in the best starting pitcher on the market as well, and all of those are good things to do. But I’m not sure there’s a team in baseball with a worse infield situation – it would be perfectly reasonable to predict 32-year-old journeyman Kelly Johnson to be their best infielder this year. Their other three expected starters had a combined baseball age of 107 last season, and played in a combined total of 109 games, and it is not good for those two numbers to be as similar as they are. That infield, both defensively and offensively, looks like a team sinker.

It comes down to the Rays and the Red Sox. Boston is the defending champ and has more resources to throw around, but they also caught quite a few breaks last year and took some losses in the offseason, and the Rays have about four different starting pitchers who could win the Cy Young. There’s nothing much to point one way or the other that I can see, so I’ll take the Rays largely because I’d prefer that they win.

AL Central

I found the Tigers extremely bothersome going into each of the last two seasons – they were clearly the most talented team in the division, but they insisted on deploying their talent in a headache-inducing way, putting Miguel Cabrera at third base and Prince Fielder at first. Now, Fielder is gone, Cabrera has sensibly returned to first, and Ian Kinsler has arrived to improve on the gaping wound that was second base. The rest of the team returns largely intact, with the exception of the perplexing Doug Fister trade and the injury to Jose Iglesias that has the team scrambling at short. But the hitting should be worthwhile, led by Cabrera, and the top three starters are still as good as anyone’s, especially now that they have a reasonable facsimile of a major league infield behind them.

There’s reason for optimism in a couple of other places within the division – the Royals could make more noise than they did last year if their young hitters get it together (which is a familiar refrain), and the Indians have a number of players who are sneaky-useful scattered around the diamond. Either of those teams could make a serious run. As for the other two options, the White Sox still have Chris Sale, and the Twins have Joe Mauer (albeit now at first base) and will soon have Aaron Hicks. But I don’t think any of the four can put a dent in the Tigers, at least not this year.

AL West

The Astros actually decided to improve this offseason, acquiring a reasonably useful position player (Dexter Fowler) and a functional pitcher (Scott Feldman). The fact that Fowler and Feldman are arguably the two best players on the team doesn’t speak especially well of the other 23 members of the roster, but Houston should probably manage to avoid losing more than two thirds of its games again this year.

Seattle’s best players are better than Houston’s; that is almost the entire reason that the Mariners are a better team. The outfield is still pretty dreadful, but they get ace caliber pitching two out of every five days, and Robinson Cano might help them put some distance between their offense and last in the league in runs. (The M’s managed a twelfth-place finish in scoring last year, but were only 26 runs out of fifteenth.)

Mike Trout is very, very good. People generally know this and talk about it a great deal, and yet I think it’s being underemphasized. There are not many opportunities to watch a player who has a chance to go down as one of the very best of all time at his or her chosen sport. Trout is not necessarily going to do that, but he is off to just about the best start any baseball player has ever had at his age. He strikes me as being a young Ty Cobb, transported 105 years ahead in time, with his approach modified for the changes in the game and with a majority of the virulent craziness removed. His play this year and over the next several is likely to be the most lasting story of present-day baseball. So it’s a shame that the Angels appear to be well on their way to wasting his astonishing talents with a supporting cast that’s both tepidly productive and cripplingly expensive.

That leaves the two teams who’ve faced off for top honors in the division for the last two years. I liked Texas’s offseason – Choo and Fielder filled needs without opening gaping voids. But with Jurickson Profar and Geovany Soto both going down in recent days, their usually-strong depth is strained. The A’s, meanwhile, confused me this winter, particularly by trading for established closer Jim Johnson in a deal that is the exact reverse of the one Billy Beane has made numerous times over the last decade and a half (Billy Koch, Keith Foulke, Huston Street, Andrew Bailey…).

I think the Rangers start the season with the better team, but the Beane-era A’s have tended to find a way of putting things together during the year, and that’s not something I’m betting against at the moment, especially after the last two seasons.

Wild cards: It’s so tempting to go “Boston and Texas” here, but then I’m basically picking a repeat of last year’s playoffs, which is really dull. And since there are zero stakes in these predictions anyway, I’d rather have at least a little fun, so… Texas and Kansas City.

NL East

There are three teams in this division with chances to be quite bad. The Phillies are OLD, and I’m not sure if anyone has had the heart to tell them. It’s kind of becoming awkward at this point to watch them run out the nucleus of the 2008-09 World Series teams as if nothing has changed. At least Cliff Lee is still going strong.

The Mets… have David Wright, who has fortuitously (if quietly) put his career back on track for Cooperstown. They also have some promising young pitchers, led by Matt Harv… oh, right. Let’s move on until next year, shall we?

The Marlins also have a stud position player (Giancarlo Stanton) and a remarkable pitching phenom (Jose Fernandez), and in their case, the phenom is not currently recovering from Tommy John surgery. They also have Ed Lucas. Who is Ed Lucas, you ask? He is a 31-year-old with 94 career games in the majors and a batting line of .256/.311/.336, and according to ESPN.com’s depth chart for the team (the accuracy of which I will not swear to), he is their expected starting third baseman.

That brings us to the Nats and Braves. Atlanta has a capable lineup with a couple of expensive holes in Dan Uggla and BJ Upton. They also have a wealth of pitching depth – or at least they did, until their rotation started dropping like flies hit into an outfield manned by three Adam Dunns. Washington, meanwhile, was a popular pick last year (not stunning given their best-record-in-baseball credentials from the season before), which did not pan out as hoped. But they still have a solid starting staff (bolstered by Doug Fister, if he’s healthy) and a pretty deep lineup led by Bryce Harper, and I think they take the Braves this year.

NL Central

This team produced three playoff entrants last year, so let’s dispose of the other two teams quickly. The Cubs look incredibly grim – if Castro and Rizzo don’t rebound and the prospects either stay down or start slowly, there’s serious worst-team-in-baseball potential here (or at least, worst-non-Astros-team), and this is coming from someone who was halfway to optimistic about this team last year. Milwaukee, on the other hand, could be decent with a few breaks – returns to form from a couple of guys who were either hurt, suspended, or just disappointing last year, along with Carlos Gomez and Jean Segura doing the same things again. But that’s a lot of breaks to count on.

The Pirates have arguably the best position player in the NL in Andrew McCutchen, a reasonably solid and promising group of position players around him, and a bullpen that was terrifying in a good way last year. Bullpens don’t always repeat their performances, of course, and there’s a lot riding on Francisco Liriano, which is not an entirely comforting thought, but this seems like a legitimately good team.

The Reds have a spottier lineup around their superstar (Joey Votto, of course), highlighted by the fact that they’re replacing a leadoff hitter who had a .423 OBP last year with one who managed a .308 mark… in AAA. The pitching staff should be good, although I don’t think it repeats last year’s performance, but the non-Votto-and-Bruce offense looks disastrous. And Votto, of course, will get the lion’s share of the blame on the team’s radio broadcasts.

And then there are the Cardinals, who happen to be a ridiculous juggernaut. Their offense is terrific, led by an over-30 catcher who somehow keeps getting better every year and a supporting cast that typically cranks out a minimum of one out-of-nowhere All Star, and the pitching staff is overflowing to such an extent that I’ll be watching Mike Matheny all year to see if he blushes while walking to the mound, thereby adding literality to the concept of “embarrassment of riches.” Even when they don’t have the best roster, the Cardinals are always a factor in the division – and they have the best roster this year.

NL West

I’m struggling to find a reason not to pick the Dodgers, because picking the heavy favorite is boring. I do think they’re a high-variance team – remember how close Don Mattingly was to getting fired last year when the team was in last place about a third of the way through the season? They rode big performances from Hanley Ramirez and Yasiel Puig, neither of which is guaranteed to be repeated. They have depth in the outfield, but it is (a) expensive, and (b) not necessarily good. ESPN expects them to start Juan Uribe at third base and Alex Guerrero at second. But they also have an exemplary top 3 in the rotation, and Puig and Ramirez could be very good again, and Crawford or Kemp or Ethier or Adrian Gonzalez could also return to very good status, so it’ll take some work to beat them even if they vary down instead of up. (If it’s up, they could win 105 games or so.)

Arizona would seem like a possibility if I had any idea who their shortstop was, and if their arguable best pitcher hadn’t just gone under the knife and out for the year.

The Rockies came in last in 2013, despite getting a batting title out of Michael Cuddyer. Yeah. Think about THAT.

The Giants have an established pattern of winning the World Series in even numbered years, then disappointing the year after. I am NOT picking a team for a reason like that, and the pitching staff after Madison Bumgarner was alarmingly grim last year. Matt Cain might rebound, but Tim Lincecum doesn’t look like a great bet at this point, and Ryan Vogelsong got two more charmed years than anyone had a right to expect; the surprise was less his 58 ERA+ of last season, and more the fact that it didn’t happen in 2011 or 2012. Tim Hudson helps, and the offense was better than it looked last year, but outside of Buster Posey and Brandon Belt, a lot of that came from players who might not repeat it.

So... the Padres? Last year’s team was twelfth in the league in runs – but they play in a murderously tough park; adjusting for that, their lineup was actually pretty good. And it was pretty good in a sneaky way, with decent hitters up and down the order; it qualifies as an asset, if not a huge one. The pitching staff, on the other hand, allowed the NL’s third-most runs, despite pitching in the same exceptional pitcher’s park. Andrew Cashner and Eric Stults weren’t awful, but most of the rest of the staff was a joint disaster area. This offseason, they added Ian Kennedy and Josh Johnson… and I actually like both of those pickups as potential rebounds, especially in the aforementioned park.

You know what? Let’s do it. I’ll pick the Padres in the West. (I kind of regard this pick as the “not-Dodgers”; if either the Giants or Diamondbacks take the division instead, I will probably attempt to claim some measure of vindication.)

Wild cards: Pirates and Braves. If I’m picking the Dodgers to fall, I’m picking them to fall hard.

Individual awards

AL MVP: Mike Trout. Did I mention he’s REALLY good? The voters have to notice this at some point, right? Although I kind of fear he’s going to settle into that zone of producing slight variations on the same extraordinary season year-in, year-out with the voters shrugging and saying, “we’ve seen that before.” The fact that neither of his first two years have garnered an MVP is a bad start; he may need a 45-homer season to get his first. And he may well hit those 45 homers this year. (Alternate choices: Pick a third baseman – Adrian Beltre, Josh Donaldson, or Evan Longoria, whoever gets the best narrative out of the playoff race.)

NL MVP: So many of the NL’s best individual players are on likely also-rans, and it’s usually hard to win the MVP without making the playoffs. Let’s go with Yadier Molina, who’s had back-to-back top-5 finishes already. (Alternate choices: Bryce Harper, McCutchen again, or your choice of Brave between Freeman, Upton, or Heyward.)

AL Cy Young: I should preface this by pointing out that not only have I never successfully called a Cy Young award, I’ve never come terribly close; my picks usually have disastrous seasons. (In 2012, they were Ubaldo Jimenez and Roy Halladay. This was an extreme case, but also not entirely atypical.) So I’m reaching the point of being tempted to use these picks as weapons against players or teams that I don’t care for. To that end, let’s go with Clay Buchholz, a promising young pitcher who works at such a torturously slow pace that an entire game of Axis and Allies can be played within the first five innings of his starts. (Alternate choices: Pick a Ray – Price, Moore, Archer, or Cobb. As a self-loathing Cubs fan, I’d lean toward Archer.)

NL Cy Young: Under the same philosophy of sabotage, let’s take Cardinal breakout playoff star Michael Wacha here. Nothing against him personally; he just plays for the Cardinals and helped them knock out the Pirates last year. (Alternate choices: Gerrit Cole, as an outside shot; Josh Johnson, as a crazy dark horse; Clayton Kershaw, if you want to be all obvious.)

The other individual awards are tough to have defined opinions on. Manager of the Year is generally also known as “manager of the year’s surprise team;” given my postseason picks, that probably means Ned Yost in the AL and Bud Black in the NL.

I’m not enough of a prospect hound to have much to say on the Rookies of the Year; let’s go with Xander Bogaerts in the AL, and throw Javier Baez in the NL spot just out of blind Cub loyalty.

Now for the playoffs. Predicting the baseball postseason is a fool’s errand when you know which teams are playing; it’s comically ridiculous before the regular season starts. With that in mind…

AL WC: Rangers over Royals

ALDS: Rangers over Tigers, Rays over A’s

ALCS: Rays over Rangers

NL WC: Pirates over Braves

NLDS: Pirates over Cardinals, Nationals over Padres

NLCS: Nats over Pirates

World Series: Nats over Rays in the first all-expansion Fall Classic. I’m probably going to make it an annual habit of predicting two non-original franchises until we finally get the first such pairing.

And that’s it. Now let’s get the season started so I can enjoy being proved wrong about practically everything.