Monday, March 20, 2006
The 2006 Diamond Mind Projection Blowout
Last year, I ran 2000 Diamond Mind Simulations with Diamond Mind Baseball and projection disks by Diamond Mind and ZiPS. This year, I’ve done it again, and also added another 1000 runs using Baseball Prospectus’s PECOTA projections.
As always, I advise anyone looking at these to take them with a ton of salt, as it is impossible to project how everything will shake out, and injuries, roster changes, and over/under performance will end up changing things in ways that cannot be prognosticated.
First up are the results with Diamond Mind over 1000 seasons.
Diamond Mind sees the Yankees winning 93 games on average, and scoring 883 runs while allowing 766. They won the division 689 times out of 1000, and made the playoffs in 80% of the seasons.
Next up, PECOTA.
PECOTA has the Yankees winning 92 games on average, scoring 889 runs, and allowing 774, winning the division 62% of the time, and making the playoffs 77% of the time.
Lastly, is ZiPS. 
I guess ZiPS really does hate the Yankees, as they project them to score about 40 fewer runs per season while allowing 40-50 more runs in the average season, and winning just 85 games on average and making the playoff just 28% of the time.
I averaged the results of the 3 sets, which you can see below.
*Updated to show individual median and modes.
Oakland and St. Louis project to be the class of baseball. ZiPS drags the Yankees down to being the fourth most likely team to make the playoffs.
My guess is that Diamond Mind and PECOTA are closer to the truth, although that could just be the Yankee fan in me. My other thoughts from glancing at these:
- Minnesota seems kind of high to me. I’d put them behind Cleveland and the White Sox.
- How the hell did the Royals win any division titles?
- Oakland looks dominant, particularly in run prevention, and across all three sets of projections. Good thing the Yankees get to start the season 0-3.
- Philly’s probably too high, and the Braves are too low.
- I guess St. Louis won’t miss Reggie Sanders or Larry Walker very much
- The Dodgers? WTF?
- I played 100 season without Bonds separately and the Giants lost about 8 games more on average, so that’s worth noting.
- These do not include the Brandon Arroyo for Wily Mo Pena trade, which looks to be about a one win upgrade for Boston based on Pena’s expected role, and a 2-3 win upgrade for Cincinnati on a smaller set of 100 that I ran upon hearing about the trade. Boston scored about 15 more runs with Pena but gave up 5 more. Cincinnati gave up about 25 fewer runs per season, so I guess Brandon was a good pickup for them after all.
Over the next few days I’ll look a little deeper at some of the results for the Yankees. Make of these what you will.
Update: I’ve uploaded the standings data for all 3 runs if anyone wants to take a look at it in more detail. The zip file is here, the link will be good for one week.
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