It’s projection season in Baseball Nerd Land, aka “The Internet At Large”. Fangraphs and Baseball Prospectus, arguably the two major tentpoles of the online baseball analytics community, have dutifully fed their giant, smoke-belching number generators the entire history of the sport up to and including the voting patterns and political ideologies of every major and minor league ballplayer (WOW turns out almost all ballplayers think [REDACTED]) and those generators have generated thusly:

Fangraphs, using Dave Szymborski’s highly-respected ZiPS system, has the Mariners at 85 wins, second in the division, and with a 54% chance of making baseball’s postseason for a franchise record-tying (deep sigh) second year in a row. On the team, Szymborski termed the Mariners’ offseason thus:

“ …this winter has been a quieter one, with the team seemingly focused more on maintaining its position than meaningfully expanding it.”

I don’t think that’s a particularly controversial statement to make. You may have, and of course are welcome to that opinion. You can go yell at Dave about it, or use me as a proxy for your anger and yell at me. Either way, I encourage you to note that your frustration, like most of life, is at its end trivial, meaningless, and empty. Go Mariners.

ANYWAY, onto the fine folks at Baseball Prospectus. Their proprietary PECOTA System has the Mariners at 83 wins, *gasp* third in the division, and with a scant 32% change to play a playoff game this season. 

You can do whatever you want with this information. The easiest thing is to simply (and correctly) observe that these are mere projections, and that projecting the future is an incredibly tricky thing to do. Harry Pavlidis – head of B-Pro’s R&D – flat out admitted that these projections are wrong *every year*. You can also quite simply and also quite correctly observe that the Mariners have been going “Vince Carter at the 2000 NBA Slam Dunk Competition” all over these projections the past two seasons. Last year’s PECOTA had the team at 83 wins, while 2021’s version had them at (lol) 70! That means the Mariners have beat their PECOTA projections by a full 27 games in just the past two seasons! That’s a lot! Suck it, nerds!

Speaking solely for myself I am a person who has gone from caring a lot about RBI and being convinced 2001 happened because A-Rod’s bad vibes were gone, all the way to the other side of seeing baseball and baseball players as something akin to cattle and/or stocks in cattle, before finally settling into a space where I pretty much just want to watch great baseball and not feel like I’m championing A Cause, I think these projections serve as a great starting point for expectation. At minimum, it gives you two separate snapshots of where an in-depth projection system sees the team in relation to the rest of the league.

Where is that relation? Well the Mariners are, again, fine. Something like the AL’s 6-8th best roster. I’m sure people within the org think that is pessimistic. After all they’ve won 90 games two seasons in a row. They are theoretically getting full seasons from George Kirby, Luis Castillo, and Cal Raleigh. They could in fact benefit from Julio Rodriguez going nuclear and establishing himself as one of the game’s great players. They did add two quality players in Teoscar Hernandez and Kolten Wong. They also have the knowledge, as earlier cited, that they’ve been running circles around these systems the past two years. If a Mariners employee believes the team has a culture, braintrust, one simple trick, or whatever that gets them to more wins than impartial observers and computers think they should, I would not blame them!

The big concern though – and I am sorry to bury this lede I am really not great at this writing thing – is even if the Mariners exceed their projections, even if the organization has become sufficiently well run and now regularly outpaces the cold grasping maw of math, it is highly unlikely they do so to an extent that this season builds upon the last. The 2023 Mariners need to be exceptionally lucky and/or well-oiled to simply reach the postseason, which by itself is no longer the generational prize it was just a season ago. The playoffs are now the expectation.

The Mariners are talented, and appear to be largely well-run. However they play in a division with a team indisputably more talented, and better run. They have done excellent work narrowing the gap between them and the sport’s best teams, but they have far from eliminated it. The most important question facing John Stanton, Jerry Dipoto, and Justin Hollander is: How much better are you willing to get? An 85-win roster that, through excellent management and good fortune, can be squeezed to 90 is not the mountaintop. I can only hope those in charge agree.