Hey, remember how the ZiPS projections came out earlier this offseason and were surprisingly rosy on the Chicago Cubs for 2025? Well, that was cool, and now we have Baseball Prospectus’s PECOTA projections for the Cubs and they might be even rosier!
Look at the standings projection that just dropped today at BP for the NL Central and be amazed:
Moreover, since win total projections are probabilistic, that number is just the median mark. It can therefore be helpful to see the distribution of likely outcomes to really grasp what kinds of seasons are projected for the NL Central:
That’s not just a lead for the Cubs. It’s a blowout. A romp. The Cubs could hit their 25th percentile win total projection and STILL win the division more than half of the time in this model. That’s wild. That’s the sign of a team that PECOTA believes is head and shoulders better than the rest of the division.
That might not even be the wildest part, though.
Are ready for this?
The Cubs’ .559 mark is the THIRD HIGHEST PROJECTED WINNING PERCENTAGE IN ALL OF BASEBALL. Literally only the Braves (barely) and the Dodgers (obviously) come in higher.
What to even make of such a thing? Some of that is schedule-related no doubt, but the harsh edges of the unbalanced schedule have been massively sanded down the last few years. Maybe PECOTA wouldn’t actually identify the Cubs as the third best team in baseball if all schedules were exactly balanced, but it seems apparent that they’d be way up there. The projections on win totals – again, these are median projections – are so conservative across the board. Just those three teams are projected to win over 90 games, and only one more (the Yankees) gets to 90 wins if you round up.
We will have to dig in on the particulars here to see just where PECOTA finds the Cubs to be an outlier, but it’s not like this is a bad team. We know that part already, and we also have to remember that last year’s installment underperformed relative to its underlying numbers. They were probably a lot “better” than an 83-win team. So, even if you were to start there, and then you note some internal development from young players, the swap from Cody Bellinger to Kyle Tucker, the swap from Kyle Hendricks to Matthew Boyd (et al), the swap from Yan Gomes to Carson Kelly (underrated move!), a pretty fundamental overhaul of the bullpen, and the possible arrival of a guy like Matt Shaw (and the other talent at Iowa that fills in holes, rather than replacement-level (or worse) veterans) … it all adds up to an improved team that was probably decent to begin with.
That said, do I look at this roster, contemplate the rest of the league, and see a clear 90-win team? I do not. I think that OF COURSE this is a team that COULD win 90 games, with positive variance up from something like an 86/87-win true talent level. That’s what those distributions up there are all about. And I’ll root for that.
I’m only saying that, while I am not a computer program, my own internal calculus is that the Cubs need to make another meaningful addition or two in order to get to that 90-win projection level.
Maybe that’s just latest pessimism creeping in, and we just don’t want to get emotionally burned. It appears that both PECOTA and ZiPS see the Cubs as much better right now on paper than many Cubs fans do. That’s certainly a good thing as we sit here on February 3.
Buuuuut maybe the Cubs should still go ahead and, at a minimum, make one more big move in the bullpen, mmkay?