The St. Louis Cardinals are projected to win the NL Central - A Hunt and Peck

Fangraphs writer and baseball projection extraordinaire Dan Szymborski has release his team standings projections and St. Louis Cardinals fans should be quite happy. According to Szym the Cardinals are projected for 91 wins to lead the NL Central, 8 games above the second-place projected Milwaukee Brewers. This would have the Cardinals tied with the San Diego Padres and Los Angeles Dodgers in the National League and behind the Atlanta Braves and New York Mets, who are tied for first place per the projections.

Szym breaks it down more in depth in his article for Fangraphs here, but he states that he uses the ZiPS projection system to find the team win totals and then uses another set of algorithms from ZiPS to determine injury risk for players. From there he takes his set of different rosters and calculates the project standings. And the result has been pretty darn accurate. Per Szym:

“Over the last decade, ZiPS has averaged 19.9 correct teams when looking at Vegas preseason over/under lines. I’m always tinkering with methodology, but most of the low-hanging fruit in predicting how teams will perform has already been harvested.”

Check out his articles on the National League and the American League for the full list of projections.

The 2023 Start of Spring ZiPS Projected Standings: National League | Fangraphs

The 2023 Start of Spring ZiPS Projected Standings: American League | Fangraphs

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