Baseball Prospectus’ PECOTA projections have been released for 2021, and as usual they aren’t favorable for the Oakland A’s. Fortunately, that hasn’t mattered for the last three years, when the A’s made the playoffs anyway.
It’s nothing personal on PECOTA’s part, and it makes complete sense that Oakland would tend to rank low in any projection system. Their success is usually tied to things like breakout youngsters, and unexpected late-blooming vets, and injury bounce-back gambles, and PECOTA isn’t in the business of predicting big spikes like those. Beating the odds is exactly what a bold, creative, low-budget club like the A’s needs to do, and sometimes that means starting with relatively low odds.