Welp, this should shake a few feathers. Baseball Prospectus has released their first PECOTA projections for the 2016 season and the Rays are projected to win the AL East.
The PECOTA model projects how every player will perform this season based on their own history, their age, and how similar players have performed in the past. The model then simulates the entire season thousands of times. Based on those simulations, the Rays win an average of 91 games, three games better than the next-best team in the AL East, the Boston Red Sox.
Here are the projected standings:
It is worth noting that the math models always seem to like the Rays, which shouldn’t be surprising since the models tend to favor many of the same factors that the Rays use to build a team.