You’ve certainly got choices in what’s turning out to be a weird (weird good and/or weird bad) season for quite a few teams so far. You can even pick the Braves, especially if you were pessimistic about their chances — though the projections weren’t, so that would be a very personal-adjustment-over-baseline-expectations take.
The reason why this question came to mind, is that the Braves are off to play the White Sox right now, and the White Sox certainly qualify. It’s not even that they’re somehow
managed to fake production and rack up a bunch of wins over two-plus months — the White Sox are sixth in position player value and 17th in pitching value by fWAR, which suggest an above-average team. This just two years after they set the 162-game era record for worst… record.
Anyway, some basic thoughts:
Better than expected
- Brewers (+9.5 wins over preseason projections). While it feels kinda dumb to put the Brewers here for the now-documented ways in which they keep blowing up their preseason projections, the fact that they keep doing it, and have had a dominant-plus-resurgent stretch this season after stumbling a bit here and there, maybe qualifies?
- White Sox (+9.2 wins over preseason projections). The White Sox finished last year with the worst non-Rockies position player crew in baseball, as well as a bottom ten pitching staff. The pitching staff hasn’t been that much better this year, but the position players have dominated. Some of it is from guys that are getting very lucky so far (Tristan Peters, Chase Meidroth), but Miguel Vargas and Munetaka Murakami have been monsters so far.
- Guardians (+56% playoff odds over preseason projections). The Guardians being not-bad in a bad AL was either predictable or not, depending on your inclination. They’re not doing anything too different, they’re just chugging along.
- Rays (+56% playoff odds over preseason projections). Once the forgotten team in the AL East amid a quartet of teams that looked like contenders, the Rays have appeared and done Rays things. I guess that makes them not surprising, like the Guardians?
Worse than expected
- Mets (-9.7 wins below preseason projections). Boy, ranking this by reality versus preseason projections just has a bunch of teams playing to type, huh? Brewers, Guardians, Rays “surprisingly” better. Mets “surprisingly” worse.
- Red Sox (-7.7 wins below preseason projections). Well, the Red Sox tried to escape their recent doldrums, kinda-sorta remaking their team, especially their rotation. They’re not supposed to be as bad as they have been by all sorts of measures, but nothing about them screams “good” or “will snap out of it,” either.
Anyway, that’s just six teams. Lots of other teams have had big swings too.
The Giants and Orioles were popular fringe-contender-to-have-a-great-season picks, and, woof. The Blue Jays are mired in a morass. The Tigers collapsed. The Nats are decent! Teams like the Athletics and Cardinals are playing way better than expected given that they weren’t really trying to win.
Anyway, who ya got?
