FanPost

Why the Angels Will Win!!! A Wild Card. Maybe....

Daniel Clark-USA TODAY Sports

It's finally that time of year when spring is in the air!!!

Flowers are blossoming, the smell of fresh cut grass is everywhere, and children are grabbing their mitts to go out and play baseball after a long winter!

Wait. What? They got how much snow? That was children grabbing mittens to throw snowballs not mitts to throw baseballs? Ah well, the point is still the same.

Maybe it's not spring for most of the country, but spring training is less than 30 days away (probably), which means it's time for my spring training optimism to start in full bloom!!!

Sure, my hopes and dreams of Trout hoisting that trophy alongside Simba and Ohtani will likely be crushed on the field at the Big A just like the hopes and dreams of the fans of 28 other teams, but what's the point of spring training baseball if you can't be optimistic?

So, I'm getting out my Mike Trout commemorative mug of 1/3 full optimism and making my case for why the Angels will win!!! ... A wild card. ... Maybe...

First, let me start with me explaining why I said mug of 1/3 full optimism rather than the more traditional glass of 1/2 full optimism.

You see, because I'm silly and like to put my faith in meaningless stuff, I follow pre-season projections pretty closely.

For the last 3 years, the Angels have been predicted to have around a 30% chance of making the playoffs. It was 26.5% in 2016, 33.3% in 2017, and 27.1% in 2018 according to fangraphs.

While the projections aren't up yet for 2019, probably because, you know, rosters aren't even set and stuff, I'm thinking it's probably going to come in around the 30% range, which is close enough to 1/3 for me to say glass of 1/3 full optimism.

I mean, if actual projections are going to have us around 30%, that's more than enough for me to be optimistic about the season. There is stuff that has a 30% chance of happening that we see happen all the time. Like, say, a really good baseball player getting a hit. It's practically foolproof!

But, to add to that, how many wins does it take to get a wild card,really?

I know it was 97 last year, but that was some crazy run the A's had. They won't do that again. The second best team was Tampa with 90. What's more, it was only 85 wins in 2017 and 86 in 2015. There is no reason 85 - 90 wins won't get us the wild card!!!

Well, I mean, unless Tampa Bay is really good or some other team comes out of the blue, but don't dwell on that. This is the time for optimism!

And how close are we to a 85 - 90 win range?

In my previous fanpost I took the fangraphs 2019 projection totals for our current roster, added the total WAR for all Angels players to 47, the baseline wins expected for a replacement level team, and came up with the conclusion that, assuming the fangraphs projections are 100% accurate, the Angels are an 86 win team as currently constructed!

That means we are in historic wild card range right now!

However, what we really want to know is how we compare to other teams. So, I decided to build on the work I did in my prior fanpost by expanding my calculations for every team in the league.

What I did was add together the WAR totals for fangraphs projections for all teams. I then added that to the number 47, which is a typical number used as the number of wins a complete replacement level team would achieve. That gives me the expected wins according to projected WAR for each team with the rosters as currently constructed and projections from fangraphs.

The chart I created is here:

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So, what does it show?

Well, for one thing it confirms the 86 WIN number is still what the projections say since my last post on the topic. But, more importantly, it says we are already in the 2nd Wild Card spot going by projected WAR! We just edge out Tampa and the Twins.

Sure, there are little details like the fact that some of the projections don't make sense, the rosters aren't even set, no games have been played, yada, yada, yada.

But, I'm 100% rolling with it!!! Well, more like I'm 33% rolling with it. I mean, 30% really.

I'm 100% rolling with the fact that we have a 30% (ish) chance of winning a wild card in 2019 and you can't stop me!

30% is roughly the percent chance of a baseball player getting a hit. I see that all the time. It can totally happen.

This is our year!!!

This FanPost is authored by an independent fan. Tell us what you think and how you feel.

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