Projecting the National League Central Standings

As a follow up to the article I posted back on January 15, where I used projected stats and Bill James' Pythagorean Expectation formula to predict the Cubs record for 2012, I decided to take it a step further and try to predict the standings for the NL Central, following the same methodology.  In addition, it gave me a chance to update the predicted wins for the Cubs, based on the updated projections for their hitters and pitchers. 

Like before, I used the projections of BaseballHQ.com for each team, removed the worst hitters and pitchers to get down to around 5500 at bats and 1450 IP, which are the team averages for the NL for 2011.  These are then plugged into the Pythagorean expectation formula to get that team's projected winning percentage, which, when applied to 162 games, gives that teams projected wins (and losses) for the year.

Thus, without further ado, here are the projected standings for the NL Central:

	Runs	Runs	Projected	Projected
	Scored	Allowed	Wins	Losses	Win %
Milwaukee	761	653	93	69	0.574
Cincinnati	754	675	90	72	0.556
St. Louis	716	657	88	74	0.543
Pittsburgh	662	722	74	88	0.457
Chicago	666	732	73	89	0.451
Houston	629	721	70	90	0.432

As you can see from the above, there is basically a 3 team race for first and a 3 team race for last.  About what we would expect, given the level of talent on each team.  Before doing this analysis, I would have predicted the Reds to finish first in the division, based on their offseason moves and the Cardinals (Albert Pujols) and Brewers (Prince Fielder) losing big pieces of their respective offenses.

The Cubs runs scored and runs allowed changed only slightly from the 665 and 736 predicted previously, but it still results in only 73 wins.  I actually expect the Astros to be worse than predicted above and would be surprised if they win more than 65 games, so the Cubs will probably battle the Pirates for 4th, just like in 2011.