How the Marlins Will Finish in the Playoff Race (in 2020)

Over at Fangraphs, they have a lot of little toys for predicting the future.

One such toy is the “Steamer” projections. To understand Steamer, you need to understand WAR.

It’s common knowledge that WAR stands for “Wins Above Replacement.” A replacement level player is one such that, if a team is comprised entirely of such players, they’ll win 29.4 percent of their games, or 47.628 wins. That translates to a 48-114 season.

When you dig into the more advanced mathematical aspect of it, you need to realize that there are 2,430 games played every major league season, and each of those games will have a winner and a loser. The “average” team will be 81-81. In other words, if you divide every team’s record by 162, the average will in fact, be 81-81.

Since 81-minus-47.628 is 33.372, and there are 30 teams, that’s 1001 WAR available for the entire major leagues, but I’m sure “they” meant to divvy out exactly 1000.

So a team that projects to be an “actual” 48-114 club will have a WAR projection of roughly zero, and a .500 club will have somewhere around 33.3 WAR. Incidentally, and the reasoning for this article in fact, the Marlins project as a team with 9.0 WAR from their fielders and 10.6 pitching WAR – a total of 19.6 WAR.

19.6 wins above 47.6 wins is 67.2 wins, or, a 67-95 season projection. Such a season would represent a 10-win improvement from what we hope is the absolute nadir associated with their current spate of growing pains. But can we possibly hope for more? Story continues if you click the banner below.