In the early months of 2025, I wrote a series of articles about consensus projections, focusing more on the starting talent but also some of the bench roster. It may have been a mistake not to delve deeper, because the projections weren’t entirely accurate. But they never are. It’s impossible to predict a season, we just have each system’s best guess at what is most likely to happen, given past and current norms, trajectories, etc.
This will be a bit of an undertaking so I am going to dive right in with some direct comparisons of projection systems and their consensus:
Skipping over to pitching now:
I could go into more detail but I feel fairly confident in saying that ZIPS was the best at projecting the Cardinals, and then the bat x with depth charts taking the bronze medal here.
Did the Cardinals underperform the projections?
The big underperformers were Nolan Arenado, Lars Nootbaar, Nolan Gorman, and Jordan Walker. They all fell well short of projected value. Together they erased the overperformance of Brendan Donovan, Willson Contreras, Alec Burleson, and Ivan Herrera. Masyn Winn and Pedro Pages also did better than expected but overall the team underperformed expectations a bit, and that pretty much rests on Jordan Walker’s shoulders as much as veterans Arenado and Nootbaar.
The starting rotation of course underperformed: Miles Mikolas, Erick Fedde, and Andre Pallante were over four wins less than projected, erasing the sort of feel good story of Matthew Liberatore’s 2025. Despite Michael McGreevy’s somewhat disappointing season, he actually was more productive than imagined by the projection systems. Kyle Leahy and JoJo Romero outdid their projections and held down the bullpen along with surprise bullpen phenom Matt Svanson. But all in all, the pitching fell short as far as what was projected, and the results at the end of the season were indicative of a rotational collapse.
I am still not sure that compiling team totals of projections means much, but it is sure fun to look at at the beginning of the season to get a general idea of what could happen. The projection systems actually were not incredibly far off predicting the Cardinals season, they were pretty accurate also with the Cubs output (many years the Cubs would’ve won the division), but they definitely underestimated the Brewers. The systems also underestimated the run prevention values put forth by the Cardinals, which made the Cardinals season a lot more watchable.