{"id":642961,"date":"2026-03-25T18:06:33","date_gmt":"2026-03-25T18:06:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/642961\/"},"modified":"2026-03-25T18:06:33","modified_gmt":"2026-03-25T18:06:33","slug":"the-braves-are-spring-training-champs-and-it-means-nothing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/642961\/","title":{"rendered":"The Braves are Spring Training champs and it means nothing"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is a weird post. I\u2019ll just go ahead and get that out of the way. And then I\u2019m going to head into a brief-ish aside.<\/p>\n

I used to generate a lot more content. On the rare occasion I interrogate this fact, the subsequent thoughts fall into a few camps. One is that, well, I\u2019m just busier. My bit of unsolicited life advice framed as a statement: one small child in a both-parents-work household with no non-hired help nearby is imminently doable; two small children with the same setup is really difficult. 2025 was also just a brutal year all-around, I\u2019m not sure what 2026 represents in that regard yet. But, the other hand is that for me, MLB is shoving itself more into the \u201cabstractly\/conceptually interesting\u201d camp rather than the \u201cdirectly engaging camp.\u201d My favorite part of baseball was roster construction, but the expanded playoffs have brutalized the idea (as expected). On top of that, there\u2019s a bunch of non-player-related uncertainty (different balls, different rules), which both dampen the rewards to roster construction but also make baseball feel kinda serialized \u2014 \u201cOh, that was the year that X\u201d \u2014 perhaps too much. I don\u2019t know. Anyway, the combination of having less time and feeling like learning baseball things is less consequential because rosters are just kind of a morass of \u201cwe sorta tried\u201d these days is a bummer.<\/p>\n

Okay, I got that out of the way. And having done so, I\u2019m going to talk about Spring Training.<\/p>\n

The Braves won three-fourths of their official Grapefruit League contests, finishing 21-7. Even the mighty Dodgers couldn\u2019t catch up \u2014 the Braves\u2019 total victory over both spring leagues wasn\u2019t assured until late, but the Dodgers ended up finishing 20-9 in the Cactus League. This, of course, means nothing. You know it means nothing, and even if it meant something, Spring Training during a World Baseball Classic year would mean even less. (Though, of course, the Braves won while missing arguably their best player for much of Spring Training\u2026) But, it\u2019s useful to occasionally reevaluate whether the things we think we know are true are\u2026 true. So, here we are.<\/p>\n

I went back to 2016 (because that\u2019s the year we have \u201cmodern\u201d playoff odds memorialized on FanGraphs). For those years, I pulled teams if they:<\/p>\n

Won either the Cactus or Grapefruit League; orDidn\u2019t win either league, but had a record better than the winner of one of those leagues.<\/p>\n

This gave me 24 team-seasons, excluding 2020. Most years had two or three teams in this set; 2017 has four, because the Angels \u201cwon\u201d the Cactus League with a .588 winning percentage, while three Grapefruit League teams fared better. One of those teams was the 2023 Braves, who had a .643 Spring winning percentage \u2014 behind the Cardinals that year, but still good enough to be included. (And we all know how 2023 went for the Braves!)<\/p>\n

For each of those team-seasons, I then pulled both their actual end-of-season winning percentage, but also their before-the-season-started final projected wins point estimate. All of this is summarized below.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Some of this stuff is kinda interesting. The teams here have a collective 85 win-ish projection (whether you include 2026 or not). Actual performance for these teams ended up around 87 wins, so basically a two-win swing. It seems tempting to say that superlative Spring Training teams go on to beat their projections in the regular season, but nah \u2014 pretty much any statistical test you can muster shows no effect, something underscored by the fact that despite the two-win swing overall, ten of the 24 teams performed worse than expected. These findings are also robust to pretty much any kind of drill-down \u2014 excluding \u201cextra\u201d teams that didn\u2019t win their Spring league, only taking the best team each Spring, etc. etc.<\/p>\n

Bottom line, you already knew this: it doesn\u2019t matter. The 2016 Nationals had an insane Spring Training, as did the 2024 Orioles. Those teams actually did do much better than expected. But the 2025 Giants are next, and they ended up at .500, as expected. The 2016 Diamondbacks weren\u2019t supposed to be good, had a great Spring Training, and then imploded during the regular season.<\/p>\n

You probably could\u2019ve surmised all of this. But now you know. Yay, the Braves won in Spring Training. That\u2019ll have to be its own reward, such as it is. Overall, the Braves will have to scrap for a playoff spot, as their injury situation and general roster malaise make this much more of a 2019-2021 situation than the expected-and-consummated dominance they managed in 2022-2023.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This is a weird post. I\u2019ll just go ahead and get that out of the way. And then…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":642962,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[2394],"tags":[191,46,73272,73042,4166,5,192,4],"class_list":{"0":"post-642961","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-atlanta-braves","8":"tag-atlanta","9":"tag-atlanta-braves","10":"tag-atlanta-braves-analysis","11":"tag-atlanta-braves-spring-training","12":"tag-atlantabraves","13":"tag-baseball","14":"tag-braves","15":"tag-mlb"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116291148917752309","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642961","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=642961"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642961\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/642962"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=642961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=642961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=642961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}