As Major League Baseball’s sort-of opening day approaches (if you don’t count the two games already played in Australia), mathematician and Mets fan Bruce Bukiet has released his predictions for the 2014 season, and they point to a lot of repeat winners.
According to his projections, the Detroit Tigers will not only again win the American League’s Central Division, but will also have the best record in baseball: 99 wins and 63 losses.
He predicts the other AL division winners will be the Boston Red Sox (96 wins) and Oakland As (93 wins), with the Angels and Seattle Mariners taking the wild-card slots.
Bukiet, an associate dean at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, uses a complex mathematical formula based on players’ past performance. By definition, it cannot take into account the impact of rookies, or of trades that have yet to be made.
The National League will be dominated by the big-spending Los Angeles Dodgers (95 wins), the St. Louis Cardinals (also 95 wins), and the Washington Nationals (94 wins). The Giants and Braves are the likely wild-card teams.
That means, with the exception of the NL East, all of the division-winning teams are projected to once again emerge on top.
Bukiet, an associate dean at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, uses a complex mathematical formula based on players’ past performance. By definition, it cannot take into account the impact of rookies, or of trades that have yet to be made.
Nevertheless, his track record is excellent: He correctly predicted all of last year’s NL races, and whiffed only with the AL East. “Sadly, for my Mets, the forecasts have been very accurate,” he says, noting that his predictions have been within three games of the team’s win total in nine of the last 10 seasons.
So don’t get your hopes up, Mets fans: Bukiet’s projecting the team to come in last in the NL East, with a record of 68 wins and 94 losses.
Bukiet projects the worst team to be—who else?—the Houston Astros, with 55 wins. Even reaching that number would be a victory of sorts: Last season, Bukiet also predicted the team would win 55 games, but they ended up with only 51 victories and 111 losses.
And this year, the perennially underachieving team from Chicago’s north side promises to give them a run for the cellar: Bukiet projects the lovable Cubbies will win only 57 games. Holy cow!
