Dan Szymborski released his ZiPS projections for the Pirates yesterday, and they are not pretty. ZiPS is much less optimistic about the team’s chances this year than CHONE. I created a new projected wins spreadsheet, substituting OBP, SLG and ERA numbers from ZiPS in place of the projections from CHONE. Fielding projections are still from CHONE, and base running value is still based on last year’s Baseball Prospectus numbers. Projected playing time remains the same.
Based on ZiPS, the Pirates are projected to win 60 games, well down from the 71 wins I ended up with using the CHONE projections. The have just a 29% chance of avoiding 100 losses, and the chance of finishing .500 is only 0.0315%. Ouch.
