PECOTA hates Bobby Witt Jr.

Damn this circuitry!

My old pals at Baseball Prospectus are celebrating the release of PECOTA this week. It’s BP’s annual projections for the 2025 season. In Kansas City, we are familiar with the system and what amounted to misses during the championship run a decade ago where they underestimated those Royals teams. That made more than a few people angry at a computer.

This time around, when it comes to team projections, the Royals check in with a respectable 81 wins on average, good for second place in the AL Central behind the Minnesota Twins. People probably won’t get too upset at that. But the Twins to win the division? The team that won 82 games last year, faded spectacularly down the stretch and then spent the offseason doing nothing. Yes, those Twins. Bah!

I give the circuitry behind PECOTA a hard time because I love it so much. Truly.

The most enlightening part for me about the team projections from PECOTA isn’t the projected standings, but rather the range of outcomes they present for the division.

This tells a story of what we can expect from the AL Central and it’s basically that the division is a tossup of mediocrity. Which checks out. Unless you’re the Chicago White Sox. Which, again, checks out.

There is next to nothing to separate the top four teams and when the division consists of only five clubs, well…let’s just say this summer is going to be entertaining. I don’t buy the Twins as the favorites, but someone has to be I suppose. Every one of the four contenders has flaws. Those flaws will be fatal for a couple of those teams when it comes to getting to the postseason. It just won’t be surprising if either of the Twins, Royals, Tigers or Guardians win the division.

The curve of potential Royals outcomes is interesting to me. There’s a dip right around the .500 mark. While their average victory total is 81 wins, there’s a variance within the projections that suggests they’ll either surpass that total by a handful of wins or they’ll fall short by about the same amount. From what I could tell looking at the graphs for all teams—not just those in the AL Central—the Royals are the only team with this prominent of a feature. Ha. The Royals: Breaking PECOTA since 2004.

As part of the celebrations around the release of PECOTA, Matthew Trueblood writes about how the projection system handles projecting advanced defensive metrics. At Baseball Prospectus, their metric is Deserved Runs Prevented (DRP). Last season, the Royals collectively graded out a little below average according to BP. This year? PECOTA is beyond underwhelmed. This chart comes from Trueblood’s article and really jumped out to me. You’ll see why:

The Royals are projected by PECOTA to have the worst defense in the majors. The.w Worst. Defense. That was not something I saw coming. Sure the corner outfield positions are shaky, but Kyle Isbel in center field is rock solid. The left side of the infield is extremely strong and I’m not worried about the right side that much. These defensive metrics are always a bit critical of Salvador Perez and his framing behind the plate, so that may be a mark against the team.

Digging deeper, it turns out that Perez does indeed project to have not just a poor DRP according to PECOTA, but the worst projected DRP in all of baseball. It’s not just that PECOTA hates Salvy. It despises catchers as a whole. The nine worst projected defenders and 16 out of the bottom 20 don the tools of ignorance.

What I saw when looking at the 20 worst defenders though, shook me to my baseball core. Checking in as the 19th worst defender in baseball for 2025 is one Bobby Witt Jr. He’s projected to be worse in the field than every other shortstop in baseball, other than Xavier Edwards in Miami.

Yes, by DRP PECOTA projects Witt to be one of the worst defensive players in the game. You know, this Bobby Witt Jr.

And this one.

Hell, I could go on all day like this.

I am befuddled by this. Statcast’s Fielding Run Value has Witt as tied with Francisco Lindor as the second-best shortstop in the game last season. Same for Outs Above Average. The Fielding Bible is less enthusiastic but still grades Witt as more middle of the pack.

And it’s not just defense. PECOTA projects Witt to hit .281/.337/.489. That’s not too shabby, but a far cry from the .332/.389/.588 he posted last season. Perhaps even more egregious is that PECOTA has Witt down for 34 steals but just 26 home runs. Ummm…I realize that no hitter in history has posted three consecutive 30/30 seasons, which Witt has the opportunity to accomplish, but that line just seems a bit pessimistic.

I should probably point out that even though PECOTA seems rather bearish on Witt at a glance, the system does have him as the 12th best player in the game for 2025. That’s good. Yet among his cohorts at shortstop, Witt lands behind Corey Seager, Mookie Betts and Gunnar Henderson. That’s…kind of nutty.

Last season, PECOTA had Witt down for .271/.322/.460. Perhaps reasonable given how he performed in his first two seasons. His 99th percentile outcome for 2024, meaning the absolute best the computer could see for him was .301/.360/.556. Again, I’ll remind you that Witt hit .332/.389/.588 last year. Yeah, let’s just mark that one as a miss for poor old PECOTA.

Alas. At the end of the day, it’s just a silly projection system. There will be hits. There will be misses. The projections are only as good as the data it parses. Joe Posnanski points out that PECOTA projects only a single hitter to top .300 next season. That’s just as weird as undervaluing Witt.

If there’s one thing to take away from projection systems, it’s this: No one is perfect…Except for Bobby Witt Jr.