PECOTA hates a lot of teams most years. The 2025 Braves aren’t one of them
Baseball Prospectus’s annual PECOTA projections have been unveiled and once again, the Atlanta Braves are projected to have a very good season according to the model. While PECOTA’s projection for Atlanta in 2025 isn’t as rosy as it was in 2024, it’s still rosy enough to where it figures that the Braves are still projected to be one of baseball’s elite teams in the upcoming regular season.
As of right now, PECOTA is projecting that the Braves will finish with 92.5 wins and a very nice projection of 69.6 losses. They’re saying that the Braves will return to the top of the NL East Mountain, with a 52.3 percent shot at winning the division. Even if they don’t win the division, PECOTA still figures that the Braves would have a 37.7 percent shot at ending up as a Wild Card. Add it all up and that’s PECOTA giving the Braves a 90 percent chance on the nose of making the Postseason for what would be the eighth-consecutive season. On top of all that, the Braves are currently given a 9.7 percent shot at winning the World Series, which is the second-best mark according to PECOTA at the moment.
Baseball Prospectus
This projection tracks with other projections throughout this offseason, which suggest that the Braves are still a very strong baseball team even if they’re licking their wounds a bit following a tumultuous season in 2024. Still, the model clearly believes that the Braves will rebound and be a serious contender once again. PECOTA figures that the race in the NL East will be a close one, as their projected three-game cushion over the New York Mets is projected to be the second-closest divisional race in all of baseball and the closest one in the NL. The Phillies are lurking right behind as well, so it’s pretty obvious that PECOTA believes there’s going to be a serious fight at the top of the division once again. I’d agree with that sentiment.
as ever, I’d encourage people to focus less on the specific number than the ridge plots below, which demonstrate the spread of performance in the sims we fun:
— Cragun’s Resort (@cdgoldstein.baseballprospectus.com) 2025-02-03T16:34:42.459Z
What’s interesting is that PECOTA also figures that Atlanta’s pitching and defense will be the key to their success. While PECOTA thinks that the Braves will only score the third-most runs in just the NL East, it does suggest that they’ll only give up the second-fewest runs in all of the entire National League and the fourth-fewest in all of baseball. That’s even with the model projecting that Atlanta’s rotation will be Chris Sale, Spencer Schwellenbach, Reynaldo López, Bryce Elder and 101 innings of Spencer Strider. While I think everybody reading this would like it if the Braves figured out a way to improve their rotation going forward, the situation is certainly far from dire on paper.
While the Braves may have some rosy projections this year, it’s a bit of a drop-off from the monstrous projection that they had last year when they were projected to win 101 games and were tabbed as World Series favorites. This season, the Dodgers have been tabbed as the team that’s not only the best in baseball but in a tier of their own. The defending World Series champions are projected to win 103.8 games, score the most runs and give up the fewest runs.
PECOTA has also given the Dodgers the rare 100 percent playoff odds, with their divisional title chances at 97.7 percent and their Wild Card percentage at 2.3 Overall, PECOTA has the Dodgers winning the World Series 20.7 percent of the time — no other team has a World Series projection higher than 10 percent, with the New York Yankees (9.0 percent) and our Atlanta Braves (9.7 percent) being the only other teams to get close to double digits.
With all of that being said, these are still just projections and as the saying goes, “the game’s not played on a spreadsheet.” If it was, then we wouldn’t have had the “pleasure” of experiencing the roller coaster ride of injuries and underperformance that was the 2024 Atlanta Braves and everything would’ve been sunshine, roses and lollipops. So while projections aren’t everything, PECOTA’s projections are a good sign that this should be another positive and productive season of baseball for the Braves.