The word “projections” used in conjunction with the Kansas City Royals brings a variety of responses and opinions. Now famously, the Baseball Prospectus projection tool PECOTA pegged the Royals as a team that would win 72 games in 2015. In case you didn’t know, they were incorrect. The Royals won 95 games and the World Series.
So why do we care about projections? And the answer for me is because they’re interesting. They don’t tell you what’s going to happen. They tell you what an algorithm believes will happen based on that player’s history and what happened to similar players in the past.