How many wins will your team finish with?
We project the 2019 win-loss records for every Major League Baseball club
Bryce Harper has switched sides, but not divisions.
Manny Machado has a home, but not yet a fully formed core around him in San Diego.
At least we know where they’re playing.
And with that, USA TODAY’s projected win totals for the 2019 Major League Baseball season have arrived.
Oh, it’s exactly a month later than we hoped — but hey, how can you sell an honest projection of the season when the two biggest stars on the free agent market in years are still jobless?
Sure, Harper and Machado themselves won’t make a 10-win difference for anybody.
Yet each transaction creates ripples, the sort that can take a half-win here and add it elsewhere, upsetting the delicate balance of competition.
If our projections are on the nose, it should be a crazy final week of the season.
Our six-person panel’s projections landed on total chaos: a three-way tie in the NL Central, a two-way tie atop the NL East — and all five teams landing on the same record, creating a dizzying set of tiebreakers.
Just because there could be a decent dose of parity doesn’t mean tanking has been eradicated.
A solid eight to 10 teams project to throw in the towel by mid-June. Many of those teams, like the White Sox, found that pulling out of a non-competitive spiral takes far more than one offseason.
Others are trying more earnestly to compete but find themselves in divisions where more teams are “all-in” than elsewhere and somebody has to finish fifth.