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Today I delightedly across Clay Davenport's site - which I didn't know existed - and was delighted. For those who don't know, Davenport co-founded Baseball Prospectus and was instrumental in a lot of things that casual sabermetric savants take for granted these days. He invented the Pythagorean winning percentage. He developed B-Pro's EqA, now called TAv, that condenses a player's value into one objective number that can be compared across eras. And he created the Davenport Translations which translated minor league performance into major league projections.
In the sabermetric world, he's kind of a big deal. And apparently, he's still around doing his thing.
Yesterday Davenport published his first pass-projections for the 2016 season. Click, and spend a worthwhile ten minutes reading up on the method he uses to do this; he's not just throwing darts at a board.
He projects the Astros to an American League-best 91 wins, scoring 758 runs (also tops in the American League) and allowing 662 runs to opponents (2nd-best in the AL, after the Mariners). At present, he gives the Astros a 68.6% chance at making the playoffs and a 50% chance at being the AL West division champion. In all of baseball, only the Cubs and Dodgers are projected to have better records than your 2016 Houston Astros.
What do you think? Do you agree the Astros have a 50% chance of winning the West? Or is Davenport woefully under-representing the impact of Carlos Correa and George Springer and their collective 100 home runs that they will hit in 2016? How about the Rangers finishing in last place at 79-83? Leave your thoughts in the comments section.