PECOTA projections have the Brewers winning the NL Central in 2023

They say the game of baseball isn’t played on paper. You can’t just crunch the numbers and spit out who will win. You need everyone to perform at their best, keep a good bill of health, and even have some luck to get to the postseason.

But if we did play the game on paper, your Milwaukee Brewers are officially the NL Central Division champions according to Baseball Prospectus’ PECOTA Projections!

Every offseason, Baseball Prospectus does their PECOTA Projections. PECOTA, which stands for Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm, is Baseball Prospectus’ way of projecting the ability of a team using the predicted most likely outcomes for each player.

“PECOTA is a system that takes a player’s past performance and tries to project the most likely outcome for the following season. It looks at all of the numbers, and all the numbers that make up the numbers, to see which players are more likely to repeat their success and which ones benefited from good fortune,” according to the PECOTA information page.

So how did the Brewers do? As I mentioned at the top, their simulated record of 88-74 is the best in the NL Central, just ahead of the 86-76 St. Louis Cardinals. They are given a 56.4% chance to win the Central, but just a 13% chance to get in via the Wild Card. Once in the postseason, they are given a 42.7% chance to get to the Division Series, and a 5.4% chance to win the World Series.

Last season, PECOTA projected the Brewers to hit 93 wins. That did not happen in reality. We will see if this lower number will become more attainable and the Brewers can find themselves back in the postseason after narrowly missing in 2022.

You can see the rest of their 2023 projections here.