The A’s are projected to win 77 games and finish last in their division. While team projections are variable enough to make this number more of a dart throw than anything, there are more than a couple reasons to think that the A’s team projections — in particular — are even more volatile than average.



The team projections over at FanGraphs are powered by Steamer projections — which do well in public projections battles — in combination with depth charts which are sorted by writers at the site. It’s a decent system, since humans can sort out the playing time based on various information sources, a little better than an algorithm might.



But that doesn’t mean that the error bars on team projections are tight. One standard deviation on team projections is four or five wins. That means that if a team like the Royals wins 10 more games than they were projected to win, the projection system is not broken. The normal...