Resetting division projections

When you do a lot of work with projections, one of the things that takes some getting used to is the inevitability that your soothsaying will miss the mark on several occasions. Baseball teams have a lot of moving parts, and over half a year there's great potential for assumptions to go awry, askew or afoul.

With a quarter of the season already behind us, we have a great deal of new information on teams -- some good, some bad -- and unless Bud Selig comes up with some crazy new idea to make the All-Star Game "count" even more, there are a lot of wins and losses in the books that nobody can go back and erase. Missing the mark here and there really isn't so bad -- if we could predict the future perfectly, things would be rather boring.

So, which teams have changed their potential position in the standings at the end of the year by the greatest degree?

To answer this question, I used updated ZiPS projections and a set of Monte Carlo simulations to estimate wins during the rest of the season, adding them to this morning's standings. The good news is that most teams still project in the same neighborhood, with 25 of 30 teams coming within six wins of the preseason projection edition.

But if you have a tendency to see your glasses as half full, as I do, that leaves five teams that ZiPS is likely, at season's end, to have missed by more than six games.

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