The simulation’s average for the Orioles puts them as a second place AL East team with 89.2 wins.
Can the 2025 Orioles beat the computers again? With the days winding down before spring training, Baseball Prospectus’s venerable PECOTA projection has been unveiled for the 2025 season. In its simulation average, the O’s end up as the second place team in the AL East with an average of 89.2 wins.
In a different era of the Orioles, one annual ritual was seeing how the assorted computer projected systems would view the team, then looking back at year’s end and seeing how wrong they were. The PECOTA system missing by ten or more wins in the playoff years from 2012-16 was a source of indignant commentary, including from me.
The 2024 Orioles exceeded their PECOTA projection by a modest four wins. It’s hardly worth digging up the snark for thinking that the O’s would end up at 87 wins and the team won 91.
For all of us with the team’s second-half .500 record freshest in our minds, it might seem more remarkable that the team was able to beat the 87 win projection at all. A lot went wrong in 2024 and the team still did better than its computer average. Even with the continual blows suffered with starting rotation injuries, the team overachieved. The season ended in a disappointing way, but it should not be lost what a solid season that was overall.
As a reminder about how PECOTA works, they run 1,000 simulations of the season. Each individual simulation will have its own developments for how player injuries work out and about player performance, and that single sim will flow forward based on things that may never happen in the real world. At least in the case of the Orioles, this PECOTA sim ends up close to where sportsbooks are setting win totals for 2025. A random sportsbook active in Maryland has an over/under of 88.5 wins right now.
If there was a sim season where Gunnar Henderson suffered a season-ending injury in April, that’s probably much worse for the O’s than ones where he repeats as an MVP-level player. Average together the results for teams over the 1,000 sims and it will come close, or at least that’s the idea.
The 2025 run of PECOTA sees a fairly weak American League with no overwhelming dominant team. No team is projected to reach 90 wins, though the Yankees, at 89.7 wins, do round up to 90. That’s a contrast to the National League, where every division leader (Atlanta, Chicago, and Los Angeles) gets at least a 90+ win promotion. The Dodgers are a projected super-team with a 104-win average. Good thing the Orioles only have to play them for three games.
Even at their 89.2 win average, the Orioles are given a 77% chance of making it back to the postseason, a 56.8% chance of advancing to the division round, and an 8.2% chance of winning the World Series. If the Orioles had entered every season as a roughly 12-1 chance of winning a title, I would probably be a happier O’s fan over the course of my lifetime than I have been.
More likely, some dominant AL team or two will emerge from this pack as things break better for them than the simulation average imagined. It’s not hard to think about why this could be the Orioles. If enough of the things that make O’s fans optimistic (or cautiously optimistic) about the season play out, the team should modestly exceed the 89-win projection and have a pretty good chance of taking the division crown. Avoid enough of the things that make people pessimistic and it’s the same.
It’s not hard to think that perhaps the Orioles assessment of the competition this season is in a similar vein to how PECOTA sees the American League, and that this assessment may have gone into their roster-building decisions. As we know, almost no money was committed to 2026 or beyond. If the Orioles are right that they can win with the guys they have, they can wait to add for the future payroll until there are seasons where there’s a greater need. They’d better be right.
Dan Duquette’s successful Orioles teams had much more go right than the projections largely imagined. The early successes of the Mike Elias era, with the 2022 resurgence and the 2023 regular season dominance, were similar. Even last year’s relatively disappointing season was a modest overachievement of the PECOTA sim average. If the 2025 Orioles can add to this list of beat-the-computer triumphs, this should be another well-regarded regular season Orioles team.