And The Simmer Is: (man, that's lame)

SG, writing on Larry Mahnken's Replacement Level Yankees Weblog, takes the ZIPS projections that I've mentioned here before and runs them through Diamond-Mind's program 100 times.

It'll be interesting to see how they match up when Diamond-Mind releases their usually-accurate projections in a few weeks.

SG averaged out the win totals and gave us a perfectly-defined mediocre result: 81-81. The sim gave us as many as 99 losses and as high as 99 wins.

W   L  RS  RA       DIV WC  HIGH   LOW

81  81  704  715     6   6   99     96

The 6 and 6 mean that in those simulations, the Nats won the division 6 times and won the Wild Card 6 times. My rapidly-eroding math skills tell me that's a 12% chance of making the playoffs. That seems just a tad on the high side of being plausible. (I'd put the chances in the 5-10% range.)

The numbers show us to be near the bottom of the league in Runs Scored and near the top of the league in Runs Allowed. Those seem accurate with what I and the other Nats bloggers are guessing.

It's a fun little toy. I'd play around with it at home on my own, but I only have an older version of Diamond-Mind. Oh well.