Come and get us?
Mets GM Brodie Van Wagenen has learned his lesson from last season, when he told the rest of the NL East to come get the Mets and found himself saying "they came and got us" by July.
But that doesn't mean the expectations for the Mets aren't high.
PECOTA's annual projections came out on Tuesday, and their 2020 standings have the Mets finishing atop the NL East -- one game ahead of the second-place Nationals and five games ahead of the third-place Braves.
Check out the full NL East standings below...
The PECOTA projections, which are often on the more conservative side when it comes to win totals, have the Reds winning the NL Central at 86-76 and the Dodgers lapping the second place Padres by more than 20 games in the NL West.
When it comes to the American League, the Yankees (with 99 wins) run away with the AL East, the Twins take the AL Central with 93 wins, and the Astros win 98 games and run away with the AL West.
PECOTA explains its projection system in full here, but here's a snippet:
Please remember that PECOTA and our simulations do not "pick" a team to "win" any particular number of games. Rather, they identify an estimated range of games a team might win and tells you the average of that fairly wide range. That is the point of the visualizations. Any one of those outcomes is possible. However, some of them, as you can see, are more likely than others.
Regarding the Mets, PECOTA projecting them to win the NL East might be a mild surprise, but it shouldn't come as a shock -- not with most projection systems having the top four teams in the NL East grouped very tightly.
