Looking back at consensus St Louis Cardinals projections pre-2025 season

In the early months of 2025, I wrote a series of articles about consensus projections, focusing more on the starting talent but also some of the bench roster. It may have been a mistake not to delve deeper, because the projections weren’t entirely accurate. But they never are. It’s impossible to predict a season, we just have each system’s best guess at what is most likely to happen, given past and current norms, trajectories, etc.

This will be a bit of an undertaking so I am going to dive right in with some direct comparisons of projection systems and their consensus:

• Nolan Arenado projected at 2.686 but was .9 fWAR… the bat x predicted the collapse with 1.4 war

• Masyn Winn was projected at 2.957 but ended up at 3.5 fWAR, nearly matching his rookie season which had more offense. this year was injury shortened but all out on defense in saving runs and range, and the arm… the projection system known as depth charts nailed it!

• Willson Contreras projected at 2.243 as a consensus but was 2.8 fWAR in 2025! zips got this one right!

• Brendan Donovan was projected at 2.43 as a consensus but ended up at 2.9 fWAR! zips again was closest

• Lars Nootbaar was expected to be a 2.5 win player but all we got was .8 fWAR. No system could’ve projected this but the bat x was closest with a 1.9 war projection

• Alec Burleson was projected at only 1.3 war but produced 2.1 fWAR,,. this has made all but his most devout doubters to be converted, myself included. I went from wanting him traded to only trading him for a very good deal. Burly is likely a player to be built around even if he’s limited to a part time plus dh share role. zips just about nailed this one!

• Iván Herrera projected at 2.357 war by consensus but was good for 2.7 fWAR! while sustaining some injuries. the bat x was the closest to projecting this breakout season

• Nolan Gorman’s projections were tempered with reality this year with him projected at 1.143 war. Sadly though, Gorman was a replacement level player this year. again, the bat x was closest but no one could foresee such a bad year at -.2 fWAR due to bad defense and lackluster hitting at .205 BA (with a little bit of bad babip luck if you’re seeking a grain of salt)

• Jordan Walker was projected to be 1.23 war because of a good hitting rookie season, but he ended up caving to a negative 1.2 fWAR season fueled by both poor offense and defense. zips came closest to predicting this but it’s still so far off from what happened I’m not going to count this one!

• Pedro Pages was projected to be .757 war but he was 1.6 fWAR! even without hitting too well. zips came out ahead on this projection and was fairly close at 1.3 war but consider it a breakout season with more playing time than expected *but still not all that great

Skipping over to pitching now:

• Sonny Gray projected to be 3.386 war and ended up at 3.6 fWAR. steamer, depth charts, oopsy, and atc were all honed in on this one at either 3.5 or 3.7 war, but zips projection of 2.9 feels more right than any of those in an experiential way

• Andre Pallante, our presumptive #2 in the rotation (if you ignore the early 2025 McGreevy craze), was projected at 1.63 war but was only .7 fWAR at the end of 2025. zips was closest but still expected twice as good of a season than Andre had

• Miles Mikolas was projected to have a 1.59 war season but ended up with a possibly MLB career ending replacement level performance. again, zips was closest but no one could project how bad Mikolas’ 2025 season would be

• Matthew Liberatore was to have an above replacement level season but not much more than that but ended up with a cromulent 1.8 fWAR, saving any semblance of a rotation from ruin. Again, zips came closest but he was still pretty far off from what happened

I could go into more detail but I feel fairly confident in saying that ZIPS was the best at projecting the Cardinals, and then the bat x with depth charts taking the bronze medal here.

Did the Cardinals underperform the projections?

The big underperformers were Nolan Arenado, Lars Nootbaar, Nolan Gorman, and Jordan Walker. They all fell well short of projected value. Together they erased the overperformance of Brendan Donovan, Willson Contreras, Alec Burleson, and Ivan Herrera. Masyn Winn and Pedro Pages also did better than expected but overall the team underperformed expectations a bit, and that pretty much rests on Jordan Walker’s shoulders as much as veterans Arenado and Nootbaar.

The starting rotation of course underperformed: Miles Mikolas, Erick Fedde, and Andre Pallante were over four wins less than projected, erasing the sort of feel good story of Matthew Liberatore’s 2025. Despite Michael McGreevy’s somewhat disappointing season, he actually was more productive than imagined by the projection systems. Kyle Leahy and JoJo Romero outdid their projections and held down the bullpen along with surprise bullpen phenom Matt Svanson. But all in all, the pitching fell short as far as what was projected, and the results at the end of the season were indicative of a rotational collapse.

…conclusion

I am still not sure that compiling team totals of projections means much, but it is sure fun to look at at the beginning of the season to get a general idea of what could happen. The projection systems actually were not incredibly far off predicting the Cardinals season, they were pretty accurate also with the Cubs output (many years the Cubs would’ve won the division), but they definitely underestimated the Brewers. The systems also underestimated the run prevention values put forth by the Cardinals, which made the Cardinals season a lot more watchable.