A look at 2025 PECOTA projections, as well as preseason projections over the last 12 seasons.
The Dodgers just won the World Series and had such a prolific offseason that several folks around baseball complained and even owners of other teams evoked the salary-cap bogeyman.
So it’s not really a surprise that Baseball Prospectus tabs the Dodgers as the best team in Major League Baseball in 2025. The PECOTA projections were unveiled on Monday, and by definition projections tend to be conservative. Only four teams are projected to win 90 games, including the Braves (92.4 wins), Cubs (90.6), and Yankees (89.7).
The Dodgers are an extreme outlier, projected for 103.8 wins, over 11 wins more than the next-best team. The Diamondbacks are projected to finish second in the National League West at 86.4 wins. The Dodgers’ 97.7-percent chance to win the division is by far the largest in baseball; the only other teams with even a 50-percent chance to win the division right now are the Cubs (79.4 percent) and Atlanta (52.3 percent).
Within the PECOTA projections — Jonathan Judge detailed the tweaks to the system for this year, including incorporating StuffPro into its model — are that the Dodgers are predicted to lead MLB in both runs scored (834, 56 more than second-place Arizona) and fewest runs allowed (625, one fewer than the Mariners).
Winning a division by 17 or more games does not guarantee success in the playoffs, of course. The Dodgers know this firsthand after losing consecutive NL Division Series to the Padres and Diamondbacks, after finishing ahead of them by 22 games and 16 games, respectively, during the season.
Still, 103.8 wins is a huge number for a projection system. It’s the highest by PECOTA since 2003, when the Yankees were predicted to win 109 games. New York that year did tie for the best record in baseball, winning 101.
But 103.8 wins isn’t that far off from recent Dodgers projections at Baseball Prospectus. They’ve been predicted either at or very near the best record in MLB dating back to 2013, including 103 wins in both 2020 and 2021. This will be the fifth time in the last six years that Baseball Prospectus tabbed the Dodgers to win in triple digits.
That’s in line with the standard the Dodgers have set. Over the last 12 seasons, with 11 division titles and a 106-win second-place year, the Dodgers have won 95 more games than the next-best team, and their .613 winning percentage equates to 99 wins over 162 games. Since 2017 — an eight-year span that includes four pennants and two championships — the Dodgers have a .636 win percentage, which comes out to 103 wins per 162 games.
So yeah, 104 wins sounds about right for this team. It might even be a conservative estimate after all.