NJIT Mathematics Professor Unveils Modeling Projections for MLB's 2023 Season
As baseball fans gear up for MLB’s Opening Day and the marathon of another 162-game season, new modeling predictions of NJIT mathematics professor Bruce Bukiet have already divined the winners and losers when the dust settles on the final day of the 2023 season in October.
America’s pastime has always been a game obsessed with numbers, and Bukiet, an associate dean at NJIT’s College of Science and Liberal Arts, is no different — he has been his applying statistical models to forecast the MLB’s league standings with commendable accuracy for 25 years.
Bukiet says his mathematical models have predicted how teams will perform during the regular season “better than about 80% of the usual prognosticators,” since he began in 1998.
Last season, Bukiet’s model projected 9 of the 12 postseason teams correctly.
“Trying to predict what will happen is fun, and it makes the season more exciting to see how well the model performs,” said Bukiet. “A surprise this year is that the model calls for all the teams it had correctly making the 2022 postseason to make the postseason again.”
Bukiet’s AL and NL Table Predictions: Playoff Contenders vs Pretenders
Who are the odds-on favorites coming out the American League and National League divisions?
According to Bukiet’s number crunching, the National League East and American League East will make up 50% of this year’s playoff teams.
Above: Highlighted teams indicate teams expected to qualify for MLB’s playoffs.
The Atlanta Braves are expected to capture the National League pennant and once again beat out the N.Y. Mets and Philadelphia Phillies in the NL East, while the St. Louis Cardinals top the NL Central and the San Diego Padres and the LA Dodgers tie for the top spot in the NL West.
Last year, Bukiet accurately predicted the Braves' finish over the Mets, his favorite team.
“This year’s computation was performed before the season-ending injury to Edwin Diaz as well,” lamented Bukiet. “We’ll see if the other Mets relievers can step up their game to be as effective as Diaz was expected to be.”
In the American League, the projections place the Toronto Blue Jays as victors of the AL East. However, Yankee fans will take comfort in knowing that Bukiet’s model incorrectly favored Toronto last year as well, when the Yankees won 99 games, outperforming his modeling projections of 89 wins.
Elsewhere, the Cleveland Guardian’s young team is expected to continue its upward trajectory in the AL Central, while the Houston Astros are projected to stroll through the AL West and toward their third-consecutive AL pennant.
Bukiet’s modeling incorporates a myriad of data points to forecast the individual results of each of the whopping 2,430 games played throughout the Major League Baseball season.
Among the many ways he predicts game outcomes, Bukiet’s projections have traditionally included runner advancement modeling, which is used to calculate the outcome of the 24 possible scenarios that can occur when at batter steps up to the plate. Each scenario is defined by a combination of how many outs have been recorded (from 0-2), as well as the number and location of baserunners, at the time of each encounter between a pitcher and hitter.
Bukiet has evolved his model constantly to account for some of MLB’s recent rule changes, most notably last year’s expansion to 12 playoff teams.
However, he says he’ll be keeping a close eye how the many big changes in the league this year — such as limits on over-shifting players’ positioning in the field, larger bases and the new pitch clock — may change the equation for his predictions going forward.
“We’ll have to see how the new rules this year impact the various teams’ and players’ performance,” Bukiet said. “Until there is enough data available to assess its impact on specific players, we’ll just suppose that everyone is impacted equally. But as always, there’s a reason they play the games.”
