How well will the Colorado Rockies do this season? This ESPN Insider projection by Dan Szymborski has the Rockies winning 85 games and taking third place in the NL West. Now, before there are groans about that total, the 85 wins actually make the NL West a tight race in this projection. The Arizona Diamondbacks take the division with 87 wins while the San Francisco Giants follow up with 86. That would certainly make for an exciting last few weeks of the season if things turned out somewhat like this projection.
After the Rockies, there is a real drop off, with the San Diego Padres finishing in fourth with 75 wins and the Los Angeles Dodgers at 72. The Padres have just a 3.7 percent chance of winning the division, whereas the Rockies have a 25.3 percent chance of capturing the division title.
The projected standings go even farther and offer a best-case scenario for the Rockies, which comes out to be 101 regular-season wins and beats ever other team in the division's best case except for the D'Backs (103). And the worst case scenario would still have them third with 72 wins.
Here is how these numbers came about:
Using the ZiPS projection system, a Monte Carlo simulation and a few scary-sounding bits of math stuff, the 2012 season was simmed a million times to see which teams projected to come out on top.