Last week, The Athletic posted their terrible offseasong rades and there was a bit of a commotion. In the comment thread of that particular post here in Battery Power Ivan The Great suggested a way to grade offseasons, but in an objective manner.

Non-dumb offseason grading methodology, left as an exercise for any reader that's interested:

(1) Start with either the team's 2023 win total, or their 2023 WAR-win total, or their 2023 projected win total, or some combination of these or other things that reflect "where they were."

(2) Probably regress the above to the mean (.500) by around a third, given that it is, in fact, a new season.

(3) Take the team's current projected win total, or projected WAR-win total. Or average them or whatever.

Subtract the regressed value in (2) from (3). Rank-stack teams, teams clustered around 0 get a C, teams in the next quintile up get a B, teams in the top quintile get an A, and then D and F for the bottom two quintiles. Easy peasy, systematic, and doesn't require any blather whatsoever, except maybe blather to discuss one's choice of starting and ending point.

I actually already had an Excel sheet with all the data from 2023, including the formula to do the 1/3 of the regression. So I just dumped what I was missing - and needed anyways to do my yearly bets and created the table, and then just assigned grades as Ivan suggested above.

I ended up taking the actual wins from 2023 since those reflect the "where they were" a little bit better than pre-season projections given trades, injuries, implosions, and surprising debuts. For 2024, I used ZiPS.

You can see the whole thing live here.