How good are the 2011 Mariners?

I had an interesting result when I looked at trying to figure out a prediction for the 2011 Mariners based on the players on the roster. First, last week I tried to predict the roster, and that wasn’t easy.  I did this prediction based on last week’s results, so I know that this endeavor is already flawed, so lets not belabor that point.

What I got was a 2011 M’s team that is likely to win more games then most of us think. Going off of 2010 performance, the 2011 M’s should win 76 games. 2011 predictions for player performance lead to a win total of 85 wins. This was taken from Fangraph’s predictions for players (mostly the fan predictions, though I used Bill James’s when available.)

I’m going to save interpretation of this result for a later post, but I’m still interesting in hearing what you all have to say about it. Please post your thoughts in the comment thread.

See below for the table of how this was determined.

There are a couple technical notes I should point out. First, all the rookies, who thus didn’t help in 2010 and had no WAR to use were also given a 0 prediction for 2011. I think this is fair, even for Ackley and Pineda. You never know how a rookie is going to perform, no matter the talent level, so assuming that all the rookies balance out close to 0 is pretty safe. I also put Erik Bedard at 0. Quite frankly, if Bedard manages to throw one pitch for the M’s it would seem to defy the odds. Feel free to disagree with that if you chose. I actually hope I’m wrong there.