Many of the most exciting stories in baseball are tales of the underdog. The Amazin' Mets of 1969 not only overcame a large Cubs lead in the standings, it was also their first good season ever and one that few saw coming. The 1991 Worst-to-First World Series between the Braves and Twins is still remembered on that basis (and for the Jack Morris/John Smoltz showdown).
What made 2016 different from the typical season was that there literally were no Cinderella teams. The Chicago Cubs winning their first World Series since 1908 was the big story -- the last time they won a World Series, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were alive and Austria had an emperor -- but this wasn't exactly a tale of shocking victory, but of the favorite winning.
To a large degree in 2016, the teams that were expected to be good were good, the teams that were expected to be lousy were lousy, and the teams expected to be in the middle were in the middle. The ZiPS projection system projected 11 teams to finish below .500 in 2016 and all 11 proceeded to do just that. On an overall basis, ZiPS missed the average team by 5.2 wins, the smallest margin for ZiPS ever. And while it would be tempting to say this is because ZiPS was just super amazing in 2016, Vegas also did better than usual, missing in the over/under lines by 5.7 wins a team.
Already, 2017 as a season is shaping up to look a lot like 2016. This was further cemented by the Cleveland Indians' signing of Edwin Encarnacion as their Mike Napoli replacement in the lineup, jumping Cleveland to a six-game AL Central lead in the very preliminary 2017 standings projections. Napoli hit a lot of home runs in 2016, setting a career mark with 34. The problem with that was home runs across the board went way up, and Napoli's 104 OPS+ in 2016 was actually the second-worst of his career, well off his 120 OPS+ career mark. Encarnacion, on the other hand, is a legitimate offensive force beyond the home runs he hits, and projects to about three wins better than Napoli in 2017, constituting a clear upgrade for the Indians.