Welcome to June! It is a time of assessments in the baseball world. Assessments by us, fans and pundits. Assessments by teams, about themselves and about individual players. Enough real numbers are in the books where it's time for teams to declare their intentions for the 2019 season and in doing so, they have to make crucial judgments about their players and players they might like to acquire.
That's the theme of this month's Stock Watch. We are selecting the biggest surprise and disappointment for each team to date. By and large, this is a glimpse of those who have most overachieved and underachieved their preseason forecasts; however, additional context was given sway when making the selections. You can also read this as a laundry list of those most likely to regress to expected patterns: Many of the surprises here won't fare as well the rest of the way, while many of the disappointments will begin to perform more according to established patterns.
As for the team ratings and probabilities that are always a part of Stock Watch, for the first time this season we have grouped the teams according to buy, hold and sell status according to their current probability of earning a postseason spot. That number was determined by running 10,000 simulations of the remaining schedule. The basis of the simulation model is the author's power rating formula, which is expressed below as "win forecast." These revised forecasts determine the order in which teams are listed.