As Thursday creeps closer and closer, baseball fans across the country are anxiously awaiting the start of the 2023 season.

A lot can happen over 162 games, and while it's impossible to predict the future, pre-season projections are an indicator of how a team might fare throughout the year.

The Colorado Rockies had a pretty rough go in the '22 season, finishing with a 68-94 record and landing last in the NL West. However, most expert sources including Sports Illustrated and PECOTA had predicted that to be the case prior to the season even starting.

As for how the Rockies rank among the rest of the MLB teams going into the 2023 season - here's what the sports and stats experts have to say (and let's hope it's better than before!).

FiveThirtyEight

From sports to politics, FiveThirtyEight.com loves looking at numbers and regularly analyzes a spectrum of rankings and statistics across a range of topics. Unfortunately, the 2023 MLB predictions aren't very bright for Rockies fans. The website has Colorado finishing near the bottom, with an estimated record of 66 wins and 96 losses.

FanGraphs 

FanGraphs focuses on statistics for Major and Minor League baseball, using methods of statistical analysis, graphs, and projections to reach their findings. Their predictions for the 2023 MLB season are slightly better for the Rockies than FiveThirtyEight, but not by much. According to current calculations, FanGraphs has the Rockies ending the season with a 67-95 record, and tied with the Nationals for last place in the league.

PECOTA

An acronym for Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm, PECOTA is a baseball projection system, known for forecasting team records for the season to come. According to PECOTA, there's a zero percent chance the Rox will win their division this year and only a .2 percent chance they'll make it to playoffs. As far as regular season games go, PECOTA predicts the Rockies will win approximately 65.3 games and lose 96.7.

FanDuel Sportsbook

Statistic experts at FanDuel Sportsbook recently released their predictions for projected wins total for the 2023 MLB season. Sadly, this site has the Rockies winning a total of just 64.5 games, and finishing 28 out of 30 teams. More bad news - they are expecting the Dodgers to win the pennant once again. Womp, womp!

RotoChamp

RotoChamp determines their preseason projected standings by compiling stats from Baseball Prospectus, Davenport, FiveThirtyEight, and FanGraphs. As you can probably guess based on what some of these sources have already predicted above, RotoChamp is within the same range, though did give the Rox a few more props. They estimate the Rockies will win a total of 70 games and in turn, lose 92 of them.

Pro Sports Fanatics

The folks at Pro Sports Fanatics are among the "having no faith in the Rockies" club. Explaining the Rockies' roster lacks talent and is undergoing a major rebuild, they believe the team will finish the 2023 season with a tragic 58-104 record.

Here's hoping the Blake Street Bombers can prove the projections wrong and have a much better season than expected.

The Rockies' first game of the season is against San Diego Padres at 2:10 p.m. on March 30.

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