There is a high ceiling for this Phillies team. But watch out for the floor. | David Murphy

Exploring the likely outcomes of a season with the highest expectations.

Much of the Phillies' success will land on the shoulders of Rhys Hoskins and Bryce Harper.Read moreYONG KIM / Staff Photographer

Published March 28, 2019, 5:00 a.m. ET

Spring is a time of ceilings and floors. I don’t mean that as some sort of metaphorical meditation on life and renewal. I’m talking about baseball, and the range of potential outcomes that all 30 teams must consider here on opening day.

In our business, we have a tendency to preview things within the framework of predictions, and when you look around I guess you might conclude that’s one of those universal human sorta things. From the Oscars to the stock market to your Uber driver’s mock draft, we are surrounded by evidence that, somewhere within us, there lurks some primal need to instill the future with some degree of certainty.

Well, I’ve got news for you. It’s an uncertain world. The reason weathermen are wrong all of the time isn’t that the weather is tough to predict, but that everything is tough to predict (at least with enough certainty to warrant a five-minute segment on television). Some of the greatest minds in history have acknowledged this fact, from Niels Bohr (“Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future") to Andre3000 (“You can plan a pretty picnic but you can’t predict the weather”).

Still, every spring, bloggers and sports writers and assorted members of the Twitter intelligentsia take it upon themselves to tell the world just how many home runs Bryce Harper is going to hit, and how many games the Phillies are going to win, and whether or not the manager is going to make it to August with a job.

Now, maybe think that all of this is just me projecting some of my lingering guilt over having predicted Yunel Escobar as my 2009 MVP choice. And maybe you are right. But I’ve always had some reservations about making predictions in the traditional true-false sense. Instead, I prefer to look at things in terms of ceilings and floors, and, from there, attempt to identify the most likely outcome.

This is a particularly useful approach for the 2019 Phillies, given the breadth of their range of potential outcomes, and the optimism bias that infects a lot of thinking this time of year. Studies have shown that 93 percent of people think they are better than the average driver. Put your ear to the ground of most fan bases and you’ll find that a similar percentage of people think the Local Nine has a better-than-average shot in the upcoming season.

The probability distribution in our mind skews to the right. I suspect this is true not just of fans, but of front offices as well. It wasn’t long ago that the Phillies entered consecutive home openers with John Mayberry Jr. (2013) and Juan Pierre (2012) in corner outfield spots. That’s not just a halo effect. That’s Timothy Leary at the Vatican.

The ceiling for this team is a lot like it was in 2008. Last season, the Yankees were the only team in the majors to have four players finish with a .340-plus OBP, .792-plus OPS, and 20-plus home runs, numbers that Bryce Harper, Rhys Hoskins, J.T. Realmuto, and Andrew McCutchen each achieved while playing on separate teams. Of the last 20 teams to have done so, 17 have won at least 86 games, 14 have gone to the playoffs, and seven have advanced to at least the league championship series.

But to really appreciate the potential of this Phillies’ lineup, consider that only four teams in the expansion era have ever finished a season with seven hitters who posted a .340-plus OBP and .776-plus OPS in at least 500 plate appearances. Odubel Herrera, Jean Segura, and Cesar Hernandez have all done it at least once in their last three seasons, in addition to the four Phillies mentioned earlier.

This team is going to score runs. For the first time since 2011, that is not a question. As for the rotation? There are some thing that could go right. Jake Arrieta could be better with better health. Nick Pivetta could have the breakout season that many are predicting. Vince Velasquez could be the pitcher he was for the first four months of last season instead of the last two.

The flip side is where we arrive at the floor. Because Arrieta could be a 33-year-old pitcher whose body isn’t going to stop acting like a 33-year-old’s. And Velasquez could simply be the pitcher he was in the last two months of last season, given that it is the pitcher he has been for most of his career to date. And if both of those things happen, and Pivetta merely takes another step toward middle-of-the-rotation legitimacy while remaining a homer-prone flyball pitcher, then the Phillies are only an injury or season-long slump away from trouble. Like those post-Jayson Werth outfields, there’s a realistic chance that we end up looking back at this year’s rotation and wonder, “What, exactly, did they think was going to happen?”

So there’s the floor. It’s very real, and it’s lower than a lot of people might suspect, especially the people who are penciling them in for 90-92 wins when most mathematical projections have them sitting in the 86-89 range.

That leaves us with about an 80 percent chance that they end up with a winning record and a 60 percent chance they end up in the playoffs.

The only thing we can say with greater certainty? The season starts on Thursday. Depending, of course, on the weather.

Get unlimited access from first pitch through Game 162 (and maybe the playoffs?) by subscribing today: 77 cents a week for 13 weeks.