While they differ in methodology, the major projection systems -- Marcel, OLIVER, PECOTA, Steamer, ZiPS et al. -- all abide by one central rule: Projections are not predictions. This mantra should be a source of comfort to Twins fans, since most experts are willing to predict that the team will be interesting and has at least some chance of making the playoff run they barely missed out on last year.

The projections, however, are nowhere near as kind. The offense looks to be about league average, while the pitching staff...well, according to the projections released so far, the less said about the pitching staff, the better.

Lest these automated soothsayers take away the hope that sustains baseball fans through the winter, there seems to be ample reason for more skepticism than usual this year regarding their estimation of the Twins’ offense.

To get a sense of the challenge facing projectors, here’s what I’d pencil in right now for a typical midseason lineup. The number in parenthesis refers to the player’s career plate appearances in Major League Baseball.

CF Byron Buxton (129 PA)

2B Brian Dozier (2374 PA)

1B Joe Mauer (6244 PA)

RF Miguel Sano (335 PA)

3B Trevor Plouffe (2565 PA)

DH Byung-Ho Park (0 PA)

LF Eddie Rosario (474 PA)

SS Eduardo Escobar (1243 PA)

C John Ryan Murphy (284 PA)

Dozier, Plouffe, and Mauer are all relatively easy to project. They’ve established the kind of players they are, it would be more surprising to have one of them either completely fail to even approach their projected line or to completely overshoot it than it would be for all three to end 2016 having performed close to expectations.

Escobar doesn’t have quite the longevity the others have, but his last two years (2014: .275/.315/.406 in 465 PA and 2015: .262/.309/.445 in 446 PA) have been so consistent, that he shouldn’t pose much of a problem. Some variation (more OBP, less slugging for example) is certainly possible. His last two months of 2015 were aberrant to be sure, but most projection systems won’t go into that level of granularity, and his year as a whole was right in line with expectations.

Thanks to a long, fruitful career in Korea, Park should theoretically be projectable, especially once his past performance is reevaluated using something like Keith Woolner’s Major League Equivalent tool. However, his season is so fraught with external variables -- things like how he adjusts to major league pitching, how the travel schedule affects him, and how quickly he acclimates to the Twins’ clubhouse culture -- that no formula could predict if he can contribute well this season or if the Twins will need to wait until next year to see Park’s characteristic power in full bloom.

That leaves about half the lineup to project. Research done independently at The Hardball Times and Beyond the Box Score show that projection systems tend to struggle with rookies since most -- PECOTA being the most notable outlier -- use some variation of a weighted three-year average in their projections. The remaining five players in that projected lineup (Buxton, Sano, Rosario, and Murphy) combined for just 1222 career plate appearances, which is about as many as one player should have in two full seasons. Adding another level of complexity, Murphy’s came over the course of three seasons, which makes for three minute samples instead of one small one.

Having solid minor league numbers to fall back on can help pull the projections in line, but these Twins don’t do the systems even that bit of kindness. They combined for even fewer plate appearances in Triple-A (612) than they did in the majors. Of those, 453 belong to Murphy, who hasn’t appeared in Triple-A since August of 2014, so it isn’t even as though he has a recent sample to pull from.

There’s a temptation to see this as a positive: The team won’t project well, but will end up being quite good. That’s possible. It’s equally possible that the projections will be bullish and the youth movement will be a year away from hitting their stride. ZiPS already has Buxton and Sano as two of the team’s three best players, though with lines of .266/.310/.405 and .249/.337/.491 respectively, that speaks more to bearish numbers for the rest of the team than optimism about them.

The Twins’ hitters are going to be better than their pitchers, this seems like the consensus view at this point in the offseason, but there just seems to be too much ambiguity to say whether they’ll be good enough to fully compensate for the pitching staff.