Baseball’s middle class is pretty large this year
Just 10 teams have records over .500 right now, while nine teams are within three games of a playoff berth — and that doesn’t include the four teams that are currently tied for the final National League Wild Card spot. Because the standings are so compressed, especially in the NL, one team going on a hot streak can up-end the status quo very quickly, as the Reds showed us last week. This season, we’ve revamped our power rankings. The old model wasn’t very reactive to the ups and downs of any given team’s performance throughout the season, and by September, it was giving far too much weight to a team’s full body of work without taking into account how the club had changed, improved, or declined since March. That’s why we’ve decided to build our power rankings model using a modified Elo rating system. If you’re familiar with chess rankings or FiveThirtyEight’s defunct sports section, you’ll know that Elo is an elegant solution that measures teams’ relative strength and is very reactive to recent performance. To avoid overweighting recent results during the season, we weigh each team’s raw Elo rank using our coinflip playoff odds (specifically, we regress the playoff odds by 50% and weigh those against the raw Elo ranking, increasing in weight as the season progresses to a maximum of 25%). As the best and worst teams sort themselves out throughout the season, they’ll filter to the top and bottom of the rankings, while the exercise will remain reactive to hot streaks or cold snaps. First up are the full rankings, presented in a sortable table. Below that, I’ve grouped the teams into tiers with comments on a handful of clubs. You’ll notice that the official ordinal rankings don’t always match the tiers — I’ve taken some editorial liberties when grouping teams together — but generally, the ordering is consistent. One thing to note: The playoff odds listed in the tables below are our standard Depth Charts odds, not the coin flip odds that are used in the ranking formula.
Complete Power Rankings
| Rank | Team | Record | Elo | Opponent Elo | Playoff Odds | Power Score | Δ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Yankees | 46-21 | 1624 | 1509 | 99.7% | 1636 | 0 |
| 2 | Phillies | 45-20 | 1598 | 1475 | 99.7% | 1612 | 0 |
| 3 | Orioles | 42-22 | 1581 | 1489 | 96.8% | 1594 | 1 |
Tier 1 – The Best of the Best
Yankees
Records: 46-21
Elo: 1624
Opponent Elo: 1509
Playoff Odds: 99.7%
Power Score: 1636
Δ: 0
Phillies
Records: 45-20
Elo: 1598
Opponent Elo: 1475
Playoff Odds: 99.7%
Power Score: 1612
Δ: 0
In a possible World Series preview, the Yankees and Dodgers met for a three-game series in New York this past weekend. Los Angeles wound up taking two of three from the Yanks, snapping their eight-game winning streak in the process. Of course, New York was without Juan Soto for the entire series, and his absence exposed some of the weaknesses on their roster. Aaron Judge can only carry the lineup so far on his own, though he certainly tried: He collected seven hits and three home runs in the series, but the rest of the lineup scored just five runs all weekend without his direct contributions. Setting aside the wild finish to their early morning game on Sunday, the Phillies had a pretty great week last week. They swept the Brewers before heading across the pond and winning the first game of the London Series. They’re still in possession of the best record in baseball and are now a whopping nine games up on the Braves in the NL East.
