We’ve reached the halfway point of the season and the playoff races are starting to take a more defined shape. While the group of teams vying for the NL Wild Card looks pretty big on paper, our playoff odds show that the postseason field is actually more clearly delineated than the standings might lead you to believe.
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 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.
Below are the full rankings, presented in a sortable table:
Rank|Team|Record|Elo|Opponent Elo|Playoff Odds|Power Score|Δ
—|—|—|—|—|—|—|—
1|Orioles|53-31|1577|1501|98.0%|1596|2
2|Phillies|55-29|1570|1479|99.8%|1593|0
3|Yankees|54-32|1569|1513|99.5%|1591|-2
4|Guardians|52-30|1559|1488|89.3%|1580|0
5|Dodgers|52-33|1556|1482|99.3%|1579|0
6|Brewers|50-34|1547|1493|89.9%|1568|2
7|Braves|46-36|1538|1497|93.0%|1549|-1
8|Twins|47-37|1539|1488|79.5%|1544|2
9|Mariners|47-39|1522|1496|71.8%|1534|-2
10|Astros|42-41|1551|1501|54.2%|1533|1
And so on and so forth. Please refer to the full tabulated rankings above for more details.
