All of a sudden the NL Wild Card race looks a lot more exciting, while the playoff picture in the AL had a big shakeup over the weekend. It’s bound to be an exciting final two weeks of the regular season.

Last year, we revamped our power rankings 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 coin flip 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%). The weighted Elo ranks are then displayed as “Power Score” in the tables below. 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 — there are times where I take 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.

Read the rest of this entry »

The playoff race in the National League looks pretty settled, but the door to capturing a Wild Card spot in the American League looks like it has cracked open a little bit. There are a handful of teams still looking to make a last minute run, though with less than a month left in the season, time is running out for those long shots.

Last year, we revamped our power rankings 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 coin flip 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%). The weighted Elo ranks are then displayed as “Power Score” in the tables below. 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 — there are times where I take 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. Read the rest of this entry »

The Mariners entered the season with a starting rotation that was the envy of nearly every other team in baseball, with four young homegrown pitchers in Logan Gilbert, George Kirby, Bryce Miller, and Bryan Woo, and Luis Castillo as the veteran ace to lead the group. Our preseason projections had Seattle’s rotation as the seventh best in baseball, only held back by its lack of depth behind the top five starters. Three of those young starters appeared on Ben Clemens’ midseason Trade Value list, ranked 23rd (Kirby), 34th (Woo), and 36th (Gilbert). The M’s rotation has been the key to their success over the last few years, but lately, that same highly regarded group has been the weakest link for the Mariners as they fight to maintain a playoff spot.

Since the All-Star break, Seattle’s rotation has put up a 4.55 ERA and a 4.27 FIP, 19th and 16th in the majors, respectively. It’s been even worse over the last 30 days: a 4.94 ERA (20th) and a 4.66 FIP (21st). Kirby has allowed seven or more runs in two of his last four starts, and was knocked around for 10 hits and eight runs (seven earned) in two innings in his start against the Rays on Wednesday. Castillo has allowed five or more runs in three of his last four starts. Gilbert suffered through an ugly six-run blowup in Philadelphia a few weeks ago. Miller is sporting a 5.63 ERA since being activated off the IL on August 19. Even the metronomic Woo had his streak of 25 starts of at least six innings snapped on August 27.

These problems becomes even more stark when you compare their performance inside the confines of the extremely pitcher friendly T-Mobile Park to their struggles on the road. This season at home, the rotation is putting up a 3.40 ERA and a 3.82 FIP, fourth and ninth best in the majors, respectively. On the road, those marks drop to a 4.69 ERA (26th) and 4.44 (22nd). The Mariners have a 32-40 record on the road this year, and these pitching issues are a big reason why.

All of these struggles are showing up in the standings, too. The M’s are 22-22 during the second half, but since a 9-1 homestand to start the month of August, they’re 7-14, with four of those seven wins coming at home. Seattle has had two long East Coast road trips during this stretch, which have included sweeps by the Phillies and Rays, and a combined 3-12 record with three more games to play in Atlanta this weekend. Despite all this, the M’s currently hold the final AL Wild Card spot, just 1.5 games ahead of the Rangers and 3.5 games behind the Astros in the AL West.

It’s worth noting that three of the Mariners’ starters have spent a significant amount of time on the IL this year: Kirby was sidelined during spring training with a shoulder injury and wound up missing nearly two months of the season; Gilbert missed all of May and half of June with a flexor strain in his elbow; and Miller has had two separate IL stints due to inflammation in his elbow stemming from a bone spur. Seattle’s starters have thrown the most innings in baseball since the beginning of the 2022 season, and it’s possible that heavy workload over these past few years is catching up with them.

Here’s how the performance of the team’s five starters has changed from the first half to the second half:

It’s at least a little encouraging to see that the peripherals for Kirby and Gilbert look solid during the second half, even if their top line results have suffered. There are some red flags for Woo and Castillo, however; the former is 20 innings past his previous career high set last year and the latter is showing some worrying signs of fatigue. I think it’s worthwhile to take a closer look at Kirby, Gilbert and Castillo, and try to see what might be causing their issues and if there’s any hope of a turnaround in the final month of the season.

It’s been a really up-and-down season for Kirby. Maybe because of the shoulder injury, he’s never really looked like he’s settled in since being activated off the IL. The biggest clue he hasn’t been feeling like himself is his walk rate. From his debut in 2022 through the end of 2024, Kirby had exactly two starts where he allowed three walks; this year, he’s already had five starts where he’s allowed three walks. His walk rate has nearly doubled, though when it’s going from 3.0% to 5.9%, it’s still an above-average mark compared to the league.

I have a hunch that his command issues stem from a pretty significant change to his arm angle. Kirby had been throwing from a pretty standard three-quarters arm slot for his entire career, but it suddenly dropped eight degrees this year. I’m not sure if that change in mechanics stemmed from his shoulder injury — it’s possible he’s compensating for a still slightly damaged shoulder by dropping his arm slot, or that his body found a new “natural” arm slot during his rehab. Whatever the cause, the new mechanics have had a pretty dramatic effect on the characteristics of his pitches. Here’s what a few of Kirby’s key physical metrics look like for his four-seam fastball:

His heater lost some raw carry (IVB), but it gained a much flatter approach angle and now sits well outside the fastball “dead zone.” The results the pitch is generating haven’t changed all that much; Kirby is still garnering a whiff more than a quarter of the time, and the expected wOBA allowed off of his fastball is right around his career norms. But he’s throwing the pitch in the strike zone just 51.6% of the time, down from 53.2% last year and 58.0% in 2023.

Along with a flatter fastball, a lower arm angle has given Kirby’s entire arsenal a lot more horizontal movement. His slider is moving three inches more to his glove side and his curveball has an extra inch of break. His sinker and splitter both have a bunch more arm-side movement as well. That break has definitely benefitted his breaking balls, as both are running career-high whiff rates. Kirby has struggled to find a consistent breaking ball he can use to earn those swings-and-misses, and it finally looks like he’s got two of them.

Unfortunately, the new arm slot seems to have caused Kirby to ditch his splitter. He added that pitch in 2023 in an effort to find an offspeed offering to use against left-handed batters, and it’s been an important piece of his arsenal since then. He was throwing his split like normal in May when he first returned from his shoulder injury, but quickly ditched it after his second start in favor of a changeup. The new offspeed pitch is coming in a little harder than the splitter, with less drop and more arm-side break. Batters are having trouble putting the new changeup in play with any authority — it has a .155 expected wOBA — but its 11.1% whiff rate leaves a lot to be desired when compared to the near 30% whiff rate the splitter had.

It’s fair to wonder if all these changes to his mechanics and pitch shapes have caused Kirby’s usually pinpoint command to waver a bit as he gets used to his new norm. It’s also possible that he’s just been the victim of some really poor luck; his peripherals all look pretty solid, with his 3.56 FIP nearly a run lower than his 4.47 ERA. All his other ERA estimators — a 3.52 xFIP, a 3.69 SIERA, and a 4.10 xERA — point to some improvement to come as well.

Kirby isn’t the only starter on the Mariners whose mechanics have undergone a dramatic change this year: Gilbert has dropped his arm angle from a high, over-the-top delivery to a three-quarters arm slot. Mikey Ajeto detailed this change in a piece for Baseball Prospectus back in June, writing:

Gilbert’s fastball has gotten flatter, and his splitter steeper. Now his fastball is flatter than the average fastball, and his splitter is not only steeper than the average splitter, it’s getting forkball depth. Now he’s throwing strikes again with his fastball, and his splitter is one of the deadliest two-strike pitches in MLB.

Among all pitchers with at least 100 innings pitched, Gilbert leads the way in strikeout rate at 34.2%. And like Kirby, his ERA is half a run higher than his FIP, though his issue is a little easier to pinpoint. His 2.64 xFIP tells you almost everything you need to know: Gilbert is allowing far too many home runs despite all those swings and misses.

Interestingly, it’s not his fastball that’s the culprit. The flatter approach angle has helped him tone down the damage allowed off his heater. Instead, it’s Gilbert’s slider that’s causing some of these issues. The breaking ball is still generating plenty of whiffs, but when batters put the pitch in play, they’re crushing it. He’s allowed a .719 slug and a .445 expected wOBA with the breaker, which means that even though batters whiff against it more than a third of the time, it’s returned a negative run value this year.

Like the rest of his repertoire, the slider’s physical shape has changed with Gilbert’s lower arm slot. It’s a near perfect gyro slider, but this year, it has slightly less drop and a bit less horizontal break. We’re talking a half inch difference in both directions, but that could be enough to throw off Gilbert’s location with the pitch. Here’s a heat map of his slider locations this year:

Right down the heart of the plate isn’t the ideal location for a slider. If he’s throwing his breaking ball expecting it to drop an extra half inch, those locations could make a little more sense. He just hasn’t made the adjustment to his target yet and continues to leave those breaking balls in a very dangerous part of the zone.

As for Castillo, the issue is pretty easy to spot:

Castillo’s fastball velocity was right around 95 mph for most of the season, not too dramatically different from where it was last year and in 2023. But in August, his fastball was suddenly averaging 94 mph, and his ERA ballooned to 7.31 with the diminished velocity. Castillo’s heater has been his primary weapon since joining the Mariners, a pretty significant change from his time with the Reds, when his changeup was his best pitch. With Seattle, he has emphasized the hard stuff at the expense of the offspeed pitch, but that’s become a liability in these last seven starts with the lost velocity:

Batters were already hitting Castillo’s fastball pretty well earlier in the season, but he was mostly mitigating the damage. Since his July 28 start, however, his fastball has been getting crushed. He’s responded by throwing his sinker and slider a bit more often, but his sinker gets hit almost as hard as his four-seamer without the potential for swings and misses.

Castillo has been a durable and very effective starter for most of his career, but he’s suddenly facing a future with a diminished version of one of his best weapons. I’m not sure simply changing up his pitch mix to feature more sinkers is the answer either. I think he’s going to need to lean on his secondary pitches a lot more heavily to succeed; his slider is an excellent breaking ball and his changeup is largely unchanged from its peak with Cincinnati. I’m not sure if Castillo can make a switch to his approach in time to salvage the rest of this season, but I’m sure it will be one of the top priorities for the Mariners’ pitching lab this offseason.

For all their recent issues, the Mariners rotation still possesses a tremendous amount of talent. Both Kirby and Gilbert seem like they’ve been victims of some bad luck even as they try to navigate new pitching mechanics. Woo has continued to look fantastic despite running up against some workload concerns. Castillo and Miller have some big question marks going forward, and you’d think that one or both of them would be relegated to the bullpen in a potential playoff series. And for what it’s worth, our Depth Charts projections think the Mariners will have the third-best rotation in baseball for the remainder of the regular season. They’ll need all that talent to show up over these next few weeks as they fight for their spot in a tight AL playoff race.

If you’re looking for a team to make a surprise run to the playoffs, the final month of the season likely won’t be that exciting; there are just three teams on the fringe of the postseason picture, and none of them have playoff odds higher than 20%. But with 12 teams jockeying for their playoff position and a handful of division races left to be decided, there’s still potential for a good bit of intrigue between now and October.

Last year, we revamped our power rankings 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 coin flip 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%). The weighted Elo ranks are then displayed as “Power Score” in the tables below. 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 — there are times where I take 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. Read the rest of this entry »

After a week hiatus, these power rankings are back… and nothing much has changed in the playoff picture. The National League is particularly stratified, even if the NL West is a bit closer than it was two weeks ago, and although there are a few more longshots in the American League, the 12-team field looks pretty settled right now.

Last year, we revamped our power rankings 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 coin flip 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%). The weighted Elo ranks are then displayed as “Power Score” in the tables below. 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 — there are times where I take 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.

…

Well, the Brewers finally lost a game in the month of August. Their 14-game winning streak propelled their lead in the NL Central from one game ahead of the Cubs on July 31 to an eight-game gap, and they have the best record in the majors by six games. They’ve barely felt the impact of Jackson Chourio’s hamstring injury, which he suffered a few weeks ago, because nearly everyone else in their lineup is on fire. Seven of the eight Milwaukee players who have collected at least 50 plate appearances in August are running a 125 wRC+ or higher for the month. The Brew Crew will have an opportunity to truly bury the Cubs in the standings, as those two rivals have a five-game series on the schedule this week, beginning with a doubleheader on Monday at Wrigley Field.

The Blue Jays extended their lead in the AL East to five games by going 4-2 last week against the Cubs and Rangers. They might not be the most complete team in the AL, but as long as their superstars are producing, they look very hard to beat. To wit: Vladimir Guerrero Jr. blasted his sixth home run of the month on Sunday, Bo Bichette has returned to form after his terrible 2024 season, and George Springer was just activated off the IL on Saturday.

It took him a few weeks to acclimate to the big leagues, but beginning with a 3-for-6 showing on June 28, Roman Anthony has slashed .322/.433/.409 (a 158 wRC+) in 40 games. And he’ll be anchoring this lineup for a long time to come, as Boston signed him to a huge extension a few weeks ago. After treading water in the Wild Card race with a 3-3 record last week, the Red Sox have a huge four-game series against the Yankees looming this weekend in the Bronx.

The Dodgers and Padres entered last weekend’s series in Los Angeles on very different trajectories. After suffering a sweep at the hands of the Angels, the Dodgers dropped from first place in the NL West for the first time since late April. Meanwhile, San Diego had been surging, winners of five straight series with a 14-3 record over its previous 17 games. Then, naturally, Los Angeles won all three games to flip the momentum of both teams. The Dodgers once again lead the division, by two games entering this week, but this race is far from over, despite our playoff odds giving the Padres just a 16.1% shot at winning the West. We’ll see how those odds move after the two teams match up for three games in San Diego this weekend in their final meeting of the regular season.

The Phillies extended their lead in the NL East from half a game on August 4 to five games entering Monday, but they are now facing the prolonged absence of Zack Wheeler, who was placed on the IL on Sunday with a blood clot in his shoulder. The returns of both Aaron Nola and Alec Bohm from their respective injuries should soften the blow a bit, and Philadelphia should have the rotation depth to get by without Wheeler in the regular season. However, it’s quite possible the Phillies won’t have their best pitcher back for October. That’s a major concern in what should be a very competitive NL postseason field.

Even if the Cubs do well in their huge five-game set against the Brewers this week, it probably won’t be enough to disturb Milwaukee’s chances of winning the division. Instead, a good performance should allow Chicago to regain some of the momentum it has lost. When the Cubs took two out of three games from the Pirates over the weekend, it marked just the third time the North Siders have won a series in the four weeks since July 21, a span of eight series.

It looks like the Tigers have put their July swoon behind them. They couldn’t complete the four-game sweep of the Twins on Sunday, but they’ve now won three straight series and have gone 13-7 over their last 20 games. The Astros will visit Detroit this week in a showdown between two of the best teams in the AL.

The Mariners had an eight-game winning streak snapped on Wednesday, but their surge earned them a share of the AL West lead for a very brief moment. From there, though, Seattle faltered again, losing both of its series last week, against the Orioles and the Mets, and slipping to 1 1/2 games behind the Astros in the West. Even so, things are looking up for the Mariners: With Bryce Miller set to be activated off the IL on Tuesday, the M’s will have all five of their top starters active and healthy for the first time this season. Meanwhile, after a frigid three weeks coming out of the All-Star break, Cal Raleigh is on fire once again. Over his last nine games, Big Dumper is slashing .303/.395/.818 with five home runs and a 231 wRC+.

As for the Astros, you can chalk up another injury on their long ledger this season. This time it’s a shoulder injury to Josh Hader, which is expected to sideline him for the rest of the regular season, though the door is still slightly open for an October return if everything heals well. In better news, Yordan Alvarez is set to begin a minor league rehab assignment this week.

Since being activated from the IL on August 5, Aaron Judge has posted a very-mortal-though-still-solid .229/.426/.429 slash line (140 wRC+). No matter, the Yankees have gone 7-4 with Judge back in the lineup and have crawled back within a half game of the Red Sox and Mariners for the top Wild Card spot in the AL.

Things got pretty dicy for New York’s National League team, as the Mets slogged through a brutal 2-14 stretch and let the Reds close the gap considerably in the Wild Card standings. New York never let go of that final spot, and its back-to-back wins against the Mariners over the weekend provided a little bit of breathing room, but this is still a much tighter race than anyone in Queens would like. The good news for the Mets is that their two Franciscos in are heating up; Lindor tallied 14 hits and three home runs last week, and Alvarez has posted a .323/.408/.645 slash line (193 wRC+) since being recalled from Triple-A on July 21.

With the Mets stumbling, the Reds looked like they were poised to pull into a playoff position, especially after they won their series against the Phillies heading into last weekend. But Cincinnati ran into the Brewers at exactly the wrong time, losing the first two games before snapping Milwaukee’s 14-game winning streak in extra innings on Sunday. Unfortunately, as soon as the Reds activated Hunter Greene off the IL, Chase Burns switched places with him after suffering a flexor strain in his throwing elbow. For now, manager Terry Francona is hoping for the best-case scenario, that Burns can resume throwing soon and return before the end of August. However, Reds fans shouldn’t get too excited just yet, as the organization will surely be cautious with the 22-year-old’s rehab and almost certainly limit his workload the rest of the way.

The three teams in this tier are desperately trying to hang on in the AL Wild Card race. The Guardians fell to 3 1/2 games behind the Yankees for the final playoff spot after getting swept by the Braves at home over the weekend. It was Cleveland’s first series loss since late July. Even with those three losses, the Guards still have the AL’s best record since July 7 (23-12). Meanwhile, the Royals have been nearly as good over that same span (20-13). Following a three-game sweep of White Sox, Kansas City enters this week just a half-game behind Cleveland in the standings.

On the other side of the coin, the Rangers are in the middle of what could be season-crushing skid. On July 27, Texas reached a season-best six games over .500; since then, the team has gone 6-13 and slipped below .500 again. This week probably represents the last gasp of hope for the Rangers to return to the Wild Card race. They travel to Kansas City for four games before hosting the Guardians for a three-game set this weekend.

It was fun while it lasted, but you can probably stick a fork in any hope of a surprise Wild Card run from the Marlins. After sweeping the Yankees three weekends ago to reach .500, they’ve won just four of their last 14 and are now seven games behind the Mets for the final playoff spot. To make matters worse, Kyle Stowers, Miami’s best hitter this season, was just placed on the IL with an oblique strain. At least the Marlins can point to their competitive stretch in July and dream about returning to contention sooner rather than later.

It’s far too little, too late, but the Braves are finally on a roll. They swept the Guardians last weekend and are now 9-2 over their last 11 games. The key to this late-season surge has been the resurgence of Michael Harris II. After making some swing adjustments in early July, he’s slashing .386/.402/.719 (210 wRC+) since the All-Star break. If Atlanta doesn’t have to worry about Harris’ bat moving forward, it gives the organization one less thing to address in what has suddenly become a hugely important offseason.

Not to discount what Harris has done lately, but the two best hitters in baseball during the second half of the season both play for the Athletics. You probably know about the heater that Nick Kurtz is on, but Shea Langeliers has been almost as good over the last month. Both of those guys blasted home runs on Sunday — for Langeliers, it was his major league-leading 14th since the All-Star break. The A’s will need to figure out how to pitch in their temporary home in Sacramento, but their offense certainly looks like it’s for real.

The Twins’ expected post-deadline crash hasn’t exactly arrived. Sure, they went 2-5 against the Yankees and Tigers last week, but they are only a game below .500 since they sold nearly every spare part off their roster. The fantastic play of Luke Keaschall is a big reason why they’re still playing like a competitive team; he’s posted a 149 wRC+ since being activated off the IL on August 5. The biggest baseball news in Minnesota last week was the announcement that the Pohlad family will remain principal owners of the team after exploring a sale. The optics of this announcement stink. The Twins just traded away a huge chunk of the roster and dumped Carlos Correa off the payroll. To turn around and say this teardown was “part of the process” looks like an extension of the same penny pinching that led to these past two disappointing seasons. The hope established in 2023, when they won their first playoff series in two decades, feels like a long, long time ago.

With a pair of series wins over the Cardinals and Diamondbacks last week, the Rockies are now playing ahead of the historically bad pace of the 2024 White Sox. Colorado has to win just seven games before the end of the season to avoid tying Chicago’s record of futility. That certainly feels doable, even if the Rockies have one of the most difficult remaining schedules in baseball.

Have you caught your breath yet from that wild and busy trade deadline? Me neither, but it sure was a blast. And we also now have a better sense of where teams stand heading into the stretch run of the season.

Last year, we revamped our power rankings 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 coin flip 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%). The weighted Elo ranks are then displayed as “Power Score” in the tables below. 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 — there are times where I take 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.

All power rankings stats, including team records, are updated through Sunday’s games. The rest of the information below is current as of Tuesday morning.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Cubs approached the trade deadline with pitching as their top priority. They traded for Michael Soroka on Wednesday to shore up the starting rotation and added Andrew Kittredge to the bullpen later that night. That didn’t stop them from making a trade to improve their hitters: Getting in on the Twins’ Thursday fire sale, Chicago acquired utilityman Willi Castro for two pitching prospects, Ryan Gallagher and Sam Armstrong. And right before the buzzer, the Cubs also acquired left-handed reliever Taylor Rogers from the Pirates for outfield prospect Ivan Brethowr. This was the second swap Rogers was part of within a roughly 27-hour span, after he went from the Reds to the Pirates in Wednesday afternoon’s Ke’Bryan Hayes deal.

The Cubs have one of the best lineups in baseball. They lead the majors in runs scored and the National League in wRC+. So they didn’t necessarily need to upgrade their offense before the deadline. Castro’s calling card is his versatility, and that’s the primary reason they acquired him. Just this year, he’s played every position but catcher and first base. Defensively, he’s probably a little in over his head at either of the premium up-the-middle positions — his career FRV at shortstop is -3 and -2 in center field — but he’s perfectly acceptable as a second baseman (2 FRV) or in either outfield corner (5 in left, -2 in right). In previous years, he was also slightly above average at third (2 FRV) before taking a step back this season (-3), though small-sample caveats certainly apply for his defensive metrics at any specific position because of how much he’s moved around. Only once has he logged more than 500 innings at an individual position in a season, and that was back in 2021 when he played 713 2/3 innings at second base with the Tigers.

That said, he is way more than just a multi-positional backup. At the plate, Castro has been solidly above average since joining the Twins in 2023; during those first seasons in Minnesota, he posted a combined 107 wRC+ and accumulated 5.4 WAR. This season, his offensive production has been slightly better — .245/.335/.407, 109 wRC+ — than in recent years because he’s tapping into his power more. He’s already smacked 10 home runs in 344 plate appearances after hitting a career-high 12 last year across nearly 300 more trips to the plate. That he is a switch-hitter only adds to his flexibility. He has been platoon neutral for his career, but he’s hitting left-handed hurlers much better this year (131 wRC+) than he has righties (100). Castro has been worth 1.1 WAR this season, a step back from his last two years despite his offensive improvements because his defensive value has declined. Some of this is due to a dip in his defensive metrics — his only plus position this season by FRV is left field — but it also has to do with the positional adjustment, as he’s spent more innings this season at positions further down the defensive spectrum; after playing 465 2/3 innings at shortstop in 2024 and another 211 1/3 in center field, he’s logged just 26 at shortstop this year to go along with a one-inning cameo in center. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a few weeks since our last run of the power rankings, and a lot has happened since then. Teams we thought of as contenders are suddenly out of the playoff picture, and the buyers and sellers ahead of this week’s trade deadline are quickly sorting themselves out.

Last year, we revamped our power rankings 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 coin flip 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%). The weighted Elo ranks are then displayed as “Power Score” in the tables below. 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 — there are times where I take 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. Read the rest of this entry »

On any given pitch, a swing-and-miss is the best possible outcome for the pitcher. The ball isn’t put in play, the count advances in favor of the pitcher, and the batter may look a little foolish in the process. It stands to reason that pitchers who possess multiple pitches that run above-average whiff rates will likely have strong strikeout rates, too. Then there’s another, much smaller group of pitchers who have multiple pitches with elite whiff rates. Those rare hurlers will surely have the best strikeout rates in baseball, right? Among all starting pitchers this season, there are just eight who possess multiple pitches that generate a whiff more than 40% of the time.

MacKenzie Gore leads the way with three of these elite bat-missing weapons, followed by a few of the game’s best strikeout artists. At the bottom, though, are two pitchers whose strikeout rates are much lower than you’d expect given their ability to generate whiffs: groundball specialist José Soriano and rookie Cade Horton. (As an aside, Horton’s changeup has the third-highest whiff rate of any pitch thrown at least 100 times this year, yet his strikeout rate is an unimpressive 17.6%.)

What happens if you lower the threshold to pitches with whiff rates north of 30%? There are 18 starters with three or more of these less-effective-but-still-impressive pitches. Spoiler: Soriano shows up again. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the last three weeks, we’ve had three different leaders atop these power rankings. The top of the standings have been volatile, as no one really has pulled away from the pack. On the other hand, the bottom half of the rankings have been stable, with a large group of mediocre teams stuck in the awkward zone between competing and retooling.

Last year, we revamped our power rankings 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 coin flip 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%). The weighted Elo ranks are then displayed as “Power Score” in the tables below. 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 — there are times where I take 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. Read the rest of this entry »