After three weeks of these rankings and plenty of feedback — both positive and constructive — I’ve decided to change the way pitching factors into overall team quality. I had been using FIP to assess pitching performance, but using only peripherals undervalued some teams who were actually quite good at preventing runs and overvalued other teams who couldn’t keep runs off the board despite good pitching fundamentals. So instead of using straight park- and league-adjusted FIP as the pitching metric, I’ll be using a straight 50/50 split of FIP and RA9- beginning this week. This gives us a way to evaluate a team’s pitching staff with a blend of actual run prevention (including teams who may or may not benefit from good defense) and pitching talent. This 50/50 composite is shown below as SP- and RP-. The rest of the factors remain the same — offense is represented by wRC+ and combined with the two pitching factors to create an overall team quality metric. Then a team’s expected win-loss record (“luck”) is factored in to produce a power ranking.

There’s a new team on top of the rankings this week. Despite losing Luis Robert for months on Sunday, the White Sox rose to the highest spot in the rankings after allowing just five total runs to score last week. Their starting rotation has been the best in baseball by a wide margin — the runs allowed by Lucas Giolito on Sunday were the first a White Sox starter had allowed in a week. There are certainly some concerns about their outfield, with two of their young stars now out for extended periods of time. Read the rest of this entry »

One month down, five more to go! The final week in April saw the top teams in the American League and National League fall back towards the pack. The standings are pretty compact around the middle, which is as much an indicator of parity as it is a reflection of a wild month of baseball. Scoring is down. Pitching is dominant. Here’s the third week of the FanGraphs Power Rankings.

A quick refresher: my approach takes the three most important components of a team — their offense (wRC+), their starting rotation (SP FIP-), and their bullpen (RP FIP-) — and combines them to create an overall team quality metric. I add in a factor for “luck” — adjusting based on a team’s expected win-loss record — to produce a power ranking. Since we’re so early in the season, teams can move up and down the rankings pretty dramatically if they have a particularly good or bad week. Read the rest of this entry »

Another week of the 2021 season is in the books and it was a wild one. The A’s finally lost a game, the Reds couldn’t win one, and the Dodgers and Padres played playoff-esque baseball in a drama-filled four-game series over the weekend. Here’s the second week of the FanGraphs Power Rankings.

A quick refresher: my approach takes the three most important components of a team — their offense (wRC+), their starting rotation (SP FIP-), and their bullpen (RP FIP-) — and combines them to create an overall team quality metric. I add in a factor for “luck” — adjusting based on a team’s expected win-loss record — to produce a power ranking. Since we’re so early in the season, teams will move up and down the rankings pretty dramatically if they have a particularly good or bad week.

The same two teams sit atop the rankings but they’ve switched positions. Neither team had an outstanding week — both teams split a series against the Mariners but the Dodgers lost their four-game set against the Padres after a wild Sunday night game that went to 11 innings.

The Red Sox now have the best offense in baseball and Eduardo Rodriguez has turned in two fantastic starts to help their rotation gain ground in the rankings. After developing a case of myocarditis — an inflammation of the heart muscle — brought on by contracting COVID-19, there was no way to know what to expect from Rodriguez this season but he’s picked up right where he left off after his breakout season in 2019. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to the first week of the FanGraphs Power Rankings. Nearly every major sports site has some form of power rankings; It’s a fun way to think about all 30 teams in baseball and stack them up against each other outside of the rigid structures of leagues and divisions. But where most sites use a panel of experts to build their power rankings — experts who may or may not be simply using their gut feeling to rank teams — I wanted to build an approach to power rankings that was a little more data driven.

My approach basically boils down to taking the three most important components of a team — their offense (wRC+), their starting rotation (SP FIP-), and their bullpen (RP FIP-) — and weighting and adjusting to create an overall team quality metric. I played around with trying to include defense in some form, but adding UZR or DRS or defensive efficiency never really made the team quality metric any more accurate. To test my comprehensive team metric, I used 2020 data to see how it correlated with each team’s win percentage at the halfway mark and their final record. The correlation coefficient at the middle of the season was .68 with an r-squared of .47, and at the end of the season, those marks improved to .80 and .63, respectively.

The final piece of the puzzle was to add in a factor for recent performance while also adjusting for “luck.” Teams with good records should be rewarded, but if they came by those wins in an unsustainable fashion, they shouldn’t receive the full weight of them. Likewise for teams who lost games they might have been expected to win. Put this overall team quality metric together with a team’s adjusted win percentage and you get a solid power ranking formula. And unlike most other sites, I’ll present these power rankings in tiers because the differences between many of these teams, particularly in the middle, isn’t that big. Read the rest of this entry »

On a recent podcast episode, Eric Longenhangen and I discussed the premise for this article, which is another way of asking which organizations are healthiest in the short-to-medium term. The factor that goes furthest towards answering that question is present on-field talent, although salary, controlled years, the presence of impact minor leaguers on the horizon, and front-office quality are all relevant — as is payroll ceiling, which serves as a proxy for margin for error. With the World Series starting tonight, it seemed like the right time to look ahead at the favorites for the five World Series beyond this one.

I’ve experimented with some objective ways of measuring organizational health. I think it’s ultimately possible to produce an algorithm that would do a solid job, ranking teams objectively in a number of key categories. It would also require considerable time. Eager to arrive at some kind of answer, I’ve settled for subjective assessment for this version of the post, but I intend to work on something more systematic in the winter.

Here are the criteria I’ve considered to produce these rankings: short-term MLB talent, long-term MLB talent/upper-minors prospects, lower-minors prospects/trade capital, payroll ceiling, MLB coaching/front office, and amateur signings (draft and international). You could quibble and combine or separate a few of those groupings, or argue some of these can’t be quantified properly. You may be right, but we’ll keep tweaking things until they are.

I had originally intended to limit this list to five teams for purposes of symmetry, but the top tier looked like seven teams to me, and the sources by whom I ran this list agreed. In the same way that the I approached the Trade Value Rankings from the point of view of a medium-payroll, medium-term-focused team, I’ve undertook this exercise by asking which team would be most attractive to a prospect GM if his or her only interest is to win the most World Series possible (and not have low state income tax, run a childhood team, or live in a cool city) over the next five seasons.

Without further explanation, here are the organizations most likely to win the 2019-23 World Series.

1. Los Angeles Dodgers

The top-three teams on this list all have some reasonable claim to the top spot, but I ultimately went with the Dodgers, as they have a little more certainty in terms of on-field personnel than the Yankees possess, while both clubs feature similar built-in financial advantages. (Houston lags behind on the second count.)

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When we created the FanGraphs Power Rankings this year, we didn’t know how they would play out. At the outset, there was scorn over the Indians’ ranking. As the season wore on, that changed to scorn about the Rockies’ ranking. By the end of the season though, things seemed to work out pretty well. Eight of the top nine teams — with the Red Sox being the one exception — reached the postseason. That in and of itself is not a justification for the Rankings mind you, but it seemed to show that we were on the right track.

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The inaugural edition of the FanGraphs Power Rankings was a bit of a labor of love for me. So, I thought it fitting that we take a look back at how they all played out in graphical view to put the finishing touches on the season.

Let’s start with the timeline of the Rankings for all 30 teams:

Click to embiggen.

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Welcome to the 23rd and final edition of the 2011 FanGraphs Power Rankings! As Dean Pritchard would say, it’s been quite a journey. We’re going to close out the season in three parts — one today, two after the postseason. First, your final end of the regular season Power Rankings, with some end of season awards sprinkled in (note — awards are totally made up by me and may or may not be prestigious (read — are not at all prestigious)). One quick note on the Rankings this week — in the final three games of the season, 20 teams moved up or down, including the Rangers, who vaulted over the Yankees and Red Sox with an incredible finishing kick.

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Over the past two weeks, baseball fans have really pricked their ears up, as Wild Card battles that were seemingly in the bag suddenly became heated battles. As we enter the season’s final three days, both Wild Card leaders maintain slim one-game leads. What’s most interesting from a Power Rankings perspective is that if the Rankings hold as they are today, and the Red Sox and Cardinals come away with the two playoff berths, the eight teams in the playoffs will be the teams that rank one through eight in the Rankings. It’s not completely out of the question. While the Orioles have played hard down the stretch, they are still the Orioles, and anyone would rather play them than half of the Yankees’ lineup. In the National League, the Cards get to play the Astros, who suffered one of the worst defeats in their team’s history yesterday, while the Braves have to deal with the Phillies. The Phillies will throw a bullpen game on Wednesday, but before that, Atlanta has to deal with Cliff Lee and Roy Oswalt. That would be a tough test at any time, but could be especially so at the moment, as Atlanta’s .296 wOBA ranks 26th in the game this month.

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The end of the season has been exciting times here in Power Rankings-land. This past week, five teams jumped two or more spots in the standings, with San Francisco’s jump from 17th to 13th the biggest. As a result, 14 teams slid backwards, the most of any week all season. Heading into the final two weeks of the season, the real pennant races may lack drama — outside of the Red Sox potential collapse that is — but there is some real juice in the Rankings’ races. Six sets of teams are separated by .002 or less — Tigers and Cardinals, Angels and Rays, Braves and White Sox, Rockies and Marlins, Indians and Padres and Pirates and Astros. We often hear that baseball is a game of inches, and the fact that these teams are grouped so closely both up and down the rankings really illustrates that point.

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