For the second time in three weeks, the Brewers sport a higher WAR% than do the Phillies. At this point, the difference between the Phillies and the Brewers amounts to the weight of preseason expectations, which were somewhat muted for the Bierbrauers. They have few glaring weaknesses — a reliever or two would be nice, and they could stand to get better performance from their third baseman and shortstop, not they are alone in that respect. They even match up well with the Phillies, as while the Halladay-Hamels-Lee trifecta is still better on paper, the Greinke-Marcum-Gallardo trio is more than capable of besting them on any given day. And the righty-heavy Brewers also don’t lose any performance against lefties (105 wRC+ vs. RHP, 104 vs. LHP). Now at fourth place overall in the rankings, the Brewers are threatening to put some distance between them and the 26 teams below them, and if they can, the conversation moving into September may not be “can the Brewers win the National League Central,” but “can the Brewers beat the Phillies.” The answer to both questions very well could be “yes.”

1. Boston: Last week – 1, WAR% – .653 (2), FAN% – .605 (1), TOTAL% – .628
With 20 walks against just 7 strike outs, Dustin Pedroia has had a June to remember — just like last year. His wOBA of .471 last June and .463 this June (assuming it holds up in this last week) are two of his three best monthly marks.
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This past week was all about positivity, as more teams than ever — 13 — moved up in the rankings. The most notable of those teams was the Detroit Tigers, who cracked the top ten for the first time. This is a bigger deal than it would seem to be on its face. Before this week, the eighth, ninth and tenth spots in the rankings have been occupied by eight different teams, but they have more or less been the same eight teams each week. The Tigers are the first new team to crack the top 10 since Cincinnati did so back in the fourth week. Alex Avila and Jhonny Peralta are among the top players at their respective positions, Brennan Boesch has played well, and Al Alburquerque and his 1.74 FIP has been a big surprise, making the Tigers more than just a three-man show. And that’s to say nothing of the below-expectations-but-still-positive contribution from Max Scherzer. In other words, it took Detroit eight weeks to crack the top ten, but they may make themselves comfortable.

1. Boston: Last week – 1, WAR% – .656 (2), FAN% – .605 (1), TOTAL% – .627
Josh Beckett may not be better than he was last season, but Jacoby Ellsbury and David Ortiz certainly are, and that’s just fine with the Nation.
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This week saw the most movement to date, as all but eight teams slid up or down the rankings. There was still no movement at the top or the bottom, but while teams on the bottom are threatening to uncongeal, the Red Sox and Yankees are moving further and further from the pack. The two have been first or second in each iteration of the Power Rankings (you can see the first week, and methodology here), but where in previous versions the margins were narrow due to each team’s slow start, they have widened considerably as they have picked up the pace. Last week, Boston’s position players were more valuable as a unit than anyone else’s entire team. These differences are showing up in the rankings. The difference between second and third has expanded from 17-18 percentage points, to the 30-point range, to 40 points last week and 51 points this week. In third once again, the Phillies are sort of floating by themselves in what we’ll call tier 1A. Below Philly, we have roughly four more tiers of teams, with lines drawn in faint pencil after the Rays, White Sox and Padres. But just as in the past few weeks, teams are jumping a lot from week to week in both WAR% and rank, be it positively (Atlanta, Baltimore) or negatively (Toronto, Chicago Cubs), and we will likely see those lines redrawn each week for the forseeable future.

1. Boston: Last week – 1, WAR% – .639 (2), FAN% – .605 (1), TOTAL% – .619
Last week, I noted that the Red Sox were pretty much running on all cylinders. They haven’t lost since, putting together a perfect week that included their second sweep in the Bronx, and are now most definitely running on all cylinders.

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The Indians started the season on fire, winning 20 of their first 28 ballgames. Right at that time, we debuted the FanGraphs Power Rankings, and the first edition had the Indians listed at 20th. People — mainly Indians fans — were outraged. Since that 20-8 start however, the Indians have gone just 13-16, and have been outscored by 26 runs in the process. They are still nine games above .500, but whereas in May it looked like they would run away with a mediocre AL Central, it now appears that they will have to fight for it. The seven-game lead that they had as late as May 23rd is now just 2 ½ games. Throughout this process, the Power Rankings have preached patience when it comes to the Indians. The team has not yet ranked higher than 18th, and this week drops back to 22nd. This is caused by the fact that their WAR% has dropped from 3rd to 15th in the past two weeks.

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The American flag still may not contain the word “Jordache,” but we are still proud of those who have served our country in the armed forces. Thank you to those who serve, who have served and especially to those who have died in service to our country.

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Note: This was all but finished yesterday, but due to a personal matter I was unable to put the finishing touches on it and post live. Please treat all stats and observations to be as of Monday morning.

We’re doing it like EPMD this week, strictly business.

1. New York Yankees: Last week – 2, WAR% – .640 (2), FAN% – .580 (2), TOTAL% – .5967
If you had to pick one Yankee to be atop the ISO leaderboards, you might pick Mark Teixeira (7th) or Alex Rodriguez (22nd), but you probably wouldn’t pick Russell Martin (21st) or Curtis Granderson (2nd), whose tear has his star rising almost as fast as Rosie Huntington-Whiteley’s

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This past week, we saw some great research introduced on when the standings actually start to matter. It showed that the really great and really bad teams don’t really shake out until June, so despite the fact that the bottom five teams have been identical in each of the power rankings’ first three weeks, there is still time for one of those teams to escape the bottom of the pack. In our third week, teams are starting to make bigger jumps in the standings. In week two, only two teams moved three or more places from week one. This week that number was seven, with three teams (the Angels, Rangers and Twins) dropping at least five spots.

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Before we begin, all Indians fans reading this need to watch this clip. Go ahead, I’ll wait. Thank you. The major critics of our newly unveiled, and generally well received Power Rankings last week were Indians fans, who were up in arms about them being ranked so low, and specifically wanted the Fan Standings replaced with a different system. Unfortunately, the Indians actually fare better in the Fan Standings, which had the Tribe at 73 wins, than if we used ZiPS forecasted standings, which had them at 71. In general, I do understand the criticism of a subjective measure like the Fan Standings, but as Dave Cameron noted in last week’s comments, the Fan Standings actually have held up just as well as any other projection system. So while Indians fans aren’t going to be any happier this week, I think you all should all give yourselves some credit — the fans that have voted for our Fan Standings, i.e. you, are smarter than the average bear.

1. New York Yankees: Last week – 1, WAR% – .675 (1), FAN% – .580 (2), TOTAL% – .599
Did you hear that Derek Jeter homered? He was never likely to finish the year as bad as he started it, and he also comes home to this. In other words, you can stop pitying Jeter.

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Welcome to the latest feature here at FanGraphs – our take on the Power Rankings that nearly every website in existence publishes, only with our own little twist.

In an effort to make this quantitative (that’s what we do around here, after all), we’re combining objective measures of 2011 performance with some subjective wisdom from our FanGraphs crowd. To this end, we’ve created a weighted system based on three factors — a WAR-based 2011 winning percentage (essentially, WAR/G shown as a winning percentage, or WAR% for short); the preseason Fan’s Standings determined from readership input ( which we’ll call FAN% for short); and the number of games each team has played. The two winning percentages are combined to create TOTAL%, on which the Power Rankings are based.

A team’s WAR% is given weighting equal to the percentage of 2011 season that the team has played. Right now, teams fall in the 15-18% range, as they have played between 26 and 29 games. As the season progresses — and we learn more about each team’s true level of talent — the WAR% will receive a greater weight with the FAN% receiving less weight. This system essentially acts as a built-in regression for current performance so that we don’t overreact to small samples of data, but it also allows for how teams have done to influence our evaluations of their abilities.

We think that our system can avoid doing crazy things like anointing the Indians the third-best team in baseball (where they score this week in WAR%), when the crowd initially thought Cleveland would be the 27th best team in the game. We’ll still acknowledge that the Indians’ performance has improved over the team’s expected performance going forward.

Our week will be Monday through Sunday, so expect each new installment on Monday afternoon. As always, we want to know what you think, so be sure to let us know in the comments.

1. New York Yankees: WAR% – .682 (2), FAN% – .580 (2), TOTAL% – .596
Despite quietly getting off to a great start — thanks to some unlikely contributions — those covering the Yankees still want you to think that the sky is falling.

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