FanGraphs Power Rankings: 2026 Postseason Edition
Two playoff races came down to the final day of the season, but with the 12-team playoff field now settled, the postseason can begin. The American League side of the bracket looks particularly weak, while the National League side features a handful of the best and hottest teams in baseball. Remember, September success (or failure) doesn’t necessarily predict how things will go in October. Here’s a look at the 12 playoff teams and how they stack up against each other.
Our power rankings use a modified Elo rating system. If you’re familiar with chess rankings, you’ll know that Elo is an elegant ranking format that measures teams’ relative strength and is very reactive to recent performance. Since we’ve reached the postseason, I’ve removed the playoff odds weighting to our raw Elo calculations and presented the teams in the tiers below based on their odds of winning the World Series. If you’re curious about how your team finished in the standard regular season power rankings, the full table can be found at the bottom of this article. If you’re looking for a visual representation of the ups and downs of your team throughout the season, look no further than the brand new Power Rankings Board in the FanGraphs Lab.
Jake Mailhot is a contributor to FanGraphs. A long-suffering Mariners fan, he also writes about them for Lookout Landing. Follow him on BlueSky @jakemailhot.
Burn the ships theory says Padres v Guardians WS I guess.
The Guardians have had absurd World Series odds this entire year, seemingly because they have starting pitching and that’s… all that matters in the Postseason? And José Ramírez is on the field, sure, but it’s been a lost season for him.
The #2 seed is obviously a huge advantage, but it will be interesting to see how these numbers look after the Wild Card round, when everyone left is 11 wins from a championship.
27th in HR, 27th in Hard%, 28th in barrel%. You can get by with that in the regular season when you get to play a lot of bad teams that will put you on base and kick the ball around. In the post season, you better be able to hit the ball over the fence because you are going to get fewer baserunners and the other team is going to make fewer mistakes.
Their World Series odds have seemed undeservedly high all season long, so it makes sense that this is no exception.
They’re +11 in RD with a Pythagorean record of 82-80; their vaunted pitching staff is only 5th in the AL and only 8th in MLB in runs allowed (including 9th/17th in the 2nd half and 8th/14th in Sept, so it’s not like they got hot late); their offense is 11th and 24th in runs scored; and their defense is above-average-ish (17th DRS, 13th OAA, 8th FRV, 9th Def) but nothing special. Even their SP haven’t been particularly good by their standards (3.93 season ERA, 4.32 2nd half, 5.48(!) in Sept – which are 9th, 21st, and 27th in MLB, respectively).
However, they get a massive boost from fWAR using FIP (3.89, 3.65, 3.41) – which, at a glance, seems to be primarily due to their high K%, as they’ve actually had pretty good HR luck and everything else about their staff (BB%, LOB%, Hard Contact%) is fairly middling. Their bullpen is very good, though ironically, that’s where FIP thinks they’ve overperformed.
All of this is to say that I’m not particularly impressed with Cleveland, and the idea that they have the third-best World Series odds in the postseason field borders on ridiculous, especially when they’re facing better offenses and big boy, swinging dick franchises who aren’t intimidated by their black magic shit.
With that said, maybe I’m totally wrong and FanGraphs is right, and I’ll feel like a goddamn idiot when Manfred hands them that hunk of metal on Halloween night. That’s why we play the games.
The odds are all about stacked probabilities based on their byes and their potential matchups. For example, the Red Sox first have to get past the Yankees on the road, then have to get past Tampa. Let’s say they have a 40% chance of beating the Yanks, and then another 40% chance of beating Tampa, that puts them at only 16% odds or even reaching the ALCS.
It doesn’t matter if they are a better team than Cleveland, their odds of even reaching the ALCS will be lower than Cleveland’s, who get a bye, then play the winner of Hou/Chi, which is absurd that all the weak teams are on the same side of the bracket, so they probably have a 60% chance of reaching the ALCS just because of that.. They need to re-seed. Anyway, so even if the Red Sox would have the probability edge in a potential matchup with CLE, their stacked probabilities vs NYY and TAM are so much against them, that they essentially can’t “catch up”.
I mean, I agree that the Guardians aren’t that good of a team. But they’re 4th in wRC+ since August 1st, behind only the Cubs, Padres, and Brewers. And 3rd in position player WAR.
Don’t undersell the starting pitching though.
Among AL starters still in the playoffs, Messick and Williams are 3rd and 4th on the WAR leaderboard. That’s a formidable one two punch in a shortened rotation dynamic.
The won-loss records are almost all wrong — 28 of the 30 teams played 162 games.
Whoops, these are all fixed. Thanks.
Perhaps I’m not understanding ELO. The Brewers have a higher ELO ranking, but the Dodgers have three times better odds and are the overwhelming favorite? I’m guessing ELO doesn’t take into consideration potential opponent strength/playoff path, but the Dodgers and Brewers have basically the same path – through each other and a bunch of similar teams.
To be clear, these power rankings are based on Elo, but the World Series odds are taken directly from the FanGraphs playoff odds. The odds aren’t derived from Elo.
Elo is backward looking and bumps up recent games (to make power rankings more dynamic and exciting, basically). Every team stats with the same Elo ranking (I presume), then with each game the winning team’s ranking goes up and the losing team’s ranking goes down–how much depends on the difference between rankings. This comes from chess where a player with a 2200 ranking wouldn’t get much of a boost from beating a player with a 1400 ranking, but the 1400 player would get a huge boost from upsetting the 2200 player.
Anyway, the playoff odds can come apart from the Elos because the Elo is looking at the results of the games that happened, and the odds are based on the projections. Elo doesn’t “know” that the Dodgers just got all their pitchers back.
Also it isn’t technically all capitals–it was invented by Arpad Elo, not an acronym! The ELO rankings are 1. Don’t Bring Me Down 2. everything else
Good explanation – thanks!
That’s the biggest reason. Snell and Glasnow were hurt for most of the year and Skubal’s only been a Dodger for two months. Those three combined to start 20% of the Dodgers’ regular-season games and now they’ll start 75% of them. Even without Ohtani pitching that’s a huge upgrade to the starting rotation, which was already the best in the league.
On top of that, the hitters are also fully healthy right now, which isn’t as dramatic of a benefit, but only Freeman and Tucker played 150 regular-season games, most of the rest of the lineup missed at least some time and Edman and Smith missed about half the season, so everyone being available right now is also a big plus.
Their depth charts projection is just astronomically better than any other team right now as a result- like, 110+ wins over a full season level good. I’m not sure I buy they’re at that level or that their odds are nearly 40% to win the whole thing, but 25-30% I could see.
Diamondbacks and Pirates fans looking at the final power rankings:
We were once so close to heaven
Peter came out and gave us medals
Declaring us the nicest of the damned
I’m looking forward to a time in the distant future when the White Sox are referenced on a baseball website without mentioning 121 losses or the pope.
We could talk about their fans stabbing a first base coach, again?
Or the fan who hid a gun in her fat rolls and discharged it in the stadium!
Or throwing the damn world series?
On second thought let’s keep on this Pope thing!
Kind of interesting seeing the disparity in WS Win Percents for the four top seeds from different sources / methodologies…
PECOTA
TBR (19.2%) MIL (18.5%) LAD (16.7%) CLE (11.5%)
FG (Projections)
LAD (37.4%) MIL (11.6%) CLE (8.8%) TBR (8.7%)
FG (Season to Date)
MIL (23.3%) LAD (18.8%) TBR (11.2%) CLE (6.7%)
Baseball Reference
MIL (18.6%) TBR (14.5%) LAD (12.4%) CLE (6.7%)
…FG projections seem to align most closely with the general sentiment towards the Dodgers relative to the rest of the field.
Some of the first round teams with higher odds…Cubs (11.1% at BRef), Red Sox (8.0% at BRef), Yankees (7.8% Season to Date).
Baseline (aka coin-flip, without HFA) odds for teams with the bye winning the WS are 12.5%, and without 6.25%.
I don’t buy anyone at 30%+, let alone almost 40%. Let’s break down what they’d actually have to do to win; for these purposes, I’m assuming coin-flip odds for all series that don’t involve them.
They have to win a 5-game series against (50% ATL/50% PHI).
Then they have to win a 7-gamer against (50% MIL/25% CHC/SDP).
Then, a 7-game set against (25% TB, 25% CLE or 12.5% HOU/CHW/BOS/NYY).
I don’t have the time right now to reverse engineer how much better you’d have to be to math out to 37%, but that feels truly insane to me. When you add the Brewers’ 11.6%, that means that those teams comprise an almost 50% chance of winning it all.
Upvote! This is an excellent point worth investigating. Let’s start with the series. If the probability of winning 3 series in a row is 37.8% (the 8 is silly since it is completely in the noise spectrum), then the probability of winning each series is 72.8%. (p^3 = 0.378, solve for p.)
So, going into each series, do you think the Dodgers have a near 3/4 probability of winning the series?
How does this translate into the games? The first series has 5 games. Using p as the probability of winning each game and the series win probability P = 0.728, the equation for a 5-game series is:
P = p^3 + (3 2)*p^2*(1-p)*p + (4 2)*p^2*(1-p)^2*p
where (3 2) is the binomial coefficient 3-choose-2.
The value of p for P = 0.728 is 62.7%.
Are you comfortable with this probability? (Note: I did not include any home-field advantage.)
For a 7-game series, the value of p is 61%. Are you comfortable with the idea that this is a reasonable probability for a LAD win in every game?
We can actually get a bit more clever than that. The playoffs odds page has probabilities for every series, and currently has the Dodgers at 68.9% to win the LDS, 49.9% to win the LCS, and 38.0% to win the WS, which implies their odds for the later two rounds are 72.4% and 76.2%. The odds having that pattern of steadily increasing with each round makes sense- it’s easier to upset the stronger team in a shorter series, and you’d expect them to have an easier time in the WS than the LCS because of the mediocrity of the AL playoff field.
Taking those odds for each series implies they’re a 60.4% favorite to win each game in the LDS, 60.7% for the LCS, and 62.8% in the World Series, though obviously the exact probabilities would vary from game to game based on pitching matchups.
So then the question is: Are the Dodgers really so much better than everyone else that even against other strong playoff teams they’re at least a 60% favorite to win a typical game? Maybe, I certainly agree that they’re the favorite and their current pitching staff in particular is much better than its regular season equivalent, but I’m not sure I buy the disparity is that strong.
FG Projections always hate TBR. Almost as much as they hate MIL.
FG Projections and ZiPS calculate lower probabilities (they don’t hate teams) because they use a formula that treats a team’s performance as the sum of its players.
Dan’s article on why ZiPS underestimates MIL (and other teams) shows that not only does ZiPS receive incorrect roster construction, but it also fails to take into account the assistance of the analytics department in player positioning on the field, batting-order construction, relief pitching sequencing, etc.
(That said, I don’t know how Dan could adjust for these types of contributions in his model.)
I’ve kind of ragged on people complaining about the playoff format, but it is worth noting that the third place team in three different divisions finished with a better record than the AL West winner (and a fourth, Miami, was only a game back — um, let’s not discuss what happened in the AL Central).
Don’t get me started….oh wait, you just did…..
(1) The Diamondbacks finished at 86-76, and were one of only 2 teams that finished above .500 in all of MLB and missed the playoffs (PIT went 82-80). They also had a better record than TWO division winners in the AL, one of which got the #2 seed and a first round bye! That’s kind of messed up, but that’s the way it goes. And here’s another: The 2nd and 3rd best teams in the AL match up in a 3-game loser goes home series, while the Astros, the team with the worst record in either league to make the playoffs, get to match up with the SECOND worst team to make the playoffs in all of MLB, the White Sox (3 games worse than the Red Sox and NINE worse than the Yankees). That’s also pretty messed up. And to make matters worse, because MLB doesn’t re-seed, the winner of the Yankees/Red Sox series has to play the best team in the AL, Tampa, while the winner of that scintillating Houston/White Sox series gets rewarded with a MUCH easier opponent in Cleveland. That’s also pretty messed up.
And, on top of that, the disparity between these teams are far worse than their W-L records indicate, due to the unbalanced schedule. You play 13 games against all teams in your division, vs 6 or 7 between teams in the other divisions. So those AL East teams all beat each other up, and even BAL and TOR are no slouches, whereas the best opponent in Houston’s division was Texas, who was barely better record-wise than BAL and TOR, and ALSO got to benefit from playing the A’s and Angels 13x each (not to mention Seattle, and say all you want about their team on paper, they played like a pretty bad team almost all year).
Perhaps this has been answered elsewhere, but why are the Cubs WS odds higher than the Padres despite being heavy dogs to the Padres based on ZIPs playoff odds?