FanGraphs Power Rankings: August 24–30

As the regular season enters its final month, the playoff picture in both leagues has been clarified somewhat. There are just two or three teams vying for the final NL Wild Card spot, while the AL Wild Card field has been whittled down to four or five. For the teams on the fringe of the playoff chase, it’s quickly becoming crunch time.

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. 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 between now and October, they’ll filter to the top and bottom of the rankings, while the exercise remains reactive to hot streaks and cold snaps. 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.

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.

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The Brewers have continued to roll through their schedule, winning series against the Mets and Rangers last week. They’re now three games ahead of the Braves and Dodgers for the number one seed in the National League, and they lead their division by eight games. Milwaukee has been getting contributions all across its roster, and recently that’s included William Contreras. He hasn’t really been the same since fracturing his finger last May, but he’s collected 20 hits and two home runs over his last 12 games. The Brewers head into a critical stretch this week. They’ll face the Cubs seven times over the next 10 days, giving them an opportunity to bury their division rival and run away with the Central.

Atlanta’s extra-innings win on Sunday marked the team’s seventh straight victory, with back-to-back series sweeps of the Dodgers and Rockies. Chris Sale was absolutely brilliant in a complete game shutout of Los Angeles on Thursday, and the Braves will need him to be at the top of his game if they’re going to make a deep postseason run this year. Last week, the team announced that Spencer Schwellenbach and Hurston Waldrep are undergoing season-ending surgeries, removing the hope that either of them would be able to bolster the pitching staff down the stretch.

The gap between the Rays and the Yankees in the AL East had closed to three games at the start of last week, but with a series win over the Tigers and a sweep of the Padres, Tampa Bay pulled ahead of New York by another 1.5 games as we head into the final month of the season. Elsewhere in the division, the Red Sox and Yankees battled it out over the weekend. New York emerged victorious in three of the four games between the two rivals, securing the season series and the all important tiebreaker. Luis García Jr. has been leading the charge for the Yankees, collecting 11 hits and two home runs last week. The Red Sox activated Roman Anthony and Trevor Story off the IL on Sunday, and while the game didn’t go Boston’s way, the two players went 4-for-7 with a pair of doubles in their return.

After dropping a pair of games in Seattle, the Phillies returned to their hot streak, winning four straight to finish the week. Edmundo Sosa was the hero over the weekend. On Saturday, he hit a go-ahead, pinch-hit grand slam with two outs in the ninth inning, and then on Sunday, he hit a go-ahead home run in the seventh inning to help Philadelphia sweep the Angels. The Phillies’ opportunity to try and sneak away with a division title begins this week; Atlanta and Philadelphia play seven times over the next two weeks with just five games separating the two rivals.

The Dodgers bounced back after getting swept by the Braves early last week by taking two of three from the Tigers over the weekend. That series saw the return of Tarik Skubal to Detroit; he held his old team to just a single run over six innings on Friday. Despite looking like he’d made enough progress to get back on the mound this past weekend, Shohei Ohtani’s scheduled appearance on Sunday was scratched after some renewed discomfort in his knee. His health is obviously paramount, but letting him focus on hitting for the rest of the season might be priority number two; over his last 10 games, he’s batting just .143 with only two extra-base hits.

Pete Crow-Armstrong further cemented his NL MVP case by slugging five home runs across Saturday and Sunday. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough to prevent the Cubs from losing both of its series last week. Had Chicago played a little better, the division could have been in reach over these next two weeks. As it stands, the Cubs are eight games behind the Brewers with seven games between the two clubs coming up over the next 10 days.

The White Sox continued to solidify their grip on the AL Central, winning their series against the Rangers and Twins last week. Their playoff odds are now up over 85% and they’re on track to win 86 games, a 26-win improvement over last year and a 45-win improvement over their historically bad 2024 season. The team’s recent hero has been Tristan Peters; coming off hitting a walk-off home run last Sunday against the Mets, he collected nine hits and three more home runs last week.

The Diamondbacks jumped over the Padres in the NL Wild Card standings after winning a series against the Cubs and splitting a four-game set against the Giants over the weekend. Arizona is weathering the absence of Ketel Marte thanks to the efforts of Geraldo Perdomo; he collected 10 hits last week and has produced a 138 wRC+ in August. Marte is expected to rejoin the team on Monday, hopefully putting this saga behind him.

It was a bad week for the Padres’ bullpen. The usually invincible Mason Miller allowed a game-winning home run to Oneil Cruz in a 1-0 loss on Tuesday and then blew a save opportunity on Sunday after Samad Taylor dropped what would have been the final out of the game over the wall for a game-tying, two-run home run. Along with an extra innings loss on Monday and a come-from-behind loss on Saturday, the relief corps was responsible for four of San Diego’s five losses last week.

The Astros had a whirlwind week last week. After an ugly 3-6 homestand dropped Houston to a game under .500 and into a tie atop the AL West, the team parted ways with GM Dana Brown on Monday. Even though the Astros are underperforming relative to the high expectations a decade of dominance will create, they’re also in the middle of the playoff chase right now, making the timing of the front office change odd. And to their credit, the ‘Stros responded well last week, winning both of their series against the Yankees and Mets. That puts them two games up in the AL West, and with both the Rangers and Mariners flailing, they’re the heavy favorite to claim the division for the eighth time in the last decade.

The Blue Jays and Orioles each produced a sweep over the weekend to help them both gain some ground in the AL Wild Card race. Meanwhile, the Guardians had their seven-game win streak snapped on Friday and wound up losing their weekend series to the Royals. Those three teams are separated by 1.5 games, and their schedules all intertwine over the next two weeks. First, Toronto and Cleveland meet to start this week, then next week, Baltimore faces both the Guardians and Jays, with a four-game series against the Red Sox this weekend to set the table. All of those head-to-head matchups should throw a little more chaos into a tight playoff picture in the American League.

It’s too little, too late, but the Royals have been playing like the best team in baseball over the last two and a half weeks. Over their last 16 games, they’ve gone 13-3 and have the third-best record in the AL since the All-Star break. The guy driving this hot streak? Jac Caglianone. He’s posted a 213 wRC+ with six home runs and 26 RBI this month. The pitching staff has been much improved as well, with Noah Cameron allowing just seven runs in 48.2 innings over his last seven appearances. It’s too bad the team struggled so significantly to start the year, making this late-season surge pretty irrelevant.

The Mariners were showing some faint signs of life heading into a big weekend series against the Blue Jays. They had completed a 4-2 homestand against the Cubs and Phillies and had gone 8-7 against some of the best teams in baseball over the previous two weeks. That’s why getting swept in Toronto felt like a gut punch; all that forward progress was undone in just three games. There is still a glimmer of hope in Seattle. Cal Raleigh is finally swinging the bat well, and Kade Anderson has looked pretty good in his first two big league starts. Still, the biggest reason the Mariners can’t be counted out just yet is that they have the weakest schedule in baseball in September, with 17 games against the Athletics, Angels, and Rockies and five games against the Rangers and Astros, the two teams directly above them in the standings.

After a valiant effort to stay in the NL Wild Card race for most of the season, the Cardinals have run out of steam. Their young pitching staff is straining under a full season’s workload. Kyle Leahy is running into an innings limit, and injuries to Andre Pallante and Hunter Dobbins haven’t helped either. And now NL Rookie of the Year favorite JJ Weatherholt is on the IL with a wrist injury, joining double play partner Masyn Winn, who fractured his thumb last weekend. St. Louis made some tremendous strides this year, but it seems like that forward momentum is sputtering with a month left to play.

Like the Cardinals, the Twins have been a surprising contender for most of the season, but they’re struggling to stay in the AL Wild Card race down the stretch. Minnesota held a Wild Card spot as recently as August 19, but the team has gone 2-7 since then. Top prospect Walker Jenkins made his debut on Friday, and fellow prospect Kaelen Culpepper has been excellent as the Twins’ shortstop since making his own debut earlier in August. Unfortunately, Joe Ryan has been sidelined all month with a glute strain, while Byron Buxton hit the IL for the third time this year with the same hip issue that’s plagued him for the past two months. Minnesota will get a good glimpse of the future with Jenkins and Culpepper in the lineup, but the team’s playoff hopes are hanging by a thread right now.

Things have been mostly miserable for the Giants this year, so you’d be forgiven if you’ve missed Rafael Devers’ extended hot streak. He collected 12 hits and three home runs last week, and is now up to a 147 wRC+ in August. Ignoring his terrible first month of the season, he’s posted a 144 wRC+ over the last four months and has very much looked like the lineup anchor the Giants expected they’d be getting when they traded for him last year. Bryce Eldridge has also settled in after an up-and-down season; he’s running a 133 wRC+ with four home runs this month. Those two sluggers will be key players for San Francisco if the team has any designs on trying to compete next year.