FanGraphs Power Rankings: June 9–15

It was an exciting weekend of baseball, with nine series ending in a sweep, but that was all overshadowed by the unexpected trade of Rafael Devers on Sunday night.

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.

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It was a good week for the Dodgers. They won their series against the Padres and Giants, and moved ever so slightly ahead of both of those division rivals in the standings. Of course, the big news is that Shohei Ohtani will be making his Dodger pitching debut as an opener on Monday night. He’ll be on a limited pitch count, but all the injuries in the rotation have forced Los Angeles to resort to bullpen games pretty regularly. Getting Ohtani to pitch for an inning or two once a week will help alleviate some of the load the ‘pen is currently carrying.

There were some pretty lopsided scores in the Tigers-Reds series last weekend, with an 11-5 victory for Detroit on Friday followed by 11-1 and 8-4 defeats on Saturday and Sunday. It’s probably nothing more than a hiccup for the team with the best record in baseball. Of greater concern was the announcement that top prospect Jackson Jobe is slated to undergo Tommy John surgery. The Tigers just recently activated Sawyer Gipson-Long off the IL, but their starting pitching depth took a pretty big hit with Jobe sidelined for the rest of this season.

The Cubs walked off the Pirates on Sunday to win a hard-fought series; every game in the four-game set was decided by one run. After a pretty soft schedule in May, Chicago faces a gauntlet of tough challenges through the rest of the first half, beginning with a series against the Brewers this week. They won’t face a team with a record below .500 until after the All-Star break.

It was a tough weekend for the Mets, as they were swept by the red-hot Rays. To make matters worse, Kodai Senga injured his hamstring in Thursday’s game and will likely be out until after the All-Star break. Thankfully, David Peterson has been pitching like an ace lately, and both Frankie Montas and Sean Manaea are close to being activated off the IL after suffering spring injuries. The next 10 days could be an inflection point in the NL East race: The Mets and Braves play each other seven times over the next week and a half, and New York will squeeze in a series against the Phillies this weekend as well.

With a series win over the White Sox and a sweep of the Twins, the Astros have now opened up a 4.5 game lead in the AL West. This version of Houston’s roster is a little more plucky than the dominant teams we’ve been used to, and the Astros have had to overcome some pretty big injury hurdles this year. Still, they’re finding ways to win when it counts, including two straight walk-off wins to secure the series sweep over Minnesota last weekend.

It was a tough weekend for the other New York team, too, as the Yankees were swept by the Red Sox. Boston somehow managed to limit Aaron Judge to a single hit in the three-game set (it was a home run, of course), which is a pretty good way to hold the Yankees to four total runs in the series. New York is set to get a little more firepower back this week when Giancarlo Stanton is activated off the IL, though his return is forcing some awkward roster decisions. The Yankees have said Ben Rice might get one or two starts a week at catcher, and Stanton won’t be an everyday player right away, but Rice’s breakout deserves more than a part-time role.

The Phillies bounced back from a pretty tough last few weeks to win a series against the Cubs, then completed a three-game sweep of the Blue Jays over the weekend. Thanks to the Rays sweep of the Mets, Philadelphia is only 2.5 games back in the NL East with a big series against the Mets coming up this weekend.

Speaking of Tampa Bay, those three wins against the Mets pushed the Rays’ record to 18-6 over their last 24 games. That hot streak has thrust them to the top of the AL Wild Card standings. The Blue Jays had been nearly as hot as the Rays before getting swept by the Phillies last weekend — Toronto was 12-3 over its previous 16 games heading into that series in Philadelphia.

The Giants made a huge splash on Sunday night, swinging a surprise blockbuster trade with the Red Sox to acquire Rafael Devers. San Francisco has had a great season thus far, though the team desperately needed an infusion of offense to stick around in a surprisingly competitive NL West race. Devers should provide that jolt in spades, and he’s under contract through 2033, giving the Giants the superstar they have desperately been pursuing the last few offseasons.

With the Giants aggressively asserting themselves with their acquisition of Devers, the five teams in this tier might be fighting over one Wild Card spot. There’s plenty of season left to play, but Philadelphia and San Francisco certainly seem like they’re a step ahead of this group. Still, the Diamondbacks went 5-1 last week and have snuck back into the playoff picture after their rough end to May. For their part, the Reds won both of their series last week, while the Brewers went 4-3 thanks to a big series win over the Cardinals last weekend. As for St. Louis, the Cards snapped a six-game losing streak with a win on Saturday, but have still gone 5-11 over their last 16 games.

The Padres are struggling to keep up in this melee. They lost series to the Dodgers and D-backs last week, and now Jackson Merrill is headed to the 7-day IL with a concussion. Manny Machado and Fernando Tatis Jr. have been driving the offense, but they can’t do it alone. Luis Arraez, Xander Bogaerts, and the rest of the lineup just haven’t been consistent enough to be truly competitive. The Padres are in a tough position because years of aggressive dealmaking has left their farm system pretty barren, so they lack the trade chips to really upgrade their roster ahead of the deadline.

Just like in the tier above, these five teams look like they’re fighting over one playoff spot, though the AL is a little more tightly clustered than the stratified NL. It’s possible the Rays or Jays come crashing down, giving one of these five teams a shot at another playoff spot. Every team in this tier swept or was swept last weekend. The Mariners, Rangers, and Red Sox all came out on the positive end, while the Twins and Guardians tumbled down the standings.

The Devers trade made a lot of sense for San Francisco, but it’s a real head-scratcher from Boston’s perspective. Beyond the back-and-forth positional disagreement that had been at play between Devers and the front office all season, the Red Sox are in the middle of a very competitive Wild Card chase. They had just won seven of their last nine games (all against division opponents) and had just swept the Yankees in a huge weekend series at home. Instead of capitalizing on that momentum, they chose to trade away the face of their franchise and their best hitter in the middle of June. The optics are really bad. Before the Devers trade went down on Sunday, the big storyline in Boston was the debut of Roman Anthony, but now any success Anthony or any of the other youngsters might enjoy this season will be overshadowed by the Devers saga and questions of what could have been if he hadn’t been traded away.

The Royals failed to win any games last week, and were swept by the Yankees and Athletics in consecutive series at home. Bobby Witt Jr.’s May slump has extended into June, and when the superstar who’s supposed to be driving the offense isn’t hitting, it’s really hard to win games. Jac Caglianone’s bat hasn’t made much of an impact yet; he’s collected just 10 hits in 12 big league games, just two of which have gone for extra bases. To make matters worse, Cole Ragans was placed back on the IL last week, this time with a rotator cuff strain.

A win over Arizona on May 31 pushed the Nationals’ record to 28-30, and it looked like they might have been sneaking into the playoff picture. They’ve won just twice since then, however, dropping their record to 30-41 and placing them firmly out of the Wild Card race. They’re in the midst of an eight-game losing streak and are looking for any kind of spark to rekindle the good vibes of late May. To that end, they’re calling up Brady House to make his big league debut this week. He was raking in Triple-A and will hopefully join James Wood and CJ Abrams as a building block for the future of the franchise.

The Rockies won twice last week and have now won five games this month. That’s one more than they won in all of May, and matches their total from March and April. It’s progress!