FanGraphs Power Rankings: May 20–26

Several preseason favorites are sliding down these rankings as we barrel toward the third month of the season, while other clubs — most notably the Guardians — are continuing their surprisingly strong starts.

This season, we’ve revamped our power rankings. The old model wasn’t very reactive to the ups and downs of any given team’s performance throughout the season, and by September, it was giving far too much weight to a team’s full body of work without taking into account how the club had changed, improved, or declined since March. That’s why we’ve decided to build our power rankings model 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 coinflip 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%). 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 — I’ve taken some 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.

All power rankings stats, including team records, are updated through Sunday’s games. The information included in the comments are current as of Tuesday morning.

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Yankees starting pitchers continued their run of dominance in the absence of ace Gerrit Cole. Last week, their rotation allowed a total of five runs (four earned) across seven starts, four of which were scoreless outings. It also helps that Aaron Judge is absolutely lighting the league on fire right now; he hit home runs in four straight games last week and his slash line in May is up to a whopping .390/.515/.974 (297 wRC+).

The Phillies swept away the Rangers before losing their weekend series to the pesky Rockies in Colorado. They still hold the best record in baseball and their path to a NL East division crown just became a little easier with Atlanta’s unfortunate injury news.

The Guardians won their ninth straight game on Sunday, giving them the best record in the AL momentarily, before their streak was snapped Monday night against who else but the Rockies in Colorado. Cleveland’s pitching has been pretty good during this stretch, with a lights out bullpen supporting its banged up starting rotation. As you’d probably expect, José Ramírez is anchoring the Guardians offense right now — he blasted four home runs last week and is up to 10 dingers on the month — but Cleveland is also getting production from David Fry, a surprising contributor who doesn’t really have a permanent position but has hit his way into the lineup on a regular basis.

The Braves received some terrible news on Sunday night: Ronald Acuña Jr. tore the ACL in his left knee — not the one he injured in 2021 — and will undergo season-ending surgery. Having already lost ace Spencer Strider to a UCL injury, which required internal brace surgery, Atlanta will now have to move forward without its best position player, too. Even before losing Acuña, the Braves were in an unfamiliar spot in the standings, with Dan Szymborski explaining on Friday that they were running out of time to catch the Phillies in the NL East. Without Acuña, Atlanta’s odds to overcome Philadelphia is even more difficult. Chris Sale has done a phenomenal job taking over as Atlanta’s ace, but there really isn’t anyone on the roster who can replace Acuña.

The Orioles were swept for the first time in over two years last week, losing three in a row to the Cardinals; Baltimore shook that hiccup right off and swept the White Sox in four games over the weekend. The Dodgers had a rough week, losing a series to the Diamondbacks before getting swept by the Reds in Cincinnati over the weekend. The Royals had a eight-game winning streak snapped on Sunday; prior to that loss, they had scored at least seven runs in six straight games.

There are some huge intra-divisional series on the docket for nearly every team in this tier; the Mariners and Astros, Brewers and Cubs, and Twins and Royals all meet four times this week.

The Padres and Giants are locked in a tight battle for the final NL Wild Card spot. San Diego has remained in the race despite its payroll-slashing offseason and slow starts from several key contributors, but now the club will have to forge ahead without Xander Bogaerts, who fractured his shoulder last week and will be sidelined for a few months. Luckily, Jurickson Profar has been one of the better hitters in baseball and Luis Arraez has excelled (.385/.411/.462, 158 wRC+) since the Padres traded for him at the beginning of the month.

Meanwhile, San Francisco just completed one of the wildest weeks of baseball you’ll ever see. The Giants had four straight come-from-behind wins, erasing deficits of four or more runs in three of those wins and scoring 23 runs in the eighth inning or later during that stretch. Then on Sunday, they were on the other end of a comeback victory when the Mets walked them off in the ninth inning.

It appears as though the obituary for the Cardinals’ season may have been a bit premature, though their long-term outlook still looks murky. St. Louis took two games from the Cubs over the weekend to cap off a nice little five-game winning streak, which also included a three-game sweep of the Orioles. And despite Monday’s 3-1 loss to the Reds, the Cardinals have won 10 of their last 13 to pull within 1.5 games of the final NL Wild Card spot and 5.5 games of the first-place Brewers in the NL Central standings. Most encouragingly, Paul Goldschmidt seems to be finally breaking out of his early season slump at just the right time.

This tier might as well be called “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back” because these five teams can’t seem to build upon any progress they make. Last week, the Red Sox swept the Rays and then lost a series to the Brewers; the Diamondbacks won a hard-fought series against the Dodgers and then lost a series to the Marlins; and the Tigers were swept by the Royals before bouncing back with a series win over the Blue Jays. It’s been rougher for the Cubs and Rays; Chicago has lost five straight and 11 of its last 16, while Tampa Bay managed to snap a six-game losing streak on Sunday.

The Red Sox are in a really weird place. They have one of the top starting rotations in baseball with Tanner Houck and Kutter Crawford both pitching like aces. Rafael Devers has been carrying the offense with supporting contributions from Jarren Duran, Tyler O’Neill, and Wilyer Abreu. Despite all those positive developments, Boston is sitting right at .500 in a loaded division and simply has too many holes on its roster to make much noise in the AL playoff race. The Sox should certainly be a tough team to play throughout the summer and could be a key spoiler down the stretch, but they’re more than a few pieces away from truly contending for the postseason.

With absolutely nothing going right and the top of their division featuring two of the best teams in the league, the Blue Jays are going to face some tough decisions in the two months between now and the trade deadline. Looking at the roster, Toronto should have enough talent to be a contending team, but the hole it needs to climb out of is deep. At the same time, because of all that talent, the Blue Jays have plenty of pieces they could trade away at the deadline if they choose either to punt on this season and make a run at it next year, or to tear it all down and build a new foundation with a different core.

The Reds looked like they were going to be one of the most exciting young teams in baseball heading into this season. Now, two months later, the youth is still present but the excitement isn’t. Elly De La Cruz still hasn’t found much consistency, and injuries have taken a toll on a number of Cincinnati’s best players. With their nine runs on Friday, the Reds have scored more than five runs in a game just three times this month. Their pitching staff has been the only thing keeping them from a complete collapse in the standings.

Speaking of collapsing, the Mets have won just seven of their 23 games this month. And like Cincinnati, their offense has gone missing; they’ve scored just a hair over four runs per game during this slump. To make matters worse, their bullpen has all sorts of issues, the most glaring being the struggles of their closer, Edwin Díaz.

The Rockies certainly won’t be mistaken for a good team, but they are a danger to play spoiler while playing at home in Coors Field. The Phillies learned that the hard way last weekend, and Colorado snapped the Guardians’ nine-game winning streak on Monday. Ezequiel Tovar has been particularly good this month, collecting 10 multi-hit games and a 120 wRC+.