FanGraphs Power Rankings: May 27–June 2

We’re now two months into the season, and the differences between the haves and the have-nots are becoming a little clearer with each week. That’s especially true in the American League, where a four-game gap separates the Mariners and the Red Sox, the sixth and seventh teams in the league standings. Meanwhile, in the National League, a pretty sizable group of teams is chasing the last two Wild Card spots, with eight or nine teams potentially vying for those playoff berths as the season continues.

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.

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A sweep of the Giants over the weekend put the Yankees just ahead of the Phillies for the best record in baseball. They’ve won 16 of their last 20 games and it doesn’t look like they’ll be slowing down anytime soon. Gerrit Cole will begin a rehab assignment this week, while young phenom Jasson Domínguez is nearing the end of his. Unfortunately, the Yankees have been hitting so well that it’s possible there won’t be room in the lineup for him once he’s ready to be activated.

After a rough six-game West Coast road trip that saw them win just two games, the Phillies bounced back with a series win against the Cardinals at home. The Dodgers also rebounded after a rough week, sweeping the Mets and securing a series win against the Rockies.

The Orioles took care of business against a couple of intra-division foes last week, winning series against the Red Sox and Rays. They’re staring down a particularly tough stretch of their schedule that will take them into July: They face the Blue Jays, Rays, Braves, Phillies, Yankees, Astros, Guardians, Rangers, and Mariners over their next 30 games. That’s a gauntlet against most of the AL playoff picture plus two of the best teams in the NL, and their pitching staff just lost a bit of depth, with both John Means and Tyler Wells out for the year with elbow injuries.

The Guardians were tripped up by the Rockies last week before winning their weekend series against the Nationals. They welcomed Steven Kwan back from the IL, though with the way their offense has been producing, they managed to weather his absence just fine. With a four-game lead in the AL Central and a three-game series against the second-place Royals on the docket, they could really put some daylight between themselves and the rest of the division this week.

In the wake of Ronald Acuña Jr.’s season-ending knee injury, the Braves lost a four-game set to the Nationals before winning a hard fought series against the A’s over the weekend. The Twins took three of four from the Royals in a huge AL Central battle and then won their weekend series against the Astros while Kansas City continued to falter against the Padres. The Mariners also prevailed in their intra-division matchups last week, taking three of four from Houston and sweeping the Angels.

The one problem the Brewers haven’t been able to solve during their run of success over the last half decade is scoring runs with any sort of consistency. They’ve leaned heavily on a fantastic pitching staff for much of that run, but their run scoring woes have betrayed them against playoff competition. That makes their offensive outburst this year all the more surprising; they’re second in baseball in runs scored per game and third in wRC+. William Contreras is leading the way, and the Brewers are enjoying resurgent seasons from Christian Yelich and Willy Adames. Their pitching staff hasn’t been nearly as good as it’s been in the recent past — losing Corbin Burnes, Brandon Woodruff, and Devin Williams will do that — but they’re holding their own, helped by the solid debut of Robert Gasser.

The Padres won both of their series last week and were a ninth-inning meltdown away from sweeping the Royals on Sunday. They’ve got a solid grip on the second NL Wild Card spot, but they’re facing a minor crisis in their starting rotation, as both Yu Darvish and Joe Musgrove were placed on the IL last week, testing the Padres’ already thin pitching depth. Thankfully, Matt Waldron has proven that his knuckleball is more than just a gimmick, and Dylan Cease has been a steady fixture atop their rotation.

This tier got a little bigger this week, with a few teams falling into it from above while a couple of others climbed into the mix. There was a lot of treading water for the Astros, Cardinals, Giants, Rays, and Red Sox last week. St. Louis and Tampa Bay went 3-3, while Boston went 3-4, San Francisco went 2-4 against the two best teams in baseball, and Houston went 2-5. All five of those teams are hovering right on the edge of the playoff picture but face some pretty significant hurdles to solidifying their place there.

The Rangers ended May on a high note, winning series against the Diamondbacks and Marlins, but before that, they were mired in a 15-game stretch during which they won just three times. The main culprit was their offense; they scored four or more runs in a game just four times during that slump. Last week, they scored four or more runs in four of their five games. Corey Seager’s hot bat has helped lead the Rangers out of their doldrums; the shortstop is in the midst of a 15-game hitting streak during which he’s blasted nine home runs.

The Blue Jays got a boost in the standings after sweeping the White Sox and winning their weekend series against the Pirates. They even started Vladimir Guerrero Jr. at third base for the first time since 2019 just to mix things up. Their pitching staff is looking a little strained after Alek Manoah and Jordan Romano suffered injuries last week, and they have a huge four-game series against the Orioles on the docket.

This tier is filled with young ball clubs that simply aren’t ready to make the transition out of rebuilding yet — and also, the Cubs. The Cubs started the year with a really strong April but they followed that up with a really bad May. Last week, they lost a big four-game series to the Brewers before falling flat against the Reds over the weekend. Since May 13, a 19-game stretch, they’ve scored just 3.26 runs per game, though it looks like Seiya Suzuki, Ian Happ, and Cody Bellinger are finally waking up from their slumps. The bigger problem has been the bullpen, which has been an absolute mess since Adbert Alzolay lost his job as closer and then was sidelined with a forearm injury.

There was plenty of drama in Queens last week as the Mets continued their early season meltdown. There was the bizarre on-field incident with Jorge López, which led to some really unfortunate headlines after his post-game interview. Then Christian Scott and Brett Baty were demoted to Triple-A on Friday, the former for workload management purposes and the latter because he still hasn’t made the necessary adjustments to succeed against big league pitching. The Mets are likely looking at a pretty significant teardown this summer as they try to figure out how to recalibrate their $300 million roster.

After getting swept by the Blue Jays and the Brewers last week, the White Sox are mired in an 11-game losing streak. They’ve won just three times in their last 20 games and they’re currently on pace to lose just a hair over 120 games this year. Luis Robert Jr. is nearly returned from his hip injury, but he could well be on his way out of town once we get closer to the trade deadline. The emergence of Garrett Crochet as a legitimate frontline starter is just about the only positive development on the Southside so far this year.