On any given day in the not-too-distant past, the Yankees, Orioles, Guardians, Dodgers, and Phillies might have laid claims to the best record in their respective leagues, yet all of them have also gone through recent stretches where they’ve looked quite ordinary — and beatable. To cherrypick just a few examples, at the All-Star break the Phillies had the major’s best record at 62-34 (.646), but since then, they’re 11-17 (.393). They were briefly surpassed by the Dodgers, who themselves shirked the mantle of the NL’s top record. Over in the AL, on August 2 the Guardians were an AL-best 67-42… and then they lost seven straight. The Yankees and Orioles have been trading the AL East lead back and forth for most of the season, but over the past two months, both have sub-.500 records. And so on.

At this writing, not a single team has a winning percentage of .600, a pace that equates to just over 97 wins over a full season. If that holds up, it would not only be the first time since 2014 that no team reached 100 wins in a season — excluding the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, of course — but also the first since ’07 that no team reached 97 wins.

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If it’s parity you’re looking for, consider this: 10 of the top 11 teams in these rankings are separated by just 4.5 games in the major league standings, and the odd team out has been the hottest ballclub in baseball over the last two weeks. While no team is currently on pace to win 100 games, the bunching in the standings should make for some very exciting playoff races down the stretch.

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 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%). 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. Read the rest of this entry »

Every spectator sport has its own tradeoffs between watching on TV and going to a game in person. And while there are some that can only be truly appreciated live, I personally think television does a pretty good job of portraying baseball at its best. This is a game of inches, and inches can be hard to perceive from the cheap seats.

One exception is exceptional center field defense. By the time the camera angle turns around on a fly ball, the outfielders have already covered dozens of feet in their pursuit of the baseball. To appreciate the speed and timing required to play this position well, you really have to see it live.

There aren’t many guys who can really go out and get it. There definitely aren’t 30 who can hit well enough to stick in a major league lineup every day. Most center fielders, therefore, fall into two camps: Good hitters who can kind of hang but should probably be in a corner, and the genuine article. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week, Michael Baumann wrote about how Kirby Yates has a chance to join Craig Kimbrel and Wade Davis as only relievers in MLB history with multiple seasons of 40 or more appearances and an ERA south of 1.25. Five years after logging a 1.19 ERA over 60 outings with the San Diego Padres, the 37-year-old right-hander has come out of the Texas Rangers bullpen 44 times and has a 1.19 ERA.

I procured subject-specific quotes from Yates for my colleague’s article, but there were a few other perspectives I wanted to glean from him as well. That he has quietly put up better numbers than many people realize was one of them. For instance, since he began throwing his signature splitter in 2017, the underrated righty has a 36.0% strikeout rate that ranks sixth-best among pitchers who have thrown at least 250 innings.

“It’s almost like a tale of two of two careers,” Yates said upon hearing that. “It’s before the split and then after the split. Now I’m getting into a situation where you could call it three careers in a sense — since [March 2021 Tommy John] surgery and how I’ve been coming back from that. Last year was good, but also kind of shaky. The two-and-a-half to three years off, I felt that. This year I feel more comfortable. I’ve felt like I could attack some things I needed to attack.”

Yates doesn’t feel that his splitter is quite as good as it was pre-surgery, although he does believe it is getting back to what it was. His fastball is another story. He told me that it’s never been better. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re speaking with someone from Toronto who doesn’t follow baseball, they can probably tell you two things about the Blue Jays. The first is that Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is the best player on the team. The second is that Vladimir Guerrero Jr. sucks.

The first point is pretty accurate, and it’s absolutely true this season — more on that in a moment. The second point is categorically false, but alas, such is the curse of superstardom. The player who has his face on posters all around the city is going to get plenty of credit when things go right, but he’s also going to shoulder an excessive amount of criticism when things go wrong. When you’re the guy starring in the Uncrustables ads, fans expect a crust-free performance on the field, too.

Guerrero made a name for himself in 2021, which was no easy task considering the man with whom he shares his name. Yet, with 48 home runs, 111 RBI, and a runner-up finish for AL MVP, Guerrero gave the average Torontonian a reason to talk about baseball for the first time since José Bautista was punched in the face. Then, Guerrero spent the next two years corroding his golden reputation. To be clear, no one who knows what they’re talking about ever thought he was a bad ballplayer — heck, he set a new record for the highest salary ever awarded in an arbitration hearing this past offseason — but his performance certainly went downhill. If all you were comparing him to was the best version of himself (like that motivational poster in your gym always tells you to do), he really was pretty disappointing last year: Read the rest of this entry »

As the man who inspired Brad Pitt’s most memorable role once said, “My shit doesn’t work in the playoffs.” Assuming Billy Beane wasn’t explaining an October Metamucil purchase to a grocery store cashier who simply asked how his day was going, what Beane likely meant was that the statistics used to construct his major league rosters don’t accrue large enough samples during postseason series to eventually even out in his favor. Over the course of 162 games, a team’s production settles into a reasonable representation of the squad’s true talent. But zoom in on any random seven-game stretch and the team on the field might look like a bunch of dudes in baseball player cosplay.

What applies to team outcomes applies just as well to player outcomes. A player with a perfectly respectable stat line in the regular season might morph into a pumpkin as the calendar shifts to fall, or on the flip side, an unlikely hero may emerge from the ashes of a cruel summer and put the whole team on his back.

With the law of averages in mind, I’d always assumed that the more consistent hitters would be better positioned to perform well in the playoffs. My thinking went like this: The natural variation in these hitters’ performances would never wander too far from their season-long average, making them the safer, more predictable options. Whereas streaky hitters — the ones with high highs, low lows, and steep transitions between the two — would be too reliant on “getting hot at the right time” to be the type of hitter a front office should depend on in the postseason.

Reader, I was incorrect. Read the rest of this entry »

Eleven seasons after making his big league debut, David Peralta might best be described as a professional hitter. As clichéd (and definitionally daft) as that label is, it’s pretty much what the 37-year-old San Diego Padres outfielder is at this stage of his career. A reliable left-handed bat now with his fourth team — the bulk of his time has come with the Arizona Diamondbacks — Peralta is slashing .268/.327/.439 with six home runs and a 118 wRC+ in the current campaign. His career numbers are actually somewhat similar. Over 1,200 games and 4,492 plate appearances, the Valencia, Venezuela native has a .279/.334/.449 slash line to go with 123 home runs and a 109 wRC+.

Peralta talked hitting when the Padres visited Fenway Park earlier this season.

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David Laurila: How different a hitter are you now compared to when you reached the big leagues?

David Peralta: “I’m different now, because every year, every day, you learn something to get better, how to approach the game, how to approach pitching. That’s especially true now. When I first got called up, in 2014, you didn’t see that many guys throwing 99-100 mph. Now that’s normal. So, it’s a different approach that you have to have.”

Laurila: Have there been any notable changes over the years?

Peralta: “I’ve always been more simple and short, but I tried one time in my career to change my mechanics. It worked for a little bit and then stopped working.”

Laurila: This was when?

Peralta: “In 2022, in the offseason, I started doing something different with Michael Brantley. I started hitting the way he does. Again, it worked for a little bit, but then for some reason I came off of that and couldn’t find myself again. I ended up going back to my mechanics. You have to know what type of player you are, what type of hitter you are. I know that I’m not a home run hitter. I’m a line drive hitter, so I have to work on things that way.”

Laurila: Brantley hasn’t been a home run hitter either. What was he doing that you were trying to emulate? Read the rest of this entry »

Aaron Judge has ascended to another plane of existence. On Wednesday, he hit his 300th career home run in his 955th career game, making him by far the fastest player to reach that milestone. He’s currently on pace for 57 homers and 11.3 WAR, and in the two weeks since I compared him to a seven-foot-tall god-child, he’s somehow gotten even better, raising his wRC+ from 212 to 219. All of this is to say that the occasion didn’t need any help in the drama department, but the White Sox couldn’t help themselves.

In the top of the eighth inning, down four runs with one out and Alex Verdugo on second, brand-new manager Grady Sizemore chose to intentionally walk Juan Soto in order to get to Judge. Let me say that again: The White Sox intentionally walked someone so that they could pitch to the guy with the best batting line since 2004 Barry Bonds – whom they were going to have to face anyway unless Verdugo somehow got doubled off second base – with two runners on base rather than one. And it worked, in the sense that Judge quickly freed the White Sox from having to play in a competitive baseball game. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. It’s an incredible time to be a baseball fan, particularly one who isn’t tied to a single team or division. There are three tight division races, and both wild cards hold some intrigue. Some of the brightest stars of the game are playing incredibly well right now. The A’s are on a kelly-green-clad respectability streak that is both improbable and delightful. The White Sox are fun to watch for their ever-evolving pursuit of futility (more on that below). There’s no time for August doldrums when the games are this exciting. So no more talking vaguely about what a great week this was; let’s get right to it. And thanks, as always, to ESPN’s Zach Lowe for the format I’m borrowing here.

1. Barry Would Never

Perhaps the least likely story of the season, on an individual level, is Tyler Fitzgerald, who has turned into one of the great offensive forces in the game overnight. After putting up average offensive numbers as he climbed through the minors across four seasons plus the lost COVID year, he has established an everyday role on the Giants and unexpectedly caught fire this season. He’s now hitting home runs faster than I can count and getting his name in Giants history next to Barry Bonds for his power feats. (As an aside, this clip of Bonds and Greg Maddux discussing an old at-bat is amazing, and I highly recommend it.)
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