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The wave of early season injuries has hit, and plenty of contenders are attempting to navigate through the first month of the season without some big name stars and key contributors.

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.

…

After starting off the season with seven straight wins, the Dodgers have dropped three straight series; they went 2-4 against the Nationals and Cubs last week. If you’re looking for positives, Freddie Freeman was activated off the IL on Friday, and Roki Sasaki made his best start of his young major league career against red hot Chicago on Saturday — even if the game ended in a 16-0 blowout. Miguel Rojas entertained us with impressions of the Dodgers pitching staff during that lopsided affair, though I’m sure Dodger fans would rather he never pitch again this season.

Following their series win over the Athletics and sweep of the Rockies, the Padres currently own the best record in baseball. It’s been their pitching staff that’s led the way; they didn’t allow a single run over the weekend and already have six shutouts this season. With Jackson Merrill and Jake Cronenworth on the IL for a bit, the Friars will need to continue to lean on their arms to carry the load.

The Cubs have had one of the tougher schedules to start the season, and not just because they began early in Japan. By the end of the month, they’ll have completed their season series against the Dodgers, Diamondbacks, and Padres while also squeezing in series against the Rangers and Phillies. That makes their 11-7 record partway through this gauntlet all the more impressive. Kyle Tucker has been absolutely crushing the ball as he leads baseball’s best offense so far. The 16-0 blowout on Saturday definitely helped, but Chicago is the only ballclub that has scored more than 100 runs this season.

Speaking of hot starts, Pete Alonso has been about as potent as Tucker, with a 202 wRC+ that’s one point below that of the Cubs right fielder. The Polar Bear’s hot start has helped the Mets take an early lead in the NL East division race. Both Jeff McNeil and Francisco Alvarez are nearing a return from their spring injuries, which should further bolster the lineup. More impressive has been the stability of the starting rotation. That group looked rather thin when the season opened, after a slew of spring injuries forced New York to dig deep into its depth, but guys like Tylor Megill and Griffin Canning have been solid so far.

The Diamondbacks followed up their dramatic ninth-inning victory on Saturday with another come-from-behind win on Sunday. They’re still only in fourth in their division, but their 9-7 record isn’t all that bad. Corbin Carroll is leading the second-best offense in the NL, a lineup that is making do without the injured Ketel Marte.

The 2025 Tigers are a good reminder that prospect development isn’t always linear. Their best hitter over these first few weeks of the season has been Spencer Torkelson; he blasted his fifth home run of the year on Sunday, pushing his wRC+ up to 206. On the mound, Casey Mize has looked excellent, though he was roughed up a bit in Sunday’s start. After spending a few years struggling to establish themselves in the big leagues, these guys finally look like key contributors on Detroit’s roster.

The Mariners may have just turned around their season with a 5-1 week against the Astros and Rangers. On the one hand, the one loss was a 2-1 extra-innings affair against Houston in which they went 1-for-19 with runners in scoring position. On the other, three of those wins came after scoring the winning run in the eighth inning or later. Seattle hasn’t sorted out all of its offensive woes, but the lineup has done just enough to support its excellent pitching staff.

After winning three of four against the Red Sox and splitting a rain-shortened series against the Orioles last week, the Blue Jays find themselves the surprise leaders in the AL East. Bo Bichette and George Springer have bounced back nicely after their down seasons last year, and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. has been solid since signing his massive extension a week ago, though he still hasn’t homered yet this season. If anything, the ups and downs in their division should remind us that the American League is wide open for the taking.

Speaking of the AL East, the Red Sox dropped an ugly series to the White Sox over the weekend; they made five errors in Friday’s 11-1 blowout and then lost in the ninth inning on Saturday. Garrett Crochet’s no-hit bid on Sunday was the only bright spot for Boston. Meanwhile, the Orioles have scuffled to start the season, and their already thin starting rotation grew thinner with Zach Eflin hitting the IL last week.

In last week’s power rankings, I called out the Reds and their offensive woes. Fast forward a week, and Cincinnati suddenly looks like it’s in a much better position thanks to some phenomenal pitching. The Reds cooled off the Giants with a series win in San Francisco and then swept the Pirates over the weekend. Hunter Greene contributed two scoreless starts during the week, and Brady Singer has looked dominant after joining the team in an offseason trade. Shockingly, the Reds are tied with the Mets for the major league lead in pitcher WAR and are second in park- and league-adjusted ERA and FIP.

There have been plenty of surprising hot starts in the NL, but the Angels hold that honor in the AL. They lost their first series of the season last weekend but are still tied with the Tigers for the best record in the AL. Mike Trout is healthy and blasting home runs — already six on the year — but the biggest surprise has been the emergence of Kyren Paris; he’s running a 266 wRC+ with five dingers.

The Twins’ bad start got even worse last week after they lost their series against the Royals and the Tigers. They showed some signs of life on Sunday in a fairly complete win over Detroit to salvage a single win in that three-game set, but that only pushed their record to 5-11. To make matters worse, Minnesota placed ace Pablo López on the IL with a hamstring injury on Wednesday. Thankfully, the Twins have enough starting pitching depth to weather his absence for a short period. More concerning are the slow starts from Carlos Correa and Byron Buxton, the two guys who are supposed to be driving the offense. A home run and a double from Buxton on Sunday pushed his season wRC+ up to 94, but Correa’s mark is still all the way down at 44.

It’s pretty clear already that Sutter Health Park in Sacramento is an offensive haven. Baseball Savant gives the Athletics’ new ballpark a 116 park factor in the early going. That means that 12 of the team’s 16 games have been played in extremely hitter-friendly environments — including a three-game series in Colorado between homestands — which possibly explains why its pitching staff has allowed 89 runs this season, the most in the majors. The A’s offense hasn’t yet benefited from the friendly confines of their new home, though Tyler Soderstrom is off to a hot start and Jacob Wilson has quickly established himself as a favorite for the AL Rookie of the Year award.

The White Sox have climbed out of the cellar and leaped ahead of the Rockies in these rankings thanks to a pair of wins against the Red Sox over the weekend. If you’re looking for a glimmer of hope on the South Side, look no further than Shane Smith. The Rule 5 pick is making the most of his opportunity in the rotation; he threw six innings of two-run ball in his start on Sunday and now has a 2.04 ERA and a 3.00 FIP.

As for the Rockies, they were completely shut out across their three games in San Diego; they have scored a pitiful 40 runs total so far this season. To their credit, they called up Chase Dollander and Zac Veen last week and Adael Amador on Sunday, so at least they’re getting their prospects valuable big league development time. It’s only mid-April, but Colorado is already looking toward the future.

Maybe Walker Buehler will be all right, after all. Through his first two starts with the Red Sox — his first two since nailing down the final three outs of the 2024 World Series with a surprise bullpen appearance on his throw day — the 30-year-old righty had been pummeled, allowing three homers and nine runs in 9 1/3 innings. On Thursday afternoon at Fenway Park, he turned the page, putting on a “pitchability clinic” opposite Toronto’s Chris Bassitt.

Buehler shut out the Blue Jays over his first six innings of work, allowing just four hits without a walk while striking out seven. Bassitt matched him with zeroes until the sixth, when Jarren Duran walked with one out, stole second base, advanced to third on a fly out, and scored on an Alex Bregman single. Buehler departed two batters into the seventh, after he’d walked rookie Will Wagner on four pitches to lead off the inning and retired Ernie Clement on a fly ball to center. When reliever Justin Wilson allowed two hits and shortstop Trevor Story made a throwing error on a potential inning-ending double play, Buehler could only watch from the dugout as the Blue Jays took a 2-1 lead. The Red Sox tied the game up in the eighth, and won 4-3 in 10 innings when Toronto second baseman Andrés Giménez bobbled Story’s grounder with the bases loaded — and, oddly, threw to first base for a meaningless out as David Hamilton crossed the plate.

This was the kind of start the Red Sox envisioned when they signed Buehler to a one-year, $21.05 million deal in January, hoping that he could build upon the great postseason run with the Dodgers that helped him salvage his first season back from his second Tommy John surgery. During the regular season, Buehler pitched to an ugly 5.38 ERA and 5.54 FIP in 16 starts covering 74 innings, and missed eight weeks due to inflammation in his right hip. He showed faint signs of improvement in September, allowing two or fewer runs in three of his five starts, compared to just once over his first 11. Still, had the Dodgers rotation not suffered a variety of injuries and collapses, he wouldn’t have been anyone’s first choice for a playoff start, even given the big-game reputation he’d earned while helping the Dodgers win a pennant in 2018 and a championship two years later. Read the rest of this entry »

Hitting a baseball is an unthinkable accomplishment of timing. In order to strike a ball traveling from the pitcher’s hand to the plate in less than half a second with a slab of wood, a hitter must execute an elaborate sequence of movements on time. When do you lift your front foot? When do you load your hands? When do you fire your hips? It’s a sophisticated choreography; a beat late at any point can doom the swing.

Picture Fernando Tatis Jr. When Tatis is at the plate, he shifts around like a predator stalking its prey, eyes peeled for the exact moment when the pitcher lifts his front foot so that he, too, can get his toe down at the right time, and then his hands up, and then finally the barrel through the zone:

If hitting is such a delicate sequence, conditional on the pitcher’s own timing, it follows that pitchers who mess with that timing can improve their performance; by extension, pitchers who groove their deliveries will underperform their stuff. In an interview with David Laurila in 2017, Jason Hammel described changing his delivery for these precise reasons. Read the rest of this entry »

Ella Black was the first woman to write about baseball for a national publication—if her name was Ella Black, and if she was a woman. On Ella Black: Lost and Found, a three-part scripted series from Effectively Wild, Ben Lindbergh explores what we know about the enigmatic trailblazer and tries to solve some of the mysteries that have surrounded her ever since she debuted—and, just as suddenly, disappeared—in 1890. On Part 1, “Ella’s Legend,” Ben introduces Ella, explains the circumstances that made her so extraordinary, and sets up the stakes of the 1890 baseball civil war.

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Nick Sandlin didn’t get his second save in as many games on Thursday. One day after breezing through three Boston batters on nine pitches, the Toronto right-hander was tagged with a loss after surrendering a pair of bottom-of-the-tenth-inning runs. The ending was anomalous. With the score tied, one out, the bases juiced, and the infield playing in, Sandlin induced a squibbed grounder that was mishandled, allowing a speedy Red Sox runner to score easily from third.

Making the walk-off unique was that Blue Jays second baseman Andrés Giménez, who had no chance to get the runner at home after bobbling the ball, threw to first for a meaningless out. The play went into the books as a 4-3. In other words, the game ended with the winning run crossing the plate on what looks like a routine groundout on the scorecard.

Which brings us to Sandlin, whom I’d decided to write about after his shutdown effort on Wednesday. Protecting a 2-1 lead in the 11th inning, the 28-year-old reliever fanned David Hamilton on three pitches, retired Rob Refsnyder on a pop foul to the catcher, then got Jarren Duran to slap a worm-killer to Giménez. Sandlin’s pitch breakdown comprised two splitters and seven sliders.

A sweeping slider is Sandlin’s bread and butter, and it’s what Refsnyder referenced when I asked him what makes the low-slot hurler so hard to hit. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the acceptable circumstances (if any) for a bobblehead of a team owner, the Grand Junction Jackalopes belatedly embracing their destiny as the “Chubs,” and more, then (29:35) review and discuss the Netflix documentary The Clubhouse: A Year with the Red Sox, followed by a tease for an upcoming Effectively Wild scripted series and (1:26:37) follow-ups.

Audio intro: El Warren, “Effectively Wild Theme”
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Spring is a time of batting stance changes. As players come back from their offseason workouts and sessions with their private hitting coaches, they may have new setups and mechanics that they believe will make them better hitters in the year ahead. Typically, we can notice stance changes right away, but throughout spring training and the first few weeks of the regular season, it can be difficult to determine whether an alteration will have any real impact on a player’s performance. A lot of times, a change can be noise, so filtering through why it was made is critical to understanding its eventual effectiveness. I approach this by thinking about a hitter’s weakness and how the change might address it. In the case of Corbin Carroll, there is a straightforward story to be told that makes me confident his new stance will be impactful in the long term.

Before we get into why Carroll changed his stance from a data perspective, let’s discuss his reasoning behind the change and what it looks like, much of which was reported on during spring training. As Carroll told Alex Weiner of Arizona Sports, his intention with the stance change was to “have a better hand position to fire from.” Carroll has been tweaking his hand position since the second half of last season, but where his hands are now versus then is different, as you can see below in this side-by-side screenshot posted by DBacks Dispatch:

Corbin Carroll has changed his batting stance in spring, he’s brought down his arms and has crouched in a little more pic.twitter.com/MVihuS5I2x

— DBacks Dispatch (@DbacksDispatch) February 24, 2025

My main focus is how he’s shifted his hands forward, closer to his face than they were even after he made his tweak last summer. That change alone puts him in a much different position before his downswing, and therefore, sets him up for a different bat path. Let’s get into why. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

At risk of stating the obvious, Luis Arraez doesn’t strike out often. Since 2022, his first full season and the year he won his first batting title, Arraez has struck out 5.5% of the time. Let me put that into context. As of this morning, the Padres have a 6.0% chance to win the NL West. That means they are more likely to upset the baseball-ruining Dodgers than Arraez is to strike out in any given plate appearance. And that might be underselling his skills. In the second half of 2024, he reduced his strikeout rate even further, going down on strikes just five times over his final 57 games. That included baseball’s first 30-game strikeout-less streak in 20 years. Since the 2024 All-Star break, Arraez has struck out in 1.9% of his trips to the plate. Meanwhile, San Diego’s odds of winning the World Series currently sit at 2.2%. A pessimist might use that comparison to demonstrate that the Padres are long shots; 17 teams have a better chance to win it all. An optimist would counter that every time Arraez strikes out, it’s a reminder that the Padres are still World Series contenders. If that’s the way you see it, well, boy did the Padres get one heck of a reminder on Wednesday afternoon. For the first time all season, Arraez struck out.

It was the top of the ninth. The Padres were up 2-1. The inning began with a base hit by Martín Maldonado. That itself is a rare enough event. No other batter in recorded major league history has taken as many plate appearances as Maldonado (3,888) and has such a low batting average (.204) to show for it. Adding to the unlikelihood of Maldonado’s single, the batted ball had a mere .100 expected batting average, a 1-in-10 chance to be a hit. Yet, third baseman Max Schuemann, who entered the game that inning as a defensive replacement, flubbed the play. The ball slipped right out of his glove. As I watched his ill-fated attempt to retrieve the ball, I couldn’t help but think of my 6-year-old self trying to crossover dribble like Allen Iverson. Neither of us had any control of the ball:

With Maldonado on first, Arraez stepped up to the dish. He was already 0-for-4 with three fly outs, a strange enough day for a player who rarely hits fly balls. Since the day of his debut in 2019, Arraez has taken 2,916 plate appearances. Thirty-nine others have taken as many or more plate appearances in that time. None of them has a lower fly ball rate. But I’m getting off track. We aren’t here to talk about fly balls.

The pitcher on the mound was Justin Sterner, who somehow isn’t the A’s player with the closest-sounding name to a current or former Dodgers third baseman. Sterner, an offseason waiver claim from the Rays, has looked sharp so far in seven games for his new team. He entered this contest with nine strikeouts through his first six appearances. His 10th would be his most impressive yet. Arraez took Sterner’s first pitch, an 88-mph cutter on the upper-inside corner, for a strike. The count was 0-1:

Pitch number two was a 94-mph fastball that Arraez sent straight back into the crotch of catcher Shea Langeliers:

Is it funny when a man gets hit in the family jewels? I’ll let you decide for yourself. What I like so much about this moment isn’t the slapstick, but rather the subtle humor of how awkwardly Arraez behaves in the aftermath. One of my favorite bits from the little-known television comedy Friends is the scene where Ross picks up a lamp. That’s the first thing I thought of when I saw Arraez pick up that baseball. Why was his first instinct to pick up the ball as quickly as possible? I’m truly not sure. Was he worried someone would trip on it? Was he trying to hide the weapon? Or did he simply feel a need to do something, and picking up the ball was the first idea that popped into his head? He’s like a well-meaning but clueless husband trying to offer support while his wife is in labor. But instead of running for ice chips, he decided to pick up a baseball.

Arraez’s next move made more sense, as he went to pat Langeliers on the back. However, the consequences of his earlier actions soon returned to haunt him. He was still holding that damn baseball:

It became something of a dance for Arraez, who went back and forth between comforting Langeliers and dealing with the ball. It’s funny to watch because we’ve all been in that position before, facing a situation where we feel like we should help but there really isn’t much we can do. It’s even funnier in juxtaposition to the physical comedy of a man getting bopped in the beans. It’s certainly funnier than the A’s TV broadcaster suggesting they call the catcher “Shea Pain-geliers,” though perhaps not quite as funny as the Padres announcer blurting out, “They call him Langy!” in response to absolutely nothing (unless he was listening to the A’s broadcast). He just seemed to be reading the name plate on Langeliers’ chest protector because, much like Arraez, he wasn’t sure what else to do.

The third pitch of the at-bat was an 81-mph sweeper in the dirt. It never came close to Arraez, and indeed, he watched it bounce. Yet, seemingly still spooked by what happened on the previous pitch, he made a delayed effort to avoid getting hit. Maybe Arraez thought the ball was going to bounce off Langeliers and hit him in an act of swift poetic justice. That would explain why he shielded his face with his hand as he spun almost 360 degrees to avoid a projectile that did not come anywhere close to his body:

At long last, you’re all caught up on the series of incidents that set the stage for the strikeout. With a 1-2 count, Sterner threw another inside cutter, much like the first pitch of the at-bat. This time, however, he missed his spot badly:

The pitch hit Arraez squarely on his left thigh. Home plate umpire James Hoye called it strike three. The call was correct:

Indeed, there wasn’t anything controversial about it. Even as Arraez stood up and started walking to first base, and even when Mike Shildt came out to discuss the call, I don’t believe either was strong in his convictions. Simply put, it wasn’t close. This wasn’t a case of a batter accidentally bringing his bat around as he tried to avoid a missile hurtling toward him. Arraez began his swing with intention and didn’t even start to pull it back until the ball had already made contact with his body. Some umpires might be holding a grudge against Arraez for disparaging comments he made in spring training, but that’s not what this was. This was a strike:

Throughout his career, Arraez has only swung and missed at 16 of the 930 (1.7%) pitches he’s seen in the waste zone (per Statcast). That’s one-third of the league-average rate. Of the 257 batters who have seen at least 500 waste zone pitches since 2019, only five have a lower swing-and-miss rate than Arraez. It’s not often you’ll see him fail to make contact so miserably. In fact, having watched all 16 of his waste-zone whiffs, I could argue this was the single worst swing decision (category: context neutral) of his career.

Perhaps there was something in the air in Sacramento that day. After all, Maldonado got a hit, and Arraez did not. If that’s not a sign of the apocalypse, I don’t know what is. Supernatural or not, this strange, funny, and painful sequence of events that finally led to Arraez’s first strikeout is exactly why I love writing about baseball.

Oh, and did I mention it was his birthday?