FanGraphs Power Rankings: June 10–16

The National League playoff picture continues to grow each week. There are now nine teams within two games of each other at the back of the Wild Card race and just two teams in the entire league who can convincingly be considered out of the race entirely. That has all the ingredients for a dramatic playoff chase this summer.

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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The Yankees lost their weekend series against the Red Sox, and even though they won three of four from the Royals earlier in the week, their lead in AL East was trimmed to just a game and a half. They’ll host the Orioles, the team chasing them, in a huge three-game set this week. They’re also expected to activate Gerrit Cole from the IL this week, giving them a major reinforcement in time for this tough stretch of games.

The Orioles managed to pull closer to the Yanks by winning their series last week against the Braves and the Phillies. They’ve gone 14-6 during one of the most difficult stretches of their schedule and have matchups with the Yankees, Astros, Guardians, Rangers, and Mariners still to come over the next few weeks.

Maybe the jet lag from their trip to London impacted the Phillies, as they lost both of their series last week, first against the Red Sox at Fenway and then to the Orioles in Baltimore over the weekend. To make matters worse, J.T. Realmuto finally decided to undergo knee surgery after dealing with nagging pain all season long. Because they have such a large lead in the NL East, they can afford to lose their starting catcher for a month or two with the long range view in mind. Thankfully, as one of their team leaders hits the IL, another — Trea Turner — is set to return on Monday.

The Dodgers had an absolutely terrible Sunday despite shutting out the Royals 3-0 to win their weekend series. First, Yoshinobu Yamamoto had to be removed from his start with a shoulder issue. Then, in the seventh inning, Mookie Betts took a fastball off his hand, fracturing it. It’s too early to tell when they will return, but they are expected to miss at least several weeks. Los Angeles has a commanding lead in the NL West but there’s suddenly an opportunity for any one of the Padres, Giants, or Diamondbacks to gain some ground.

The Mariners might have shut the door on the rest of the AL West this weekend after sweeping the Rangers to extend their division lead to 8.5 games, the largest in the majors. They’re now 17-5 against their division this year, the best intra-divisional record in baseball, and they’re also 27-12 at home. In those three games against Texas, Seattle’s starters allowed just two earned runs, both of which were scored in the first inning of the first game of the series on Friday. Luis Castillo, George Kirby, and Logan Gilbert were absolutely masterful, giving fans a taste of what this rotation could be capable of in a short playoff series.

The Guardians and Mariners meet for a big series this week that, although it’s early, could have some implications for AL playoff seeding. Cleveland has been cruising along atop the AL Central for pretty much the entire season, but it has a bit of a gauntlet coming over the next two weeks; the Guardians host Seattle and Toronto this week before heading off to Baltimore for a three-game set and then a big four-game series in Kansas City.

The Brewers continue to find ways to win despite their patchwork rotation that has been wracked by injuries. A big reason why they’ve been so successful is because of their shutdown bullpen, which is still missing its best member, Devin Williams. The rest of the NL Central is a pretty big mess of clubs sitting around .500, so Milwaukee shouldn’t have much trouble getting into the playoffs, but the team will need some sort of upgrade in the rotation if it wants to make some noise once it gets there.

On May 26, the Royals had an eight-game win streak snapped; they’ve gone 7-13 since then and have won just one series during that rough stretch. They couldn’t keep up with the Yankees and Dodgers last week, losing both of those series, and they’re now just a half-game ahead of the surging Twins. For their part, the Twins have won five straight, and Carlos Correa and Royce Lewis erupted for 27 hits and seven home runs between the two of them last week.

Speaking of offensive resurgences, the Braves have scored 28 runs over their last four games and might be looking a little closer to the powerhouse offense we all expected they would be this year. Austin Riley has homered in three straight games, and they blasted nine home runs off the Rays pitching staff last weekend.

This tier has grown enormous. These nine teams are hovering right around .500 and sitting within two games of each other, but only two of them will be able claim NL Wild Card spots — assuming Atlanta maintains its hold on this race.

The two teams who really launched themselves up the standings last week were the Nationals and Mets. Washington ended the week tied for the final Wild Card spot after winning a series against the Tigers and sweeping the Marlins. Expanding our lens a bit to underscore how well the Nats have been playing recently, they have the third-best record in the National League (14-9) since May 24, with six of those 14 wins coming in their eight games against the Braves.

The Mets’ surge has been even more improbable. They won their fifth straight game on Sunday to finish off a weekend sweep of the Padres and are now just a game and a half out in the Wild Card race. Closer Edwin Díaz recently returned from the IL to bolster their bullpen and their offense has been much better this month after a dismal May.

If the Mets and Nats are the teams trending up, it’s the Cubs who are on the way down. Their offense is in such desperate need of a spark that they bunted on three straight plays in a game last week and produced two runs through the effort — yet they wound up losing 3-2 after the bullpen blew the lead. They have the worst record in the NL since the calendar flipped to May and have scored just 3.55 runs per game during this extended slump.

Over in the American League, the playoff picture is a lot more settled. Below the top six teams in the league, the Red Sox and Blue Jays are barely hanging on in the Wild Card race. Both of those teams won statement series last weekend, with Boston beating the Yankees and Toronto surviving a series against the Guardians. The Sox and Jays are set to play each other six times over the next 10 days, each looking to sabotage the other’s summer hopes.

It looks like the Rangers will be getting Max Scherzer back this week from the IL, a stint that was prolonged when he hurt his finger while rehabbing from his back injury. His return couldn’t come soon enough. After getting swept over the weekend by the Mariners, Texas is now 8.5 games back in the AL West and 6.5 out of the final Wild Card spot. When the Rangers entered the season with Scherzer, Jacob deGrom, and Tyler Mahle all on the IL, they were taking a risk that something like this would happen without their rotation at full strength, but I don’t think they expected things to get this bad.

With Kris Bryant’s season — and possibly career — looking like a complete loss because of some unfortunate injury issues, the Rockies need to start focusing on their young building blocks. Luckily, Ezequiel Tovar and Brenton Doyle are showing plenty of life with their bats to compliment their already stellar glovework. Colorado also called up top prospect Adael Amador recently and activated Nolan Jones off the IL last week. The Rockies have an opportunity to play the part of pesky little brother to a beat-up Dodgers squad in a four-game series in Colorado this week.

The White Sox wound up losing three of four to the Mariners last week, but they really made Seattle work for each of those wins. Two of the losses were walk-offs, the third was given away in the seventh, and the lone Chicago victory came in extra innings. But make no mistake: This is a truly terrible team. The White Sox have fielded a roster of position players who have combined for -1.8 WAR this year, a full-season pace of -4.0 WAR. That would make them the least-valuable group of position players since the 1998 Twins (-4.5 WAR). No club has combined for -1.0 WAR from its hitters since the 2003 Tigers (-1.2), who finished 43-119 that season. On the bright side, Luis Robert Jr. has blasted five home runs in 12 games since being activated off the IL; yet fittingly for such a moribund franchise, Robert has struck out in almost half his plate appearances, too.