FanGraphs Power Rankings: September 16–22

The final week of the regular season is upon us and most of the division races are pretty much decided, if not officially wrapped up. Thankfully, the two Wild Card races should provide plenty of drama over the next seven days.

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.

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The Padres won five games last week to push three games ahead of the Diamondbacks and Mets for the first NL Wild Card spot and just three games back of the Dodgers in the NL West. San Diego and Los Angeles are set to face off three times at Dodger Stadium this week, beginning Tuesday. The Padres are the only second-place team with a greater than 1% chance to win the division. It won’t be easy, because even if the Friars take care of business against the Dodgers, they close out the regular season with a three-game set in Arizona over the weekend.

Shohei Ohtani just completed what could very well be the best week ever produced by a big leaguer; not only did he found the 50/50 club with an epic performance on Thursday, he added two more home runs and four more stolen bases over the weekend to bring his season totals to 53 homers and 55 steals. In total, he collected 16 hits, six home runs, 15 RBI, and seven stolen bases last week. After hosting San Diego for three games with their 11th division title in 12 years on the line, the Dodgers head to Coors Field this weekend for three games against the last-place Rockies.

The Diamondbacks blew an 8-0 lead on Sunday afternoon to lose to the Brewers, denying them a chance to mop the four-game series in Milwaukee. That loss meant they ended the week tied with the Mets in the Wild Card standings, which ratchets up the stakes for this final week of the season. Eugenio Suárez continues to rake and Ketel Marte launched home runs in three consecutive games over the weekend, but the Snakes will need all hands on deck to maintain their playoff position.

While it wasn’t the smoothest ascent to the top of the AL West, all the Astros need to do to clinch the division is win one of their three home games against the Mariners this week. Fortunately, Houston may have “dodged a bullet” after Yordan Alvarez injured his knee on Sunday, though his status is unclear as of this writing.

The Yankees survived their six-week slump this summer and now need to win just one of their final six games to clinch the AL East. After a bit of a slowdown earlier this month, the bats of Aaron Judge and Juan Soto woke up a bit last week. This team will go as deep in October as those two will carry it.

After sweeping the Nationals and winning three of four from the Phillies, the Mets are completely in control of their playoff destiny. They travel to Atlanta this week looking to completely bury the Braves in the standings and secure their surprise spot in the postseason.

It doesn’t bode well that the Phillies faced two playoff teams last week — the Brewers and Mets — and came away with just two wins in seven games. With the division all but locked up, perhaps they were just taking it easy before the postseason begins. After their hot start to the season, their up-and-down second half hasn’t bred a ton of confidence in their ability to cruise through the early rounds. Still, Philadelphia is filled with veterans who have engineered deep playoff runs two years in a row; the Phillies should be fine.

The Brewers became the first team in the majors to clinch their division last week, so I suppose you could excuse the series loss to the Diamondbacks over the weekend. The dramatic come-from-behind victory on Sunday was a nice way to show that they still have a lot of fire within them. They’ll need it as they seek their first postseason series victory since 2018.

The Guardians are in a weird spot: They’re not consistently good enough to fit in the second tier but they’re clearly above the fray of teams in the Wild Card race. Still, after their disappointing season last year with largely the same cast, they clinched the AL Central on Saturday, their fifth title in the last nine seasons.

If the AL Wild Card race hadn’t been so dramatic over the past few weeks, we’d probably be paying more attention to the Orioles’ fall down the standings. As recently as September 10, they were just a half game back in the AL East; now, they are one loss or one Yankees win away from having to settle for a Wild Card berth. Baltimore’s pitching staff has had plenty of issues during the second half of the season — things got so bad in the bullpen, they opted to release Craig Kimbrel instead of hoping to fix him before the playoffs. In more positive news, the O’s just activated Jordan Westburg off the IL on Sunday, they’ll hope he can provide a spark as they crawl their way into the playoffs.

If you’re looking for drama this final week of the season, look no further than the AL Wild Card race. Against all odds, the Tigers have surged into a playoff berth and are currently tied in the standings with the Royals and a game ahead of the Twins. They did it by sweeping the Royals last week and then taking two of three from the Orioles in Baltimore. That’s a pretty stiff challenge and shows just how good Detroit has been during this late-season hot streak. With three-game series at home against the Rays and White Sox, the Tigers have the weakest schedule of the four teams fighting over the last two Wild Card spots.

The Royals have now had two separate seven-game losing streaks over the past month. Sure, there was a 7-2 stretch sandwiched between those skids, but Kansas City is on the verge of tripping right as it reaches the finish line. The Royals have three games against the Nationals in Washington, followed by three weekend games in Atlanta that should be crucial for both teams. Buckle up.

After losing both games of their Sunday doubleheader against the Red Sox, the Twins are out of a playoff position for the first time since April. They’re barely hanging on, and their only saving grace has been the simultaneous collapse of the Royals. Luckily for Minnesota, it holds the tiebreaker over Kansas City, Detroit, and Seattle; this could definitely come into play in such a tight Wild Card race. The Twins host the Marlins and Orioles this week.

Don’t count out the Mariners just yet either, though some agonizing mistakes last week really hindered any progress they could have made in the standings. Sunday’s loss was perhaps the most glaring; leading the Rangers 5-0 after 5 1/2 innings, Seattle gave up four runs in the sixth and another in the seventh before ultimately losing on Marcus Semien’s walk-off single in the ninth. It was just the fifth time all season that the Mariners lost a game in which they scored five or more runs. For as bad as things have been since mid-July, when they squandered a 10-game divisional lead in record time, the Mariners enter this week just two games out of the final Wild Card berth and five games back in the AL West standings. Seattle faces long odds to reach the playoffs, let alone to retake the division, but it’s not impossible. The Mariners head to Houston for three games against the Astros before ending the season at home against the A’s.

Over in the National League, the banged-up Braves are still alive in the Wild Card race. They are two games out of the final spot with six to play, including three at home against the Mets, one of the two teams ahead of them in the Wild Card standings. Atlanta needs to take two of three from New York to hold the season-series advantage that would settle a potential tie, and it already holds the tiebreaker over Arizona. Things aren’t great for the Braves, but if they start winning again this week, they should find their way in.

The Reds surprisingly fired manager David Bell on Sunday night, less than a year after signing him to a contract extension that runs through 2026. They “felt a change was needed to move the Major League team forward,” said GM Nick Krall. “We have not achieved the success we expected.” Maybe a new voice in the clubhouse is needed, but the reality is that injuries and Noelvi Marte’s suspension played major parts in the team’s underperformance. Even so, things aren’t too bleak in Cincinnati, where Elly De La Cruz has continued his ascent and should receive down ballot MVP votes this season. Of course, the real sticking point is the amount of investment the Reds will receive to improve the rest of their roster. That’s not something a new manager will be able to solve.

The Giants succeeded in playing spoilers last week, winning two of three against the Orioles and then sweeping the Royals over the weekend. San Francisco has one last shot to reprise its role this week with a three-game series in Arizona, beginning Monday night.

Of all the teams in this huge tier, Toronto seems like the club that’s most likely to bounce back with a good season next year. The Blue Jays opted to hang onto all of their big stars at the deadline, and they did manage to play a little better during the second half of the season. Still, the roster isn’t without holes, and they’ll need a healthy season from Bo Bichette to reach their full potential.

The Rockies were so close to winning a pair of series against the Diamondbacks and Dodgers last week. Back-to-back home runs from Shohei Ohtani and Mookie Betts secured the walk-off victory on Sunday and forced Colorado to settle for a single win in that weekend series. The Rockies have another crack at Los Angeles next weekend.

While James Wood has adapted to major league pitching pretty quickly, Dylan Crews has taken a little longer to make the adjustment to the big leagues. The Nationals aren’t on the verge of breaking out of their rebuilding cycle just yet, which means Crews has some time to acclimate. Unfortunately, All-Star shortstop CJ Abrams, the other young member of their core, was optioned to the minors over the weekend reportedly after breaking curfew for an all-nighter at a casino before a day game in Chicago. Not a great look for someone who is supposed to be leading the team into its next contention window.

With their 120th loss of the year on Sunday, the White Sox tied the 1962 Mets for the most losses in a season since the founding of the American League in 1901. Barring a miraculous turn of events, they will go down as the worst team in modern MLB history. But hey, look on the bright side: Even if they lose their final six games, they still won’t lose as many games as the 1899 Cleveland Spiders!