FanGraphs Power Rankings: September 9–15

With just two weeks left in the regular season, the two Wild Card races look like they’ll be the only source of drama down the stretch. Entering this week, the top team in the closest divisional race has an 87.8% chance to finish in first — that’s the most uncertain winner, according to our playoff odds.

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 Phillies went 5-1 last week, dealt a blow to the playoff hopes of the Mets, and reclaimed the best record in baseball. Their seven-game road trip through Milwaukee and Queens this week is their last big hurdle before the playoffs, and they’ll probably have the NL East locked up in just a few days. Mostly, though, they’ll be looking to earn the top seed in the NL over the next two weeks while ensuring they get to October as healthy and prepared as they can be.

Thanks to the Dodgers’ woes, the Padres have closed the gap in the NL West to 3.5 games with four wins last week, including a dramatic sweep of the Giants. Fernando Tatis Jr. is quickly making up for all that lost time on the injured list, smacking four home runs last week, and Luis Arraez has simply stopped striking out since the All-Star break. San Diego’s remaining schedule won’t be easy: Its cakewalk three-game set against the White Sox is sandwiched between series against the Astros and Dodgers, and then the team finishes the season on the road against the Diamondbacks. The other thing working against the Padres in their push to catch Los Angeles is the clock. With only 12 games left to close the gap entering this week, San Diego has a mere 8.2% chance to win the NL West.

That’s good for the Dodgers, because they now have even more injury woes to worry about. After a setback on Friday, Los Angeles announced that Tyler Glasnow would be sidelined for the rest of the season with an elbow sprain. Thankfully, Yoshinobu Yamamoto looked dominant in his first start off the IL last week, and there’s a possibility that Clayton Kershaw, Gavin Stone, and/or even Tony Gonsolin could rehab in time to make a return during the postseason.

With Jose Altuve and Alex Bregman nursing nagging injuries and Justin Verlander suddenly looking extremely mortal at 41 years old, the Astros are having to rely on the next generation of stars to fuel their postseason run. Houston lost a series to the A’s last week but made up for it by sweeping the Angels over the weekend. That helped the team maintain its position 4.5 games ahead of the Mariners in the AL West. The Astros will try to gain some more ground this week, with series against the Padres and Angels, before what could be a crucial three-game set at home against Seattle to open the final week of the season.

In a battle of two of the hottest hitting teams in baseball, the Brewers and Diamondbacks fought in a fireworks-filled three-game series over the weekend. Arizona barely avoided a sweep on Sunday thanks to a big extra-innings, come-from-behind victory, a win that helped the D-backs put a bit of daylight between them and the Braves and Mets in the NL Wild Card race. Meanwhile, despite Sunday’s loss, Milwaukee has all but officially locked up the NL Central; that’s important, because it has a tough schedule the rest of the way. The Brewers are set to play three games against the Phillies, followed by four more against the D-backs. Then, after a quick three-game trip to Pittsburgh, the Brewers host the Mets to close out the season, giving them a chance to play spoilers in the NL Wild Card race.

Yankees’ fans can all breathe a sigh of relief: Aaron Judge finally broke his home run drought with a mammoth, game-winning grand slam on Friday, and he followed it up with another home run on Sunday. And after winning series against the Royals and Red Sox last week, the Yankees are three games up on the Orioles in the AL East. Though this is the tightest division race in baseball at the moment, New York’s 87.8% divisional odds are the highest they’ve been all season. The Yankees head to the West Coast this week for a six-game, two-city trip against Seattle and Oakland hoping to build an even bigger cushion before they host Baltimore for three games next week.

On Sunday, Brady Singer became the first Royals starter to allow more than three runs in any September start this year. That stretch of brilliant starting pitching will likely carry the team to a surprise postseason berth and should prove to be a huge advantage during October. The Kansas City bullpen is another story. It has been stretched pretty thin lately and was saddled with two losses last week. The Royals begin this week with three games at home against the won’t-quit Tigers, followed by three-game sets against the Giants, Nationals, and Braves to wrap up the regular season.

The Guardians have an opportunity to bury the Twins this week, as the two division rivals meet for four games in Cleveland; more importantly, the Guards need to find some consistency before the playoffs begin. Unless they completely collapse, they’re most likely going to win the division and snag the AL’s second seed, along with the first-round bye that comes with it. The problem is, they’ve been so hot and cold recently that it’s hard to figure out which team will show up when it matters most.

The Mets enter the week tied with the Braves for the final NL Wild Card berth and face a potentially dire injury to their superstar MVP candidate Francisco Lindor. He aggravated a nagging back injury on Friday and had to be removed in the middle of the game on Sunday. Testing will reveal the severity of the situation on Monday, but New York absolutely cannot afford to lose Lindor for any significant amount of time at this point. The Mets play their final homestand of the season this week, beginning with three games against the Nationals, followed by four vs. the Phillies. Things won’t get easier after that, with three games in Atlanta next week.

After such a strong start to the season, the Orioles seem to be falling backward into the playoffs. They’ve lost three straight series and haven’t won a series against a team with a record over .500 since early July. The division race is quickly falling out of reach, and even though they’re not at risk of losing a playoff spot right now, it’s not very encouraging to see them struggle so mightily with postseason baseball right around the corner.

The Braves will have the opportunity to earn a series win against the Dodgers on Monday in the final game of a wrap-around four-game set. Then, they’ll embark on their final road trip of the season through Cincinnati and Miami before returning home in a week to host the Mets. They’re not immune from the late-season injury woes either; Reynaldo López recently hit the IL for the second time in a month with a shoulder injury. It sounds minor and it’s possible that he’ll be ready for a potential postseason series, but Atlanta is going to miss him as it tries to get to that point.

At 6.5 games back, the Twins have little chance to catch the Guardians in the AL Central standings, but they are desperately fighting to hold on to the final spot in the AL Wild Card race. Minnesota activated Carlos Correa and Byron Buxton off the IL over the weekend in the hopes that two duo could spark an offense that has really struggled recently. The latter hit a home run in his first game back, but the Twins still wound up losing the series against the Reds. Now, they have to try and get their season back on track during this week’s seven-game road trip through Cleveland and Boston.

Both the Tigers and Mariners moved a game closer to the Twins in the AL Wild Card race last week, bringing the margin for both teams down to 2.5 games.

Detroit is making this charge up the standings thanks to an admirable effort from its bullpen, which has had to carry a larger workload after the Tigers traded away Jack Flaherty at the deadline. They’ve also dealt with a few injuries in their starting rotation, but it’s all working thanks to an impressive amount of depth and a lockdown trio of guys working the high leverage innings. One of those injured starters, Reese Olson, is just about ready to be activated from the IL, possibly in time to start Monday’s series opener against the Royals. His return could be crucial for the Tigers during their late surge into contention. Also fueling their playoff push is a young lineup that is finally producing runs consistently, led by Riley Greene, Kerry Carpenter, and a resurgent Spencer Torkelson.

It looks like the Mariners have finally figured out their offensive woes, too. They’re scoring 5.36 runs per game in September, their best mark in any month this season. That five-run threshold is critically important since they’re 55-4 this season when they score at least that many runs. Thanks to a simplified approach preached by new interim hitting coach Edgar Martinez, the M’s have the second best wRC+ in the majors this month. Julio Rodríguez has rediscovered his power, Cal Raleigh has been one of the most overlooked stars in the game, and Randy Arozarena has been one of the few midseason acquisitions that’s worked out for Seattle.

It was a valiant effort, but the Cubs’ longshot Wild Card bid was truly put to rest last week after two gut-wrenching losses in Colorado. If there’s a silver lining to this late-season surge, it’s that they’ve seen Pete Crow-Armstrong develop into what looks like a key piece of their core moving forward. They’re set up well to take an even bigger step forward next year.

It looked like the Red Sox were going to figure out a way to stay in the playoff race after winning their series against the Orioles last week, but they ran into a suddenly rejuvenated Yankees ballclub over the weekend and lost three of four. Things are bleak in Boston, but at least according to our playoff odds, all hope isn’t lost yet. Though the Red Sox are 4.5 games out of the third AL Wild Card spot, they have three games this week against the Twins, the team that currently holds that final berth. The problem is, even if Boston takes care of business against Minnesota, there are still two other teams — Seattle and Detroit — for the Sox to leap. If nothing else, they could make things difficult to the Twins. Altogether, Boston enters this week with 2.3% playoff odds.

With three games at home against the Braves, the Reds also have an opportunity to play spoiler this week. Otherwise, these teams mostly play games that could affect playoff seeding or a bunch of games against teams outside the playoff picture. That’s a little disappointing since these are the non-contending teams that are good enough to actually have an impact on the playoff picture.

The moment the Rangers had been waiting for all season long finally came last week: They activated Jacob deGrom and Max Scherzer off the IL and debuted Kumar Rocker all in one weekend. Never mind that Texas is eight games under .500 and completely out of the playoff picture at this point. The defending champions built their roster to take advantage of this moment, only the rest of their roster wasn’t able to hold up its end of the bargain.

The Athletics will begin their final homestand in Oakland on Friday in what promises to be an emotional six games at the Coliseum. At least the roster is looking much more promising than expected — if you squint, you could see how the framework of this current group could be pretty good in a couple years, wherever the A’s are playing. The biggest reason for future hope right now is the fantastic play of Lawrence Butler; his 22-game hitting streak was snapped on Sunday, but he enters this week with a 137 wRC+ and 3.2 WAR on the season. That’ll play.

The White Sox won back-to-back games for the first time since June 29! That said, they’re almost assuredly going to set the record for most losses in modern MLB history, possibly as soon as this week.