FanGraphs Power Rankings: March 27–April 6

The regular season has gotten underway and we’ve already seen a few teams get off to some surprising starts. The NL West looks like it’s shaping up to be the most competitive division in baseball. Meanwhile, the Braves inspired Michael Baumann to reference Biblical plagues in the headline of his piece on their woeful first week.

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.

All power rankings stats, including team records, are updated through Sunday’s games. The rest of the information below is current as of Tuesday morning.

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The Dodgers didn’t lose their first game of the season until Friday and yet find themselves looking up at the Giants in the NL West standings after the first week and half of the regular season. That entire division has gotten off to an incredible start, but while the success of San Francisco and San Diego is a relative surprise, I think everyone expected Los Angeles to be atop the standings. Being in second place with a 9-2 record is nothing to worry about at this point, but the injuries to Blake Snell and Freddie Freeman are definitely a little concerning.

The Phillies handed the Dodgers their first losses of the season last weekend and have an opportunity to really bury Atlanta in the standings this week. Jesús Luzardo has looked unhittable in his first two starts with Philadelphia, further strengthening a rotation that was already one of the best in baseball. You can’t win a division in April, but the Phillies are already well positioned to defend last year’s NL East title.

The Rangers have surged out to an early lead in the AL standings and it’s mostly thanks to a solid starting rotation and a better-than-expected bullpen. The offense hasn’t started clicking yet, but Texas has been scoring just enough runs to win five one-run games so far. Jacob deGrom is healthy, Nathan Eovaldi threw a Maddux, and the Rangers’ rebuilt ‘pen is locking down the later innings. If they can keep all this up, it’s scary to think about what they will look like when their boppers start hitting.

The Giants and Padres have been the two hottest teams in baseball to start the season. San Francisco has been thriving with some hot hitting and excellent defense, and it currently holds the best record in the majors. As for San Diego, the Friars ran into a little trouble in Chicago last weekend but fought back to avoid a sweep on Sunday. Is the success of either team sustainable? It’s way too early to tell, but it’s definitely a good sign that Jackson Merrill, now a very rich man, is hitting .378/.415/.676 with three home runs to start the season.

If you can look past all the torpedo bat hullabaloo, the Yankees are scoring lots of runs with a barrage of homers. Unlike last season, when he had a 94 wRC+ and just three home runs over his first 100 plate appearances, Aaron Judge is off to a scorching start; across his first 10 games, Judge has a 242 wRC+ and six dingers. What’s more encouraging are the four homers and .297/.366/.703 slash line from Anthony Volpe. A breakout from the young shortstop would be a huge boon to an offense that’s already extremely potent.

After slogging through an opening series loss to the Rangers, the Red Sox rattled off five straight wins last week to get their season back on track. And after going hitless during the first five games of the season, Rafael Devers collected 10 hits during that five-game win streak, putting aside any lingering concerns about his shoulder. Boston was also busy off the field last week, locking up Garrett Crochet and rookie Kristian Campbell to long-term extensions.

Not only are the Diamondbacks looking up at the Giants, Padres, and Dodgers in the standings, they’re also facing a lengthy absence from Ketel Marte, their star second baseman whom they had just signed to another extension. His absence puts some pressure on Arizona to find ways to keep up with the hotter clubs in the division. Luckily, Corbin Carroll and Eugenio Suárez have gotten off to strong starts at the plate.

The start of the season has been an absolute disaster for the Braves. They finally won their first game of the season last Friday but still own the worst record in baseball at 1-8. On top of those ugly results on the field, they’re also having to navigate the suspension of Jurickson Profar for PED use and an ominous-sounding shoulder injury to Reynaldo López. It’s far too early to panic because Atlanta has the returns of Spencer Strider and Ronald Acuña Jr. to look forward to in the near future, but the team desperately needs some positive results against the Phillies this week.

After dancing around the final number this offseason, the Blue Jays finally signed Vladimir Guerrero Jr. to a massive long-term extension on Monday, essentially guaranteeing he’ll finish his career in Toronto. That’s a huge weight off the franchise’s shoulders, and now comes the hard part of actually building a contender around Vladito. The Jays have gotten off to a decent start, though a sweep at the hands of the Mets last week put a damper on things. They’ve got a particularly tough schedule ahead of them; a seven-game road trip through Boston and Baltimore followed by series against the Braves, Mariners, Astros, Yankees, and Red Sox again.

After getting crushed by New York to start the season, the Brewers went 5-2 last week thanks in part to the red hot bat of Jackson Chourio. Unfortunately, they had to place Nestor Cortes on the IL after his second start of the season, which means Freddy Peralta is the only healthy member of their starting rotation right now. None of the injuries seems all that serious, but Milwaukee will have to make do with a patchwork pitching staff for the time being.

Since breaking out in 2021, the Mariners’ path to success has always been razor thin thanks to a bunch of half measures to support their young core. It worked out in ‘22 when they broke their playoff drought, but it’s caused them to come up just short in the two years since. The story’s the same this season; a spring injury to George Kirby has forced Seattle to scramble to cover the fifth spot in the rotation, and an unfortunate shoulder injury to Victor Robles in Sunday’s loss means the lineup will be missing a dynamic playmaker for a while. The pressure is on this week as the M’s host the Astros and Rangers in an early test of their mettle.

The Reds lost three straight 1-0 games in a row last week, a surprise given that two of those games were played at home in the tiny confines of Great American Ballpark. Don’t lay the blame at the feet of Elly De La Cruz, who despite his 97 wRC+ has made some notable adjustments to his stance, cut his strikeout rate, and put up eye-popping contact numbers in the early going. Instead, look to the lingering hamstring injury that’s kept Matt McLain off the field for four games, or the choice to have Spencer Steer play through a shoulder injury, or the more serious injuries to Tyler Stephenson and Austin Hays. Cincinnati’s lineup won’t be this bad for the entire season, but the team needs to turn things around soon if it wants to stick around in the hunt for the NL Central crown.

Ahead of Opening Day, I lambasted the Rockies for slipping back into their bad habit of prioritizing playing veterans over their young prospects. It only took them a week to realize the error of their ways; they called up Chase Dollander to make his debut on Sunday and will be calling up Zac Veen to make his debut on Tuesday. Between those rookie debuts, the exciting play from their established youngsters, the health of Germán Márquez, and maybe a breakout from Hunter Goodman, there are now more reasons to watch baseball in Colorado than there were just a few weeks ago.

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