I am right there with you. The standings are showing one thing, and the instinct says there are teams that are better than the standings show. We all see teams sitting pretty on the strength of a soft May and a hot two-week stretch, and the record treats that exactly the same as a team that’s actually built to win in October. Wins are wins, but not all of them come from the same place, and if you’re trying to figure out who’s actually good instead of who’s just been lucky, the record alone won’t get you there.
I wanted to get past the noise of the media of which team to watch for the postseason. I used a calculation to grade every team in baseball, measured on three things that tend to predict who keeps winning. The questions I wanted to see answers to were how well a lineup hits relative to the league, adjusted for park; how well a pitching staff prevents runs once you strip out the noise of balls falling in for hits or getting run down that shouldn’t have been; and how much value the defense adds on top of both, independent of who’s on the mound or at the plate.
I checked it for both leagues. The names at the top mostly aren’t surprises. What’s underneath them is.
In the National League, there’s a team riding one of the best defensive seasons I’ve ever put a number to, and using it to paper over a rotation that grades out as one of the shakiest of any contender in baseball. There’s a team that traded its actual ace over the winter and still runs the single best pitching staff in the league by the numbers. And there’s a team most people would reflexively pencil into a top five right now that doesn’t make the cut at all.
The American League told an even stranger story. We know the three teams from the same division that took three of the top spots outright. One team’s best hitter has been out since May 31 with a fractured rib and the club is still winning almost entirely on the strength of its rotation. And the team that made me want to write this in the first place traded away two of its top three starters, including a pitcher a lot of people would call the best in baseball, inside a single week at the deadline, and still didn’t fall out of the top five.
The full top five for the National League is up now, with the exact order, the numbers behind every team, and the case for each one. So is the American League. Both go into the model in full: the metrics I used, why I weighted things the way I did, and where a few teams surprised me enough that I had to double check my own math.
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