By the Numbers: MLB Power Rankings, Week 4

Disregard Evan Longoria and the Rays at your own peril.

Brandon Jennings leads the Bucks to an improbable 3-2 series lead over the Atlanta Hawks. Alex Ovechkin gets bounced from the Stanley Cup playoffs by a ragtag Canadiens squad. It’s an exciting time to follow basketball or hockey, right?

But who cares? There’s baseball to talk about!

In 2007, I came up with a way to rank all 30 MLB teams statistically. It correctly identified the Boston Red Sox (who won the World Series) as the strongest team that year. It also ranked the Colorado Rockies fourth, as they made a shocking run to the Fall Classic. I’ve made some tweaks and modifications to the formula over the last few years, and it tends to provide an accurate picture of the strength of each MLB team.

The major statistic driving the formula is scoring margin, which tends to be a more accurate predictor of a team’s ability than wins and losses. I also factor in a team’s home and away records, as well as their strength of schedule. There’s a big difference between beating the Yankees in New York and beating the Pirates at home, so we take that into account. Put it all together and you get a score, usually ranging between 1 and 10. An average team (one who scores as many runs as it allows) will generally score around 5.5. A team contending for a championship will typically score 9.5 or higher, while a very poor team will score lower than 2.

Scores will be updated weekly, as well as comments on any noteworthy teams. Let’s get to it.

These numbers probably don’t mean much at first glance, so I’ll run you through them. The first thing we notice is that there is some extreme inflation at both ends of the scale. The Rays are an excellent team, but a score over 15 is unheard of. Same thing at the other end; the Pirates aren’t great, certainly, but they aren’t the nuclear wasteland that a score of -7 would indicate. That’s because we’re still only about 20 games into the season, so we’re still dealing with a small sample size. As teams play more games, games they win or lose by ten runs won’t matter quite as much.

That said, the scores from the Rays and the Pirates are eye-opening. The Rays’ record (16-5) is the best in the majors, but it doesn’t quite reflect just how good they’ve been. Through just 21 games, the Rays have scored 59 more runs than their opponents, or nearly 3 more runs a game. That’s not just good, that’s world-conquering. If Tampa can keep that pace up, this metric projects them to win an astounding 131 games. Are they likely to keep up such a blistering start? Probably not, but even if they fall back to half of that scoring pace, they’d be on track to lead the majors comfortably.

And what of the Pirates? They don’t even have the worst record in their division (that honor goes to the Houston Astros), yet their score is so abominable as to make the Detroit Lions blush. How do you explain such an awful score for a team with a 9-12 record? Simple – despite that decent record, they’ve been outscored by an eye-popping 77 runs through just 21 games. That’s a scoring differential that would suggest a record of just 2-19. They’re even worse than the Rays are good at this point; if they can keep this pace up for a full season, they project with just 15 wins, which is fewer than the Rays already have. Yikes. It doesn’t help that they’ve played the league’s weakest schedule so far (with a .446 winning percentage). Just imagine when they start playing tougher competition.

Looking at the top of the chart, we see a clear divide between good teams and title contenders. If we use 9.500 as the cutoff for contenders (and stretch that to include the Mets, after whom we see a steep drop), we’re looking at 8 teams battling for the World Series. Some were expected to contend, like the Yankees, Phillies, Rockies, and Cardinals. Some weren’t, like the Giants, Twins, and Mets. Meanwhile, other preseason darlings are struggling, like the Red Sox, Braves, and Angels.

It’s still early in the season. Teams at the top now could hit a wall and regress, while others could get hot and shoot up the charts. With another 140 games to go, anything could happen.

But it’s still interesting to get a feel for where things are right now.