FanGraphs Rankings of Best Teams: 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 loo…

Tier 2 – On the Cusp of Greatness

Tier 3 – Solid Contenders