Pitching Grips

It seems like every team is dealing with serious injuries to start the season. Maybe that’s why there isn’t much daylight in the standings yet. Every team has won at least six games so far, with most clubs huddled right around .500. Our power rankings use 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 ranking format 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...