BtB Power Rankings: Through Wednesday, September 9th, 2009

Welcome to our weekly ranking of all the MLB teams!  In this ranking, we use aggregate team hitting, baserunning, pitching, and fielding statistics--not team wins, losses, runs scored, or runs allowed--to evaluate the performance of teams to date.  You can think of the estimated winning percentage (eW%) below as how we'd expect things to fall out if we threw teams with these aggregate statistics into one big league and let them battle it out for thousands of games.  They don't replace your actual standings, but they give you something different to consider when thinking about team performances.


The table is sortable if you click in the header.  All data are park-adjusted when possible.  A legend is below the table, followed by commentary.

Beyond The Boxscore Power Rankings

Offense
wOBA (park-adjusted, includes BPro's baserunning data)
wRC (wRC from FanGraphs, with baserunning removed, then park adjusted)
BRR (Equivalent Base Running Runs from Baseball Prospectus)
eRS (estimated runs scored) = wRC + BRR

Defense
Pitching = tERA and tRns are a home-brew version of Graham MacAree's statistic.
Fielding = Fld: average of bUZR (from FanGraphs) and THT's batted balls statistic (converted to runs)
eRA (estimated runs allowed) = Pitching - Fielding

The Rest
eW%lg = estimated winning percentage within the specific league (AL or NL).  Compare this to true winning %!
LgAdj = league adjustment (bonus to AL teams, penalty to NL teams, because the AL has superior level of play)
eW% = estimated winning percentage if all teams were in one league (after league adjustment)

Methods provided in more detail in the first post in this series

Team Leaders (asterisks indicate teams improving in specific ranking):

American League

Offense (wOBA): Yankees, Angels*, Rays
Pitching (tERA): White Sox, Red Sox, Royals*
Fielding (Fld): Mariners, Rangers, Rays

National League
Offense (wOBA): Marlins*, Phillies, Dodgers
Pitching (tERA): Rockies, Braves*, Dodgers
Fielding (Fld): Giants, Reds, Dodgers

"On Paper" Playoff Leaders (asterisks indicate new leaders):

American League: E=Yankees, C=White Sox, W=Rangers*, WC=Rays
National League: E=Phillies, C=Cardinals, W=Rockies, WC=Dodgers

This Week's Movers

Two stories this week in power ranking land.  First, St. Louis has been rolling, winning 25 of their last 31.  Even though only six of those games have been won by 4 runs or more, they've been shooting up our charts.  Last week, they took over the NL Central.  This week, they shot up six slots and are now ranked as the third-best team in the National league, behind only the Rockies and Dodgers.  In part due to the relative paucity of competition in the NL Central, they now have the largest actual-games division lead of any team in baseball.  The Cardinals are going to the playoffs!

On a personal note, I got a chance to see the Cardinals last Saturday at the Baseball Prospectus event at PNC park.  It was something of a disappointment at first--Pujols, Holliday, and Molina were all given the day off.  But a well-pitched game by Ross Ohlendorf and an equally competitive outing by Mitchell Boggs sent a 1-1 game into extra innings.  At that point, Pujols pinch hit in the top of the 10th.  That guy's really good at baseball.

Second, the Rangers rode an 8-2 stretch to edge in front of the Angels, at least on paper.  Texas currently faces a 4.5 game deficit, which will be hard to overcome with less than a month to play.  But I wouldn't count them out just yet.