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With every team in Major League Baseball having played between 69-73 games right now, we’re quickly nearing the halfway point of the season. There’s a strong foundation upon which to judge who the contenders are, but we’ve seen changes.
The Braves and Orioles all but left themselves for dead at the beginning of the season, but are now trying to resurrect. The A’s looked like contenders for a quick second and then squandered everything. The Mariners built a decent lead in the AL West and have now allowed the Astros to grab control. The Blue Jays, Rays and Red Sox let the Yankees build a huge lead in the East before deciding to get hot and become major players in the wild-card race.
Along the way, the top tier in baseball hasn’t been just one or two elite teams. There’s a group of strong contenders which hopefully means the playoffs will be unpredictable and exciting. We’ve had five different No. 1 teams here in Power Rankings this season already (Dodgers, Phillies, Padres, Mets, Tigers) while two more (the Cubs and Yankees) have been awfully close multiple times.
As things stand right now, the top tier is much bigger than many thought it would be, because it isn’t just the Dodgers. Yes, the Dodgers are in the mix, but they aren’t the obvious best team running away with their division. In fact, the NL West is the closest division in baseball. It was tied heading into Saturday. The Dodgers now have a two-game lead over the Giants and it’s three games over the Padres.
The Tigers have had the best record in baseball a decent number of days at this point. They started with three losses in Dodger Stadium, but went 18-9 in April and 19-9 in May. They did just lose a series this weekend, but it was the first one they lost since May 22-24. They only lost two series in April, two in May and just the one so far this month. It’s just a consistently great team on pace to top 100 wins.
The Mets have also been pretty consistently great. They haven’t had a longer losing streak than three all season and though they were just swept this past weekend series, that came on the heels of a six-game winning streak.
The Phillies have been up and down. They’ll look like the best team in baseball for swaths of time but also just went through a stretch where they lost nine of 10. Still, they are on pace to win 96 games. The Phillies haven’t won 96 in a season since winning 102 in 2011.
The Yankees have very clearly been the best AL East team — and second-best American League team — all season. The lead has shrunk to 3 ½ games, but that’s still a leg up.
The Cubs have had just one three-game losing streak and that’s the only time all year they lost more than two straight. They’ve been in first place since April 4 and have built a 5 ½-game lead. They’ve done so despite their top two pitchers falling injured (though Shota Imanaga is coming back soon).
That makes six teams on pace to win between 96 and 102 games. Only one team won 96 last season. We haven’t seen six teams get there since 2019, when a record-tying seven teams won at least 96 games (1999 and 1977 also had seven 96-win teams). Remember how wild those 2019 playoffs were? And the World Series champion only won 93 that year. That means we could be looking elsewhere for our champ.
A short step below the big boys in 2025 is a tier that includes teams like the Astros, Giants, Padres, Blue Jays and Rays. All have looked excellent at times, which means they’ve shown enough good to believe getting hot at the right time in October could well mean a World Series title. Teams like the Brewers, Cardinals, Diamondbacks, Twins, Reds, Guardians, Red Sox and Mariners have also shown themselves capable to be included there when they are playing well.
Even the Orioles (six back in AL Wild Card) and Braves (eight back on NL side) have crawled to a spot in the standings where a playoff run isn’t totally off the table.
The only teams that aren’t truly sitting with at least a sliver of hope for the season are the Rockies, White Sox, Pirates, Marlins and A’s. We might be safe to loop the Nationals in at this point, but that’s still a very short list when we’re nearly halfway through the season.
And at the top, there are a lot of top-level ballclubs.