The Dodgers moved a game closer to the Giants last night, holding off Atlanta while their rivals fell to Milwaukee a day’s drive up the coast. It put Los Angeles a game and a half back of San Francisco for the best record in baseball, with Tampa Bay sandwiched in between.
The question of which team is the best in baseball is a tricky one. On the one hand, you could go with record to-date, especially in a sport where the sample size is well over 100 for each contender. You could also go with expectations, though—who would, on a given night, be the favorite. Then, of course, uniquely to baseball, there’s the starting pitcher consideration. With future Hall of Famer Max Scherzer on the mound, the Dodgers are better than anybody. When little-hyped prospect Mitch White’s out there, they aren’t going to get as much love in betting markets. And all of this has yet to mention strength of schedule, where the Rays’ place in the American League East makes a compelling case for their accomplishments as the most impressive thus far.
For whatever it’s worth, FanGraphs’s Depth Charts projection system grades the Dodgers as the best team in the sport by a good length, followed by the Yankees, Astros, Red Sox, and then four more teams—two of which are unlikely to make the playoffs—before you get to the Rays. This is an on-paper rating, but it’s the kind of thing used to rather accurately predict on-field results, and as one looks ahead to October, it’s worth keeping in mind.
THAT SAID.
Betting markets are high on the Rays. As of this morning, the Rays were the American League favorites over at Bovada, not far off of the Dodgers in World Series probability. FanGraphs doesn’t think much of a roster whose best pitcher, on paper, has an ERA of 4.57 so far this season and isn’t expected to pitch much better than that. But if you flip their Playoff Odds from its preferred projection method to one based solely off of season-to-date stats, it grades the Rays as more championship-likely than any other team in the sport.
The Rays have long been one of baseball’s most efficient franchises, figuring out ways to win without massive revenues and often with a dearth of All-Stars. But the way they’re winning this year is informative. It’s not that they’re sneaking out a lot of close games. It’s not that they’re getting lucky in high-leverage situations. It’s that as a whole, their team is outperforming expectations by magnitudes, enough to raise that World Series probability we referenced in the last paragraph from 7.8% to 18.1% when you flip to season-to-date stats.
Who’s the best team in baseball? You could say it’s the Giants. You could say it’s the Dodgers. There’s a good case to be made that it’s the Tampa Bay Rays.
