There are 30 teams in Major League baseball, all with their own strategies, hopes, and expectations. But it doesn’t mean that all 30 are on 30 different trajectories, either, because you can look at them and come up with groups. You can place them in tiers, as we’ve done in the past.
To that end, we’ve split them into nine different tiers, attempting to group together teams in similar situations for 2024. These aren’t strictly based on playoff odds or projected records, though of course there’s a lot of that in here; it’s hard to do a ranking like this without considering team quality, so these tiers are roughly – though not exactly –“best-to-worst.”
But it’s mostly about expectations, about feelings, about where exactly each team is – and where they’re going this season. These are the nine tiers of contenders in 2024.
The Braves and Dodgers certainly aren’t the only two teams going into the season with hopes of winning the World Series, but they might be the only two with expectations so high that any outcome that doesn’t end with a ring will be a disappointing one – and since they can’t both come out of the National League, at least one of them is guaranteed to find unfulfilled dreams.
Yet while the expectations may be similar, the way they got here is not. The Dodgers made a seemingly endless number of big, loud moves this winter, the kind you surely remember. (We’ll remind you anyway: Aside from Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto, they imported James Paxton and Teoscar Hernández, plus brought back Clayton Kershaw, Jason Heyward, Ryan Brasier and Joe Kelly.) That was all necessary given how much talent they’d lost from a 100-win team that somehow couldn’t staff enough starters for three NLDS games against Arizona, but it also makes the expectations wildly high – perhaps unattainably so, especially with the unexpected need to move Mookie Betts to shortstop.
Meanwhile, the Braves made a somewhat complicated series of moves that ended up with them taking on money yet not clearly improving, depending on how you feel about A) the spring struggles of Jarred Kelenic and B) how likely it is that Chris Sale, who has looked strong in camp, stays healthy. That said, it hardly matters; this is a team coming off back-to-back 100-win seasons, and you could argue that their best hitter and their best pitcher might both be even better this year, as we outlined for Ronald Acuña Jr. Put it this way: Atlanta is so good that the Dodgers can’t even claim to be clearly the best team.
Tier 2: World Series or bust
The defending champs and three 90-plus win teams make up the second group, comprising the teams that aren’t quite the Braves and Dodgers, but absolutely have their sights set on making it to the World Series – as three of these four have done in the past two seasons.
Tier 3: Making the postseason is the minimum bar to clear
We have the defending National League champs, a 99-win team, and also the defending AL Central champs here. As you’d expect, these clubs all have good-to-strong postseason chances, somewhere in the 45-60% range, and while you could rightfully argue that isn’t meaningfully different from some of our Tier 2 clubs, remember that this isn’t a strict recounting of projections.
We’ve kept this group separate because while they should all be competitive or better, we think they either have more questions or lower expectations than the group above.
For example, consider the Blue Jays and Twins, who each lost some star-level players (Matt Chapman, Sonny Gray) without doing a whole lot to replace them, and each now has to deal with injuries to multiple pitchers, including their closers. They’ll still be good, because they both have some top-level talent, especially if Vladimir Guerrero Jr. rebounds and if the Twins’ young trio of bats (Edouard Julien, Royce Lewis, Matt Wallner) prove they can do it over a full season. There’s just more uncertainty here…
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