Quick trivia question, trusted readers: How many teams repeated as division champions last year? That’s to say, who won division titles in both 2022 and 2023?
The answer is three. The Braves won the NL East (by 14 more games than they did in 2022), the Dodgers won the NL West (by six games fewer, though still by 16 games) and the Astros won the AL West (in a tie, after winning it by 16 games in 2022). That is par for the course. Here are the number of defending champs to win again each of the previous five years:
2022: Two
2021: Two
2020: Three
2019: Three
2018: Three
So, four out of the last six seasons, we’ve had three repeat division champions, a particularly sticky number when you consider the truncated 2020 season. So as we head into 2024, should we expect to see three again?
Here’s a look at the six division champions from last year, ranked by the likelihood that they’ll win their division again. Repeating: It’s not so easy to do. (Each club is listed with its 2023 record and margin of victory in the division.)
1. Dodgers (NL West)
100-62 (16 games over D-backs)
The Dodgers would be a terrific choice to top this list no matter what they did this offseason, considering they’ve won 10 of the last 11 NL West titles. But, uh, well … the Dodgers have indeed done some stuff this offseason. This 100-win team added Tyler Glasnow, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Teoscar Hernández and a certain two-time MVP named Shohei Ohtani. The best player they lost off last year’s team is J.D. Martinez, who is replaced in the DH spot, of course, by Ohtani.
And it’s not as if the rest of the division made huge steps toward the Dodgers. The Padres don’t have Juan Soto anymore and may lose Blake Snell, too. The Giants finished under .500 and saw top free-agent targets Ohtani and Yamamoto pick the Dodgers instead. The D-backs have made some additions to a team that did go to the World Series last year, but they are also a team that finished 16 games behind Los Angeles.
The Dodgers ran away from everyone in this division last year, they got tons better in the offseason and no clear NL West challenger has emerged. It was not difficult to rank them No. 1.
2. Braves (NL East)
104-58 (14 games over Phillies)
You can tell how confident the Braves are about their ability to reach the playoffs in 2024 by their offseason approach. They didn’t make big, sweeping, change-the-foundation-of-your-team moves. Rather, they made tweaks. These are the sort of transactions that won’t make much difference over the course of a 162-game season but could make all the difference in a short series in the cold of October. You probably can’t count on Chris Sale for 200 innings anymore, but for 15 innings with everything on the line? Not a lot of guys you’d like out there more.
The Braves have won six straight division titles, but they’ve never won their division by as many games as they did in 2023. With their core in place, they’re clearly not reinventing the wheel here. They’ll face steeper division competition than the Dodgers will, if just because the Mets’ 2024 season can’t be nearly as difficult as their 2023 was, and the Phillies will be extra motivated after their NLCS loss to the D-backs. But there’s a reason everyone was chasing the Braves a year ago. It’s the same reason they’ll all be chasing them again this year.
3. Astros (AL West)
90-72 (Won tiebreaker with Rangers)
Speaking of streaks, the last full season in which the Astros didn’t win the AL West was 2016, which was Alex Bregman’s rookie season. It has been a while.
There have been signs that the Astros’ grip on the division – and, really, the whole AL – may be loosening, though. First there’s the fact that their division (and intrastate) rival, the Rangers, just won their first World Series after beating Houston in a seven-game ALCS. But the core of this team remains as strong as any in baseball: Altuve/Bregman/Alvarez/Abreu/Tucker is a gauntlet for any…
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