The week two MLB Power Rankings are here and some things are starting to normalize, somewhat at least. The Atlanta Braves are dominating everyone right now and there is absolutely no doubt that they are the best team in baseball currently. American League East cohorts, the Boston Red Sox have jumped up to number two in this week’s power rankings and I’m starting to believe that they may be a good bit better than many of us thought. Pretty sure I said that last week as well but they are only reinforcing that thought.

Week 2 MLB Power Rankings 2013

Matt Cain and the San Francisco Giants have had the toughest schedule, up to this point, but are climbing up the rankings — going from 20th to 4th. This is a team that has been getting some solid contributions from their offense and their pitching staff has been a little up and down. I can only imagine how good they’ll really be once Tim Lincecum is dominating again and then the rest of the rotation gets into a rhythm.

Could we be looking at the New York Mets as the surprise playoff contender this season? With Matt Harvey completely dominating opposing batters and their offense putting up a touch over six runs per game on average it’s certainly possible. It’s still too early to say for sure but if, and it’s a big if in my opinion, they continue playing with the confidence on offense they have been then I wouldn’t be shocked if they were still in it come September. The biggest question mark for them will be their rotation and whether they’ll be forced to call up Zack Wheeler before they want to.

Our other AL East counterpart, the New York Yankees have been a hard team to figure out so far because there are games in which they look old and decrepit and  then other games they look really good. That triple play they turned against the Baltimore Orioles isn’t as impressive as some analysts have made it out to be though as they were greatly assisted with a base running blunder by Manny Machado.

A few other things I want to point out about the Yankees are that Ichiro Suzuki looks done and Kevin Youkilis does not, although Youk does look really weird without the facial hair. Their pitching staff is still their strength but the offense is still pretty hit or miss for me.

Orioles fans have been a bit disappointed by the play of the team and their 6-6 start but don’t worry, they’ve been in most of those losses and I’m getting the impression that the AL East will end up being more of a dog fight than in years past. They’ve yet to really get anything going as they’re 2-2 in the four series they have played so far but Adam Jones and Chris Davis are still murdering the ball.

Pittsburgh Pirates fans are probably rejoicing right now though because the team got off to such a poor start and couldn’t even buy a run, but they’ve turned it around and have scored 32 runs over the past week whereas they only scored eight during the first week of the season. I’m also happy with that turnaround because I selected them in our season predictions to snag a wild card.

The Toronto Blue Jays and Tampa Bay Rays are having an even more difficult time sustaining any kind of winning effort and the Blue Jays also just suffered the loss of shortstop Jose Reyes. He is out for roughly three months with a severely sprained ankle and you have to wonder just how well he’s going to recover from that. The Rays on the other hand just can’t score consistently enough on offense to bail their pitchers out when they get into trouble.

Lance Rinker
Lance Rinker

Lance is the Managing Editor for Konsume, a crowd-sourced news platform driving passionate journalism.

In addition to his work on BSL, you can find Lance’s extended portfolio at his profile on Konsume and you can follow him on Twitter.

X