As you can see, the rankings are pretty scattered as far as the points are concerned, especially near the top. That will all begin to normalize a bit as we progress further into the season.

The three teams at the top all have five wins but the most surprising of the three is obviously the Colorado Rockies. They’ve allowed the fourth fewest runs in baseball so far but I’m not sure how much longer it remains that way.

A couple other teams that are in the top 10, which are surprising to see there, are the Boston Red Sox and the Minnesota Twins.

The Twins don’t look like much more than a .500 team, at best, as they’re currently constructed — especially with the patch-work rotation and suspect defense at the middle infield positions.

With the Boston Red Sox, I don’t know if surprised is the right word as anyone can get off to a good start and fall with a rapid descent as the season wears on but these guys actually look good playing together. There aren’t many people who were picking them to do much this season but if they continue to play with the confidence that they have been, and the rotation holds together of course — depending on what’s up with John Lackey, then I think they could be a team that surprises many this year. Not sure if that would lead to a playoff berth or not but they certainly don’t look like a team capable of finishing last in the American League East at this point.

For Baltimore Orioles fans I’m sure everyone expected them to do more a bit more, or less depending on your view of the team, but it’s still early and a 3-3 start isn’t something they can’t “recover” from. The crazy thing with them, up to this point at least, is that the offense has been scoring runs like they’re about to go out of style and the pitching staff wants to give up good leads like they’re tax write-offs or something. Through this first week, at least, the offense is tops in baseball and the pitching staff needs to get it together.

Further down the rankings we have the New York Yankees and the Toronto Blue Jays. The Yankees are still trying to figure their roster out with so many injuries to key players (Curtis Granderson and Mark Teixeira being two of them) and the Blue Jays are trying to gel as a team with all the new additions. It’s early enough that we shouldn’t count any of these teams out of anything just yet.

There are two teams at the bottom that I’m very surprised with though — the Pittsburgh Pirates and their single digit runs scored and the Milwaukee Brewers who want to give runs up to anyone wanting them. Some teams we are already pretty confident are going nowhere and the rankings show that, the Miami Marlins are a good example of that, and then there are others we weren’t really sure what to make of heading into this season, the Cleveland Indians and the Kansas City Royals are good examples of that, which are floating around the middle of the pack after this first week.

Expect a good bit of movement when next week’s rankings come out as teams begin to get into the swing of things and those who have gotten off to fast starts may fade. That’s the beauty of baseball.

The post MLB Power Rankings – Week 1 appeared first on Baltimore Sports and Life.

Is this the year in which the New York Yankees don’t qualify for the postseason and money truly can’t cure what ails them at the deadline?

The Boston Red Sox traded away their veterans with horrendous contracts only to replace them with other, slightly worse, veterans which they overpaid for but over a shorter period of time. Is it enough to keep them out of the basement in the American League East?

The Toronto Blue Jays happily accepted the Miami Marlins core players, whom they lost many games with in that new stadium of theirs, with the hopes that they’ll perform better with them in a tougher division.

The Houston Astros are now calling the American League West home and it’ll be interesting to see if they win 60 games in a tougher division and league.

I could continue to go on but that’s not what this piece is about, this piece is actually about power rankings. I will be bringing you power rankings every week (Mondays), with exception of this preliminary one, with a ranking formula that I developed myself. Here is the formula I use to calculate these rankings:

((W/L)*Strength of Schedule)/(RA/G / RS/G)*100

To show the results of this formula I present to you the final rankings from the end of last season, which are also my rankings for Opening Day simply because no games have been played yet and all we have to go on is past performance. I prefer not to use my opinion or own natural, yet unintentional, bias when putting together weekly rankings so that was my reasoning behind developing this.

I’m showing you how I calculate my power rankings because I want you to know what it is I’m using, or deeming important, when evaluating team performance. These rankings aren’t going to dramatically change from one week to the next because a team goes 4-1 in a week while another goes 1-4 or anything like that. These rankings are based on cumulative performance up to that point in the season and will continue that way until the end of the regular season.

As always, you can reach out to me on twitter @BSLLanceRinker or send me an email at Lance.Rinker@baltimoresportsandlife.com with any questions, comments, or feedback.

The post Opening Day MLB Power Rankings appeared first on Baltimore Sports and Life.