The first three weeks of the baseball season have already flipped the board. The Twins, Athletics and Rays are sitting in first place, while the Cubs, Mets and Astros are buried near the bottom, and the usual order has been scrambled in ways few preseason forecasts saw coming.
No team has pushed that surprise harder than the Dodgers. FanGraphs projected 98 wins before the season, PECOTA had them at 105, and they have played at a 126-win pace through the opening stretch even with Mookie Betts limited to eight games, Blake Snell missing entirely and Tommy Edman unavailable. The fast start has been built less on perfect health than on a roster still overwhelming opponents while several key pieces are absent or uneven.
That is why these early mlb power rankings look so different from the preseason scripts. Three weeks is not a season, but it is enough to show whether a team is simply hot or whether the shape of the club itself was misread. The Dodgers fit the second category. So do the Twins, who were expected to finish with only 79 wins, stumbled to a 1-4 start and then won eight of nine games before finishing a four-game series sweep against the division-rival Tigers. They are now in first place with a plus-17 run differential, a number that says their standing is not built on smoke alone.
The Padres are making a similar case in the National League West, even if they still trail the Dodgers. Before the season they were expected to land almost exactly at.500, then lost four of their first five games. In April, they surged after the calendar turned, a run helped by a sweep of the Rockies and interrupted only by a loss to Paul Skenes. Kyle Tucker has not been very good, Edwin Diaz has not been very good, and the Giants have been poor enough to add to the sense that the early standings are still sorting out reality from noise.
There is one corner of the league where the standings may be telling a harsher truth. The Braves were supposed to be in the thick of a three-team race in the NL East, and they are the only club in the division living up to that billing. The Phillies and Mets have both fallen short of expectations, with the Mets in last after three weeks, while the Red Sox are dealing with their own unrest after fans chanted “sell the team” during a home loss the same day the White Sox swept the defending AL pennant winners. The first month has not settled anything, but it has already shown which teams are forcing the models to catch up and which ones are asking for another look.
