Rankings over Who’s on top to began with a relevant task of the year.
Congratulations, you’ve made it to 2024. Baseball is that rare professional sport that takes place entirely in one calendar year. So, if you were unhappy with how 2023 went for your team, that’s all in the past. And if you were happy … well, now you get to cheer for your team to go do it again.
What better way to turn the calendar page than with our first Power Rankings of 2024. There are plenty of moves still left to be made before Spring Training, but the biggest names, those two Japanese superstars, have signed with, of course, the same team. But just because the Dodgers have added Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Tyler Glasnow does not make them No. 1 atop these rankings.
Here are the inaugural 2024 MLB.com Power Rankings. We now all get to start all over again.
Braves
However excited you may or may not be about the additions of Chris Sale from the Red Sox and Jarred Kelenic from the Mariners, our voters didn’t overcomplicate things: The team with the best record (by far) in 2023 tops the Power Rankings to kick off 2024. And why not? They still have the MVP in Ronald Acuña Jr. They still have Matt Olson, Austin Riley and Ozzie Albies following him in the order. They still have a terrific rotation and they still have, well, they still have just about everybody back from a team that won 104 games in 2023. This is a team that is built to win right now. And win, without question, is something they will do very much of in 2024.
Dodgers
There is a sense, both inside baseball and out, that the Dodgers are somehow indestructible now that they’ve signed the best baseball player in the world and brought in two top-shelf starting pitchers. But this is still a team, for all its success, that has won as many World Series in the last 35 years as the Reds, Royals, Nationals and D-backs. The Dodgers do not have titles as some sort of birthright. The team’s urgency to win a Series that didn’t take place in the truncated 2020 season is one of the primary reasons they have been so aggressive this offseason. This team wants to win a World Series as badly as its newest superstar Ohtani does. They’ve spent hundreds of millions of dollars to try to get one. But as dozens of other teams in baseball history can tell you, that guarantees absolutely nothing.
Leave a Reply