North Shore Nine

Forget scoreboard watching in April, let’s do a little January power ranking watching. This morning, the MLB website released its first power rankings for the upcoming 2024 season. I wouldn’t say that there is anything too surprising in the inaugural list. Let’s unpack things a little.

The Top Five

They have the Braves in first place to start things off. I might’ve expected the Dodgers here, but when you consider they’ll be without Shohei Ohtani pitching for the entire season and will be without his bat for a very good chunk, maybe it makes a bit more sense. The Dodgers did land in the second spot.

1) 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.

2) 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.

Reigning World Series champs, the Texas Rangers, come in third. Followed by the Baltimore Orioles and the Philadelphia Phillies. That seems like a pretty fair assessment of the top five teams to me. I could lay out a good argument for the Astros over the Phillies, but Houston is in the sixth spot so it’s a pretty minor quibble.

National League Central

Now we move along to the important part. Where are the Pirates’ peers in the NL Central ranked? Well, the first team comes in at number 13 and it’s the Chicago Cubs. The Cubs haven’t really had the off-season that many predicted so far. I’m not sure I see them as the favorites in the division at this point. Milwaukee comes in next at the 14th position. Another interesting development. They feel like they should be considerably less of a threat in 2024. The Cincinnati Reds land at 15th. I think if I had a vote on this I’d probably have the Reds higher than both the the Cubs and the Brewers. There’s probably a reason that they don’t give me a vote, though. You have to drop down a few more spots to number 18 to find the next NL Central team in the St. Louis Cardinals. I kind of like seeing this after so many predictions of the Cardinals winning the Central again. I’m not sure that I’m ready for that scenario.

2024 Pittsburgh Pirates

Well, now that we’ve gotten all of that out of the way we can get to the important stuff. Where did the Pittsburgh Pirates end up in the first 2024 MLB Power Rankings? They wound up in the 26th spot. Only the White Sox, Nationals, Rockies, and A’s ended up below them. I don’t know that I could really summon a sincere argument against this ranking. I wish that I could. It sucks seeing all of the division basically bunched up together to start the season knowing that if the Pirates put just a bit more effort into it that they could be right there in the mix. It’s a wasted opportunity. I know that there is still time, and maybe they’ll still make the necessary moves to correct this. The clock is ticking, though, and that’s not going to be the case for much longer.