The American League will be quite interesting this coming MLB season. While there are a couple teams at the top, there are many teams that will fight for just a few playoff spots.
Doing MLB rankings is always a difficult task, especially during this time of the year where rosters are far from being solid. Trades are still being made, and free agents like Jose Bautista, Jason Hammel, and Mark Trumbo are still on the market. Teams that are on the bubble, or even teams at the top or bottom, have the ability to change their roster how they see fit. In this final month before pitchers and catchers report, rosters will start to become less fluid. Until then, this is the best ranking possible with the current rosters. Teams can certainly still move up and down depending on the players they lose or add in the next month or so.
With that said, the American League is especially interesting when it comes to rankings. There’s a clear top two in the league. There’s also a clear bottom three or four with teams that are rebuilding and don’t plan on winning all that many games in the coming season. In the middle there are ten or so teams that could all compete for the three remaining playoff spots.
Parsing out which of those ten teams ranks higher than the others was incredibly difficult. This also means that each one of those middle teams has a pretty easy path to adding enough to get themselves into the playoffs if they wish to do so. It also means that, because of the early nature of these rankings, that they’re bound to be wrong in at least once place. However, this ranking can give us a good idea of how things will shake out in the American League this season.
One final note before the rankings begin is that these were based solely on current rosters, but possible ways for each team to improve in the next month and half before spring training are also included. For example, the Astros currently sit at the top of the middle group of 10 teams. If they were to add a starter like Jose Quintana, or even Jason Hammel, their chances to be a sure-thing playoff team certainly increase. These things are certainly worth mentioning in a ranking that is coming so far before any baseball has been played. Therefore another caveat is obviously that these rankings are just based on the team on paper. As we’ve seen many times, teams can surprise us by coming together at the right time or having a fantastic record in one run games like the Rangers did a season ago. This accounts for none of that. With all this said, let’s get into the actual rankings.