2024 MLB Baseball Preseason Predictions: Rankings, Win Totals, Projected Standings

2024 MLB Baseball Preseason Predictions: Rankings, Win Totals, Projected Standings

Preseason MLB predictions for 2024 including team rankings, win totals, projected final standings, playoff odds and World Series odds.

March 26, 2024 – by Jason Lisk

Mookie Betts will be joined by several more stars in L.A. in 2024 (Wilfred Perez/Icon Sportswire)

This article lays out all of our preseason MLB team rankings, ratings and projections for 2024, including our MLB projected standings, MLB postseason seed projections and various projection details such as final win-loss records, playoff odds, and World Series champion odds.

Now that they are published, all of our MLB projections will update every morning to reflect the latest game results and our most up-to-date MLB power ratings.

2024 MLB Baseball Season Details

The 2024 MLB season gets underway on March 20, 2024, with the Dodgers and Padres playing in South Korea. The rest of the league officially starts on March 28th, with the regular season concluding on September 29th.

These are our projections as of the beginning of March. With some key free agents still yet to sign, we may update the projections after the Seoul Series, and just prior to the full season start, if necessary.

UPDATE: March 26, 2024

Based on free agent signings and injuries after we initially published this post, we made the following preseason rating changes on March 26th, 2024.

These ratings changes are not reflected in the article below, but most of them result in a change of less than one projected win.

+0.15 — San Francisco Giants+0.05 — Chicago Cubs+0.05 — Pittsburgh Pirates-0.05 — Boston Red Sox-0.05 — New York Yankees-0.05 — Miami Marlins-0.05 — Milwaukee Brewers-0.10 — Chicago White Sox

How We Create MLB Preseason Ratings

For football and basketball, we use our own data and models to come up with independent estimates of team quality. We then compare our numbers to the betting markets and to other leading projections, and make final adjustments.

We treat baseball a bit differently. So far, at least, our methods for projecting MLB aren’t as cutting edge compared to our approaches for other sports and compared to other leading analytics sites that focus exclusively on baseball.

So rather than creating our own preseason ratings, we instead base our initial MLB projected standings on a weighted average of betting market info and projected standings from other well-respected sources.

Our Baseball Ratings Process

First, we first combine projected season win totals from the betting market and other leading sites like Baseball Prospectus into a consensus win total projection for every team.

Then, we p out what preseason team ratings would have generated those exact same season projections—a bit of reverse engineering. We publish these inferred MLB team ratings, so that our users know what preseason rating we used in our projection system for every team.

Just be aware that we haven’t done the same level of research on MLB preseason ratings as we’ve done for other sports, so we’re not confident in the utility of these projections for making preseason bets.

A Seemingly Narrow Win Distribution For MLB Projections

You may look at the 2024 MLB projections below and think that they aren’t extreme enough. For example:

Only two teams are projected with at least 93 winsOnly four teams are projected for fewer than 72 winsHalf of the teams have win total projections in the 80.0 to 89.9 range

In a way, you’d be right. When the dust settles at the end of the 2024 MLB season, there will likely be several division winners (and maybe a wild card team or two) that have won more than 95 games. Some of the teams projected in the large upper-middle class of wins will have collapsed, while others will have become contenders.

Besides the heaviest favorites, though, if a team wins that many games in 2024, it’s going to be because things have gone better for them than anyone should have reasonably expected. And picking which teams will wildly exceed their consensus expectations is rather tricky (and risky).

On average, these more conservative predictions may end up being quite wrong for some teams, but the overall accuracy of the system should be better than if we made several bold calls on a handful of teams to far exceed or fall short of the consensus opinion of several smart predictors.

More Details on 2024 MLB Projections

If you’d like to see our more aggressive best case and worst case scenarios for each team, check out their team projections page. Here are the Los Angeles Dodgers projections and the Oakland Athletics projections as examples.

Click through to find a chart showing the projected odds of the Dodgers or Athletics winning any specific number of games in 2024.

From the details in the Athletics’ chart, you can determine that as of the preseason, we project about a 33% chance for Oakland to win fewer than 55 games in 2024.

The team projections detail page also includes a list of each team’s toughest and easiest games, and a table showing how their odds of winning the World Series change depending on what seed they get in the playoffs.

Highlights of 2024 MLB Preseason Rankings & Projected Final Standings

The Texas Rangers were last year’s World Series Champion, as a young team came together and surged in the playoffs, even though their key offseason pitching addition, Jacob deGrom, missed most of the year. They also did so despite a late slide that dropped them into a Wild Card slot, as the Rangers went 90-72 in the regular season.

The Atlanta Braves (104 wins), Baltimore Orioles (101 wins), and Los Angeles Dodgers (100 wins) had the best regular season records, but all three lost in their first playoff series.

Who’s At The Top of MLB in 2024?

The Dodgers and Braves were the two highest-rated teams last year, and both won at least 100 games. Both are back as our two biggest favorites this year.

The Dodgers in particular made several noteworthy acquisitions. Shohei Ohtani signed with the Dodgers, as did Japanese League star pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto. The team also traded for P Tyler Glasnow and signed OF Teoscar Hernandez in free agency.

Los Angeles has underachieved in the postseason recently, but has 211 wins over the last two years. You have to go back to 2018 for the last time the Dodgers failed to win 100 games in a full 162-game season.

In the AL, no team is projected higher than Houston at 92.6 wins. The New York Yankees are looking to rebound after a disappointing year that saw them miss the postseason entirely, and have the second-highest win total projection (92.4) in the AL.

Projected Standings Highlights

Some other highlights of our 2024 MLB projected standings:

The National League has the top two teams in our power rankings, but the American League has seven of the next eight teams.We again see that the Central Divisions are weaker. No teams are in our top 10, and only St. Louis, Minnesota, and the Cubs are in the top 15.The Tampa Bay Rays had the second-best record in the AL last year with 99 wins, but are projected 10th overall in power rating, and for 84.2 wins this year. Milwaukee is the other big expected decliner, projected 4th in the NL Central after winning it with 92 wins last year.The two biggest expected improvements are in the Show-Me State. Kansas City finished with 56 wins last year, second-lowest in all of baseball, but is projected for a 16.8-win improvement toward respectability. Meanwhile, St. Louis had its worst winning percentage (71-91, 43.8%) since the 1995 season, but is expected to bounce back with a projection over .500 this year.

2024 MLB Projected Playoff Results

Just for kicks, here is how the 2024 MLB postseason would play out, if our 2024 preseason projections are spot on and our higher-rated team won each series.

Note that the numbers below refer to each team’s playoff seed within their league, NOT our preseason ranking. For instance, even though we’d have Minnesota getting the No. 3 playoff seed in the AL based on win-loss record, our ratings still see the projected No. 6 seeded Blue Jays as the better team.

Remember that the MLB playoffs were expanded in 2022 to add a sixth team in each league, and the top two division winners get a bye past the Wild Card Round.

Wild Card Round:

No. 6 Toronto Blue Jays over No. 3 Minnesota TwinsNo. 4 Baltimore Orioles over No. 5 Texas RangersNo. 6 Arizona Diamondbacks over No. 3 St. Louis CardinalsNo. 4 Philadelphia Phillies over No. 5 Chicago Cubs

Division Round:

No. 1 Houston Astros over No. 4 Baltimore OriolesNo. 2 New York Yankees over No. 6 Toronto Blue JaysNo. 1 Los Angeles Dodgers over No. 4 Philadelphia PhilliesNo. 2 Atlanta Braves over No. 6 Arizona Diamondbacks

League Championship Series:

No. 2 New York Yankees over No. 1 Houston AstrosNo. 1 Los Angeles Dodgers over No. 2 Atlanta Braves

World Series:

No. 1 Los Angeles Dodgers over No. 2 New York Yankees

Full Preseason 2024 MLB Projected Standings

Finally, here is a summary of our 2024 preseason projections for all AL teams:

American League
AL East	overall W	L	TR Rank	Playoffs	Win Div	Top Seed	WS Champs
NY Yankees	92.4	69.6	3	80.8%	43.0%	23.5%	9.1%
Baltimore	88.9	73.1	5	66.7%	25.4%	12.8%	5.2%
Toronto	86.7	75.3	7	56.4%	17.0%	7.6%	3.6%
Tampa Bay	84.2	77.8	10	44.8%	11.4%	4.4%	2.3%
Boston	78.3	83.7	19	19.6%	3.2%	1.0%	0.6%
AL Central	overall W	L	TR Rank	Playoffs	Win Div	Top Seed	WS Champs
Minnesota	85.3	76.7	13	59.7%	51.2%	5.8%	2.8%
Cleveland	80.1	81.9	21	32.7%	23.7%	1.8%	1.0%
Detroit	78.6	83.4	23	26.0%	18.3%	1.0%	0.7%
Kansas City	72.8	89.2	26	9.0%	6.0%	0.1%	0.1%
Chi Sox	64.1	97.9	28	1.1%	0.7%	0.0%	0.0%
AL West	overall W	L	TR Rank	Playoffs	Win Div	Top Seed	WS Champs
Houston	92.6	69.4	4	81.7%	52.9%	24.8%	8.6%
Texas	87.9	74.1	8	63.0%	27.2%	10.5%	4.2%
Seattle	85.9	76.1	9	52.5%	18.9%	6.6%	2.8%
LA Angels	72.0	90.0	25	5.8%	1.1%	0.2%	0.1%
Oakland	59.2	102.8	30	0.2%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%

And for all NL teams:

National League
NL East	overall W	L	TR Rank	Playoffs	Win Div	Top Seed	WS Champs
Atlanta	100.5	61.5	2	97.1%	81.0%	38.1%	20.6%
Philadelphia	88.2	73.8	6	67.5%	14.0%	4.0%	3.8%
NY Mets	81.0	81.0	15	33.1%	3.3%	0.7%	0.9%
Miami	78.4	83.6	20	22.1%	1.6%	0.3%	0.5%
Washington	64.3	97.7	27	0.7%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%
NL Central	overall W	L	TR Rank	Playoffs	Win Div	Top Seed	WS Champs
St. Louis	84.4	77.6	12	51.6%	33.4%	1.2%	2.0%
Chi Cubs	83.9	78.1	14	48.6%	30.5%	1.4%	1.8%
Cincinnati	81.1	80.9	17	35.5%	20.2%	0.7%	1.0%
Milwaukee	77.9	84.1	22	21.8%	10.6%	0.1%	0.5%
Pittsburgh	74.1	87.9	24	11.6%	5.2%	0.0%	0.2%
NL West	overall W	L	TR Rank	Playoffs	Win Div	Top Seed	WS Champs
LA Dodgers	102.4	59.6	1	98.5%	89.2%	50.7%	24.3%
Arizona	83.8	78.2	11	46.5%	5.3%	1.6%	1.7%
San Diego	81.0	81.0	16	33.3%	2.7%	0.6%	0.9%
SF Giants	80.9	81.1	18	32.0%	2.8%	0.6%	0.8%
Colorado	58.9	103.1	29	0.1%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%