MLB Postseason Tiers: Which teams are contenders and which ones are just happy to be here

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You don’t need some pointy-headed baseball writer to tell you that the postseason can be unpredictable. The Arizona Diamondbacks won the pennant last year. Every generation gets their perfect example of a team that rides a wave all the way to the World Series, and the 84-win 2023 Diamondbacks are the best possible example.

Unless the team that beat them in the World Series, the Texas Rangers, are an even better example. That team had a bullpen that could allow home runs on their off-days, and it was only getting worse when the postseason started. And, then, poof, they were an asset instead of a liability. As if by magic. October magic. The sickest, freakiest magic of them all.

However, there’s a wrinkle this year. For the first time I can remember, I’m not sure if there’s a team that’s favored to win it all. I’m not sure if you can whittle it down to a group of four or five. It’s possible to poke holes in every single roster. It’s also possible to acknowledge that all of these teams have a shot to win it all even without October weirdness. This is a remarkably even field.

These playoff tiers are less about long shots and favorites and more about how the whole experience will resonate with the teams and their fans if they don’t win it all. Eleven fan bases will be devastated over the next month, but some of them will be more devastated than others.

Tier 5: Aw, raspberries. But what a season! Wait ’til next year!

Detroit Tigers

It seems rude to put them here after how hard they had to work to make the postseason, but it’s impossible to concoct a scenario where a Tigers fan doesn’t remember the 2024 team. Anyone paying attention to the 2024 Tigers right now will remember the team fondly for the rest of their days. Oh, that team from ’24? Golly, that was a fun season. What moxie! What spunk!

On Aug. 4, the Tigers were closer to the A’s than the Royals. I know these factlets can bleed together, but read that one again. That was a few weeks ago. They weren’t in a race, and they weren’t supposed to be. They went 33-15 after that, which was the best record in baseball. That’s impressive enough, but they were also obliterating their opponents, scoring 207 runs and allowing 139, which is the kind of run differential that might translate to a 104-win season over a full season. So are we sure that they’re happy with a participation ribbon?

No, but this is still a roster with perhaps the best pitcher in baseball and two or three hitters better than the league average, which is a difficult roster to ride to a championship. The Tigers have already had a great season, and they can head into the offseason with momentum, sign some missing pieces and everyone will feel good about it. Or they could shock the world and win the whole thing.

Either way, Tigers fans will be happy about the 2024 season on some level.

Kansas City Royals

The Royals lost 106 games last year. They’ve won a World Series within the last 10 years. They’re supposed to be crushed if 2024 isn’t maximum magic?  Just like the Tigers, this season has already been an unqualified success.

Unlike the Tigers, though, the Royals are entering the postseason without any wind in the sails. They should have had an easier path to the postseason with the wins they banked earlier in the year, but they stumbled at the end. Still, they have one of the most dynamic young players in baseball (Vinnie Pasquantino) and they also have Bobby Witt Jr. Their new front office has already exhibited a lot of vision. Their season won’t be defined by what they do in October. It’s already been logged as an incredible success.

Tier 4: The window is still wide open, but, uh, we’re starting to get a little impatient.

Baltimore Orioles

The Orioles are in the sweet spot that every organization wants to be in: They’re young, and they’re contending. They should be contending for a long, long time, with MVP-ceiling youngsters already in the lineup and more on the way. Their rotation is a little top-heavy, and their best pitcher will likely sign with another team in the offseason, but this is a team that’s built to last.

Beware the false sense of security that comes with a young, contending team. Sometimes it works out as expected, and your future is filled with pennants and more. Sometimes it’s more like a slasher film, where players start disappearing, one by one, until there are just a couple left, all they can do is run around and scream. If you think that’s too dramatic, look over the respective rosters for the division-winning 2021 White Sox and the not-division-winning 2024 White Sox. Luis Robert Jr. and Yoán Moncada have locked themselves in the basement and are trying to call for help, but someone cut the phone lines.

So if the Orioles could just get the World Series championship out of the way now, it would certainly take a lot of the pressure off. The window will remain open if it doesn’t happen, but that’s less comforting than you might think.

Tier 3: A pennant would be pretty cool, not gonna lie.

Atlanta Braves

In any other year, the Braves would be in a category where nothing matters but a championship. They were the best team in baseball going into the season, and there was only way for them to consider 2024 a success. Then they were attacked by weasels, sucked into the gears of industrial machinery, pushed into a spiky pit and locked in a steamer trunk being sent to Abu Dhabi, not necessarily in that order. They might have had the preseason favorites for Cy Young and MVP and lost both to injury, yet they’ve still cobbled together a roster that’s good enough to scare other teams, even if it’s far from the roster they were counting on. Not many teams would have been able to do even that.

So, yes, even if they make the World Series and lose, it’ll be a successful season. The Braves would be much happier with a championship, to be sure, but it’s remarkable that they’re even in position for one.

New York Mets

Steve Cohen didn’t kick down the door of the 2022 Winter Meetings and scream, “Come with me if you to win” because he wanted to win a pennant. They’re a championship-or-bust team in theory.

We need to return to the days where people thought that winning the pennant was almost as cool as winning the World Series. There are 28 teams that wish they could have had that kind of success, with the attention of the sports-loving world focused on a city that’s buzzing with an energy that might not be there for the next 10, 20, 30 or 40 years. Heck, it might not come again in your lifetime. Appreciate the World Series when it’s there. Pennants are pretty cool.

Toward the end of May, the Dodgers came into Citi Field and swept the Mets, dropping them to 22-33. It was another lost season for the Mets, another unfulfilled promise from an owner who was supposed to fix things. Even if they get to the World Series and lose to, say, the Orioles or Royals, were you not entertained?

(Can’t lose to the Yankees, though. We can all agree on that one.)

Tier 2: Please. Just one. For the love of all that is holy. Just one.

San Diego Padres

Slowly but surely, the depressing Padres factlets are going away. They went 46 years without a player hitting for the cycle, and then it happened. They went 52 years without a no-hitter, and now they have two, with both pitchers likely to be in their postseason rotation. Their all-time franchise leader in home runs used to be Nate Colbert, with 163. While he was a fine player, that shouldn’t have been a franchise record, especially for an organization that had Gary Sheffield, Fred McGriff, Dave Winfield and Adrián González at different points when they were in their 20s. The franchise record belongs to Manny Machado now, who should only add to it. This is a normal franchise home-run-record situation.

There’s one box left to check, though, and it’s so close, yet so very far. The Padres have never won a World Series, and the last time San Diego has had a championship team was when the Chargers defeated the Boston Patriots for the 1963 AFL title. There are expectations here. Realistic expectations.

With realistic expectations comes the potential for maximum sports pain. Padres fans might be used to it, but that doesn’t make it easier.

Cleveland Guardians

When Willie Mays passed away earlier this year, we were treated with replays of “The Catch” on a loop. His hat falls off. He fires the ball back to the infield. Guys in ties stand up and applaud and say things like, “hokey smokes, good golly.” It’s so familiar and comforting for baseball fans. And so old. It happened so, so long ago. The last time the Guardians won a World Series was before that. That 1954 team might have been the best in franchise history, but they lost the World Series, and it was just the beginning of a long, long drought.

Another way to describe how long it’s been: Hollywood made a movie about Cleveland baseball specifically because the franchise was synonymous with pain and frustration, and they made it so long ago that Alex Cobb was the only Guardians player alive when it came out. He wasn’t even two years old yet.

The White Sox spent nearly a century without a single postseason series win, but they got one. The Cubs finally got one, and they did it at Cleveland’s expense. It’s well past time for the Guardians to join them in the Land of Temporary and Fleeting Bliss. Yet the odds are against them, just like they’re against every team.

Milwaukee Brewers

The Brewers have the most underrated championship drought in baseball, and it’s not close. They were the proto-Mariners back when they were the Seattle Pilots, and they brought some of that malaise with them when they moved east. They’ve been playing in Milwaukee since “Led Zeppelin III” came out, but they have just one pennant, from 42 years ago.

It’s a remarkable team and franchise in so many respects. They have fewer built-in advantages than any other MLB team:

MLB revenue sharing follows something called market score. The A’s, by market score, should have been disqualified. Big city, but no stadium, so they were granted a special allowance to keep receiving it. But that special allowance had an expiration. pic.twitter.com/gQ327nlY5h

— Evan Drellich (@EvanDrellich) September 23, 2024

Their former manager was poached by a big-market bully of a rival. Their biggest financial investment, Christian Yelich, finally started playing at a superstar level again, only to get hurt. They traded their best pitcher to a team they might face in the World Series, in a situation where other teams simply would have kept that starting pitcher.

That plucky, can-do spirit goes only so far, though. If, say, the Yankees or Dodgers don’t win the World Series this year, their fans will be furious and/or despondent. But they won’t have the sense of “is this it?” that teams with razor-thin profit margins and teensy markets will have. The Brewers don’t have a window so much as they have a variety of holes they’ve punched in the drywall. Anything other than a championship will be devastating at this point.

Tier 1: Don’t bother coming home without a championship. Sit in the corner until March and think about what you’ve done.

Philadelphia Phillies

It’s fun to reach the League Championship Series in two straight seasons, but it sure adds to the pressure. The Phillies have an ownership group that cares and a front office that mixes aggressiveness with practicality. That’s the secret sauce that every organization strives for, but at one point it has to work. And by “work,” we mean, “scrape enough residue of design together to get lucky and to win a World Series.”

The Phillies aren’t suffocating under the weight of a century-long curse, but the last time they won the World Series, they did it when you had to close an app to answer a phone call on your iPhone. It was so long ago that people answered calls on purpose with their phones.

Bryce Harper has more World Series plate appearances than Mike Trout, but he has fewer than Pedro Feliz. The Phillies would like to fix that, and they’d also like to get him as many World Series rings as R.J. Swindle. They’ve spent an awful lot of money for that chance.

Houston Astros

If the Astros fail, it will sting less than other recent seasons. They were dead, buried, forgotten and ashamed already this season.  On June 18, they were 33-40 and 10 games out of first place. Have they not already achieved something memorable and great? The season will be remembered fondly, regardless of what happens in October.

Yes. But they’re still the Astros, and they’ve been in every ALCS since 2016, which is an absolutely freaky achievement. They don’t appreciate silver medals and second-place ribbons as gracefully as other teams might. There’s no gee-whiz that comes with a World Series in Houston; they’ve hosted four of them in the last decade. That part of the novelty is gone. It’s about parades down … whatever the famous street is in Houston. Maybe they just close down a 16-lane freeway and party there, not sure. They should do that, to be clear.

If they win this World Series, it will be with more finesse and luck than their other championships, which usually featured brute force and a glut of talent. That doesn’t mean the expectations are lower.

New York Yankees

Don’t take it from me. Take it from Giancarlo Stanton.

Are the Yankees the team to beat in the playoffs?

Giancarlo Stanton: “We’d better be. That’s the point.”

— Bryan Hoch ⚾️ (@BryanHoch) September 27, 2024

Yeah, it was tempting to put the Yankees in the “pennants are neat” category, but let’s not fool ourselves. This is a franchise that will forever strain under the weight of successes that happened decades and decades ago. We’re close to the 100-year anniversary of the 1927 Yankees, which is still used as shorthand to describe one of the greatest sports teams ever assembled. But that team, along with all the others until the 1970s, came together when players’ freedom was limited, other franchises were happy to be de facto farm systems for bigger teams and only one team made the postseason from each league. Continuity was much, much easier back then. It was structurally encouraged.

Without that history, their run in the late ’90s and early ’00s is more analogous to what the A’s did in the ’70s or what the Giants did in the ’10s. It would have been a spectacle that was as unlikely as it was remarkable. Instead, though, it was the continuation of a framework that didn’t exist anymore, one which Yankees are still chasing. They don’t get to high-five each other with a close-but-no-cigar run to the World Series, fair or not.

The Yankees will be a World Series-or-bust team until people don’t remember who Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle or Derek Jeter are. And that’s not going to happen until society collapses and canned beets are the dominant form of currency. So, two months, give or take.

Los Angeles Dodgers

NO PRESSURE. Other than all of the pressure.

The Dodgers committed a billion dollars, give or take, this offseason. They’ll have four no-doubt Hall of Famers on their postseason roster, along with a couple others who have a chance if they keep it up. The most sought-after free agent in the history of the sport chose them because they represented the best chance to fulfill his championship dreams.

And after all the injuries and entropy, here’s what the Dodgers’ rotation currently looks like:

But they’ll make it work! They’ll either hit their way to a championship, or they’ll cobble together enough clean innings from their entire 12-man staff, unless they do both.

And if they don’t, what is the plan? To get another Shohei Ohtani? To develop another Clayton Kershaw? There is no plan with a better chance of success than what the Dodgers have built over the last decade. This has to work.

Baseball doesn’t give a rip about “has to work,” though. There is only chaos and malevolence for the 96.667 percent of teams that don’t win the World Series every year. No pressure, other than all of the pressure.

(Top photo of Juan Soto (left) and Bryce Harper: Chris Szagola / Associated Press)