BBMI MLB Power Rankings, Week of July 1
All 30 teams ranked by schedule-adjusted BBMI Score, with real week-over-week movement since June 24 and the changes worth explaining.
BBMI Research Desk
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July 1, 2026
Week of 7/1
Today is July 1, which means somewhere in the mail is a check for $1.19 million made out to Bobby Bonilla, a man who last played for the Mets in 1999. Rather than pay him the $5.9 million they owed in 2000, the team deferred it at 8 percent interest and agreed to cut him a check every July 1 through 2035. It is the most famous bad valuation in sports: a number that looked fine on the surface and was quietly disastrous once you accounted for what it was really worth. There’s a wrinkle the internet is convinced of, too: the Mets’ owners were reportedly invested with Bernie Madoff at the time and anticipating the kind of returns that would have made deferring Bonilla’s money look shrewd — right up until the fund turned out to be a Ponzi scheme. We can’t verify the front office was banking on Madoff to cover the tab, but it’s the version of the story the internet has decided is true.
Fitting, then, to talk power rankings, because most make the same mistake. A win over the Rockies counts the same as a win over the Dodgers, and the standings pretend that shouldn’t bother you. The BBMI Score takes a team’s banked wins, projects the rest of the schedule off the current roster, and corrects for the strength of the opponents already beaten. BBMI is the ranking; Talent is the lens beside it, what a healthy roster is worth record-neutral. When they disagree, that gap is usually the whole story. This week the top two held serve and the entire middle of the board rearranged itself, with one eight-spot fall doing most of the talking.
The full board
| # | Chg | Team | BBMI | 6/24 | Δ | SOS | Talent | Record | L15 |
|---|
Top of the board
The Dodgers (0.889) and Brewers (0.843) held first and second and both nudged up, and the Dodgers are the only team over the record line while carrying a top-three-hardest schedule. Nothing is hiding here: the best record, the toughest slate, and the best roster (.641 talent) all point the same way.
The interesting move at the top is a team that fell without really moving. The Yankees slipped only one spot, 3rd to 4th, but their BBMI Score dropped −0.053, the largest fall on the entire board, on the back of a 4-11 cold streak. A one-spot rank change is hiding a real collapse, and the only reason it was one spot and not four is that the teams behind them had quiet weeks. The Braves (▲1) stepped over them into third almost by default — though, not to say we told you so, our recent Running Hot, Running Cold piece pegged Atlanta as the single most regression-prone team on the board, the widest full-strength gap of all 30, and a 4-11 last-fifteen is precisely what that projection looks like arriving.
−.053
The movers
Marlins ▲6 (16th to 10th). The biggest jump on the board, and the score backs it: +0.025 BBMI on an 11-4 last-fifteen, second only to the Cubs’ 12-3 for the hottest stretch in baseball. This is the model finally crediting a run it had been discounting. The caution is built into the .491 Talent: a roster this ordinary posting one of the league’s hottest stretches is worth watching for a give-back, but for now the results earned the climb.
White Sox ▲5 (21st to 16th) and Rangers ▲4 (11th to 7th). Both real score gains (+0.023 each), and the Rangers’ is the more meaningful because it happened inside the top half against a positive-SOS schedule the model usually docks. The White Sox jump is the noisier of the two, a .460 Talent doing a lot of climbing, so it is the one more likely to reverse.
Blue Jays ▼8 (10th to 18th). The fall of the week, and it is not close. A −0.044 BBMI drop dumped Toronto out of the top ten and most of the way through the middle. The Talent column (.532) still likes the roster more than the ranking now does, which frames the question: the Blue Jays got repriced hard on a bad stretch, and either the roster pulls them back up or the model was right to stop believing the earlier record. This is the board’s loudest talent-versus-record disagreement.
Orioles ▼5 (19th to 24th) and Athletics ▼4 (17th to 21st). The other side of the churn. Both shed real score (−0.036, −0.021) and both carry the profile the model punishes: middling rosters whose records were living on schedule luck. The Orioles’ +0.8 SOS says the wins were coming against soft competition, and this week the correction collected.
Biggest movers — rank change since 6/24
Spots gained or lost this week · the churn is all in the middle of the board
Up in green, down in red. The Blue Jays’ eight-spot fall is the loudest single move on the week.
The non-mover worth naming: Cubs, 12-3 and going nowhere. The hottest team in baseball held at 8th and gained a rounding-error +0.005 in BBMI. That is the model declining to chase the streak on purpose, and this is the clearest case on the board of why the schedule correction exists. The 12-3 is real, and a series win in Milwaukee against the second-ranked Brewers is a genuinely good result. But strip that series out and the rest of the run came against the Giants (25th), Mets (26th), Rockies (29th), Padres (17th), and Blue Jays (18th). You don’t apologize for beating the teams on your schedule, but the model isn’t going to mistake a hot stretch against the bottom of the league for a new tier. A .493 Talent plus a soft-schedule streak reads as exactly what it is. If the Cubs are for real, the score will come to the record as the competition stiffens. It hasn’t yet.
The watch list (talent vs. record)
Tigers (19th, .562 Talent, 38-49). The widest roster-over-record gap on the board, and unlike most gaps this one has a name: Tarik Skubal. The .562 Talent, sixth-best in baseball, reflects a rotation projected forward with a healthy Skubal, who just returned from injury. The 38-49 record reflects the months the Tigers played without him. That is the gap in one sentence: the model is pricing the roster they’ll have the rest of the way, not the one that banked the losses. As long as Skubal is healthy and still in Detroit past the trade deadline, the expectation is that the record climbs toward the talent and the Tigers keep moving up the board. The deadline is the real variable here, not the roster.
Mets (26th, .528 Talent, 4-11 cold). The perennial undersold team, hardest schedule in baseball (−1.5 SOS) and a roster the record doesn’t reflect, now in a 4-11 skid that is dragging the number down toward the record instead of the other way. The gap is closing, in the wrong direction for Mets fans. The front office noticed too, firing the manager this week in hopes of the new-manager bounce. The model, unfortunately, does not price hope. A managerial change doesn’t move a single roster input, so the number won’t budge until the results do, and a bounce that exists has to show up as wins against that brutal schedule before the BBMI Score believes in it. On Bonilla Day of all days, it’s worth remembering the Mets paying handsomely for things that stopped producing is a tradition older than this losing streak.
Talent vs. ranking — the roster the record won’t admit to
Where each team’s healthy-roster talent ranks vs. where BBMI ranks it · of 30
The line is the gap. Each roster grades out far higher than the ranking — talent the record hasn’t paid off yet.
What the board is telling you
Stable top, violent middle, which is the normal shape of a board in early July: the good teams have separated enough that a week can’t move them, while ranks 7 through 24 are a knife fight where a two-hundredths swing in BBMI moves you five spots. The two teams to actually watch are the Yankees, whose one-spot slip is hiding the biggest score drop in baseball, and the Blue Jays, whose eight-spot fall is either a correct repricing or a roster about to prove the model wrong. Next week’s board answers both.
The bottom line
Stable top, violent middle. Watch the Yankees and the Blue Jays — one score drop the rank hasn’t caught up to, one repricing the roster still disputes. Next week’s board settles both.
The Chg column diffs against the prior published board and will every week going forward. Full sortable table lives on the MLB Rankings page; prior weeks are archived below.