BBMI MLB Power Rankings, Week of July 24
All 30 teams ranked by schedule-adjusted BBMI Score coming out of the break, with nine days of movement since the July 15 board and the changes worth explaining — one week before the deadline redraws the rosters underneath it.
BBMI Research Desk
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July 24, 2026
Deadline-week edition
Deadline week is when baseball stops pretending the rosters are settled. For fifty-one weeks a front office gets to say the roster is the plan; for this one, every team in the middle of the board has to decide out loud whether it believes its own record. It is the sport’s annual group project — due Friday, worth half the grade, and most of the league hasn’t started — and the board has opinions about who’s been doing the reading. It has spent all season grading the gap between what teams are and what their win column says, and this is the week those gaps either get closed with trades or ratified by standing still. Next board, the inputs themselves will have changed hands.
The board’s job, as ever: 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 faced — a credit for a tough slate, a debit for a soft one. BBMI is the ranking; Talent is the lens beside it, what a healthy roster is worth record-neutral. The Chg column diffs against the July 15 break board, nine days back. The shape of the stretch: the break board asked three questions and the season answered all three — the Red Sox run survived contact, the Royals’ rank did not finish the fall, and the top compressed again.
The full board
| # | Chg | Team | BBMI | 7/15 | Δ | SOS | Talent | Record | L15 |
|---|
Top of the board
The Dodgers (0.858) held first with the smallest score move on the board (−0.002), and the schedule debit that defined their break profile is unwinding on its own — −2.3 then, −1.4 now, as the slate they’re actually playing firms up. But the headline number at the top is the cushion: first-to-third was .100 on July 1, .063 at the break, and is .049 today. Three boards, three compressions. The Brewers (+0.009, 9–6) quietly closed to .035 of the lead, and the Braves finally cashed the regression argument — +0.019 on an 8–7 stretch, past the Rays and into 3rd. Atlanta’s climb is the one our hot-and-cold ledger has been predicting since June: the talent lens (.568, tied with Seattle for second-best in baseball) kept insisting, and the record finally started agreeing. Tampa Bay went 7–8 and paid a rank for it in a top this tight.
▲8
The movers
White Sox ▲8 (19th to 11th). The biggest single-board jump this column has recorded all season, and it isn’t a streak artifact — Chicago went a solid-not-scorching 9–6 while the score moved +0.037. That combination means the model repriced the team, not the fortnight: at 54–47 the record has now outlasted every discount the projection applied to it. The caution is the same one we hung on the Guardians at the break: a .467 Talent ranks in the bottom third of baseball, and rank climbed on projection is rank that has to be defended with a roster the lens doesn’t love. Deadline week matters more for this team than any other riser on the board.
Red Sox ▲5 (13th to 8th) — the run that refused to end. At the break we wrote that the second half’s first question was whether a 9–0 run survives contact with a .529 roster. Answer: 6–1 since, 15–1 across two boards, a 14–1 last-fifteen that is the hottest in baseball, and +0.020 more score. Boston has climbed twelve spots in three weeks — 20th to 8th — and the roster lens has quietly risen with the results (.529 to .537). We keep waiting for the correction; the correction keeps not coming. This run is now in its Fast & Furious era: the premise stopped making sense several installments ago and the box office keeps disagreeing. The record is 52–49, which means the entire climb is still projection — but at some point a streak this long stops being a streak and starts being evidence.
Orioles ▲3 (23rd to 20th). A 10–5 stretch and +0.021 of score, the bottom half’s biggest earned gain. Filed without comment beyond: the schedule credit (+0.3) says it came against real opponents.
Blue Jays ▼5 (18th to 23rd) — the slide with no bottom yet. Toronto fell eight spots on the July 1 board, held at the break, and has now fallen five more: 5–10 since the break, −0.017, and a 47–56 record that no longer supports the middle-of-the-board residency. Thirteen spots in three-plus weeks — the Blue Jays are speedrunning the standings, just in the direction nobody streams. The lens still grades the roster .496 — almost exactly average — which makes this the rare slide the model attributes to performance rather than to talent evaporating. That is not the consoling version.
Rangers, Guardians, Marlins — all ▼4. Three different autopsies for the same fall. Texas (7–8, −0.013) is the gentle middle-of-the-board kind, two hundredths in a congested stretch where that costs four ranks. Cleveland gave back the break-board climb almost exactly as our caveat priced it — the .453 Talent said the roster was renting the top ten, and after a 7–8 stretch the lease is up. Miami’s is the one that stings: −0.025, the biggest score drop on the board, on a 6–9 slide — the projection that spent a month defending the Marlins’ record has started marking it down.
Royals ▲1 (29th to 28th) — the fall that didn’t finish. Honest accounting: at the break we wrote that Kansas City held “a rank their score has already abandoned” and framed the second half as the rank finishing the fall. The opposite happened — the score came back +0.025, the biggest recovery in the bottom third, on an 8–7 stretch. The Talent input that had slid to .419 firmed to .452. We were wrong about the direction, and the board caught it before we did: the reprice at the bottom was real, but it overshot, and this is what the correction to a correction looks like.
Athletics ▼1 (26th to 27th) — the cold that won’t break. The break board’s coldest team is still the board’s coldest team: another 2–13 last-fifteen, another −0.022 of score, and a slide that has now cost them six spots since July 1 (21st → 27th). The franchise that gave the world Moneyball is currently shooting the sequel nobody pitched — no money, no ball. Nothing in the profile argues for a floor yet: the .451 Talent is bottom-five, and unlike the Royals there is no reprice-overshoot to give back.
Biggest movers — rank change since 7/15
Spots gained or lost since July 15 · nine days, one board
Up in green, down in red. The White Sox’ eight-spot jump is the biggest single-board move of the season — earned on a reprice, defended by a roster the lens grades bottom-third.
The watch list (talent vs. record)
Mariners (13th, .568 Talent, 51–52). Still the headliner, and the gap got more uncomfortable, not less: the lens now grades Seattle’s roster tied with the Braves for second-best in baseball — only the Dodgers grade higher — while the board has them 13th and the record sits a game under .500. A 6–9 stretch since the break is exactly the wrong answer to the question we asked at the All-Star pause. The rotation inputs haven’t moved; the results still refuse to arrive. Seattle is Schrödinger’s contender — simultaneously the second-best roster in baseball and a game under .500, and the box doesn’t open until the deadline. This is the widest strong-side disagreement on the board, and a roster this good, this far under its grade, is either a buyer’s dream or a sell-high warning; the model’s money remains on the former.
Tigers (15th, .519 Talent, 49–54). The thesis keeps paying on schedule: 11–4 since the break — the second-hottest 15 in baseball — and two more ranks. Since we first flagged Detroit on July 1 they have gone from 19th-ish obscurity to the edge of the top half, exactly the record-climbs-to-talent trade the watch list exists to catch. And now the deadline variable has a face: Tarik Skubal — the biggest trade chip in baseball if Detroit sells — said this week he wants to stay if the Tigers can win. That converts the front office’s deadline call into a referendum on its own playoff belief, and the model’s contribution is unsentimental: about a 16% shot at October and a most-likely finish of 81–81. The climb is real; the math says it started too far back. If the brass believes the 11–4, Skubal stays and they buy. If they believe the 16%, the watch-list thesis gets liquidated mid-proof — with the ace as the headline. There is no third option where everyone keeps a straight face.
Mets (25th, .533 Talent, 43–60). The gap narrowed the wrong way again. The lens still grades the roster 11th in baseball; the board has them 25th; the record is seventeen games under. Two boards ago this was “undersold.” One board ago it was “getting hard to say with a straight face.” At 43–60 in deadline week, the question stops being whether the score believes the roster and becomes whether the roster is still there on August 1 — this is the prestige drama that got great reviews, found no audience, and is now waiting to hear about renewal. The model prices rosters, not sell-offs; if the deadline strips this one, the gap resolves itself the grim way. The full Mets census is here.
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 higher than the ranking — talent the record hasn’t paid off yet — and the deadline is the last, best chance to close it from the roster side.
What the board is telling you
Three boards in a row now tell the same story at the top: the leaders keep winning and the lead keeps shrinking — .100, .063, .049. The Dodgers are experiencing the Jaws school of frontrunning: everything is fine, the record says everything is fine, and yet the music has started. Below them, the middle remains a coin-flip congestion (sixteen teams inside .067 from 8th to 23rd) heading into the one week that can rearrange it by fiat — musical chairs, except the chairs are relievers. The open questions the deadline will answer: whether the White Sox’ reprice gets a roster to defend it, whether Seattle finally buys the wins its lens says it deserves, whether Detroit’s brass believes its own 11–4 enough to keep Tarik Skubal over the model’s 16% — and whether the Mets’ watch-list gap is resolved by winning or by moving vans. The next board will be graded against different rosters. That’s not a caveat; it’s the point.
The bottom line
The top is the tightest it has been all season and the middle is one trade from reshuffling. Two teams carry the board’s live arguments into the deadline: the White Sox, holding the season’s biggest jump with its thinnest supporting roster, and the Mariners, whose tied-for-3rd talent grade and 13th-place rank is the widest disagreement the model has left to defend. Seven days to close it.
The Chg column diffs against the July 15 board, nine days back. Full sortable table lives on the MLB Rankings page; prior weeks are archived below.