Everyone starts at the beginning on Opening Day. The pileup on the pitch following the final out in a World Series conclusion is what thirty teams are all aiming for.
Last season ended with the preseason Tier 1 Los Angeles Dodgers beating the Tier 2 New York Yankees. In 2023, it was the Tier 3 Texas Rangers topping the Tier 4 Arizona Diamondbacks. Could this be the year a team emerges from Tier 5 to win it all? Maybe not, but these results show that the system yields a forecast, not an immutable destiny.
Where does your team stand in the pecking order for 2025 World Series hopefuls?
A note on methodology: This ranking used player-level projections as the inputs to my team forecast model, which were blended with over/under lines from ESPN BET. These calculations were used to create a baseline win expectation, which formed the basis for 10,000 simulations of the rest of the 2025 schedule, yielding our win forecasts and postseason probabilities.