Henry Roldán
We have arrived to July’s mid-season break, and with it comes a new edition of JefeBet’s MLB Power Rankings. With little over half of each organization’s games completed and the summer officially begun, we begin to spot the teams who will battle for a postseason spot and those that will simply wait until the end of the season to forget about it.
Below, we’ll go through a list of the teams that have excelled and those who have been getting worse in the past week of Major League Baseball season before the All-Star Game.
MLB Power Rankings 2022 – July 18th
Top 3
Los Angeles Dodgers
The Los Angeles Dodgers closed the first half of the season as the best team in the National League by posting a 60-30 record, winning nine of their last ten games and riding a four-game winning streak.
The California team’s collective pitching performance dipped slightly over the past week, leaving a 3.07 ERA, the league’s seventh lowest, but was compensated with many runners on base thanks to the second best OBP in the Major Leagues, .379, and timely hitting that took advantage of what was going on the bases.
New York Yankees
Along with the Dodgers, the New York Yankees were the two best teams in the first half of the season. In fact, the “Bronx Bombers” can easily be considered the leaders of the span by finishing with the best record in the Major Leagues with a 64-28 mark, the only team that did not record at least 30 losses.
While the Yankees got off to a shaky start last week with a series loss at home to the Cincinnati Reds and then a loss in the first of a four-game series to the Red Sox, Joe Girardi’s team finished the weekend with three crushing victories over Boston. In total, they hit 11 home runs and were the team that scored the most runs with 47.
Seattle Mariners
While the Seattle Mariners were expected to be fighting for something at the end of the season, what the West Coast team has done to close out the first half is truly impressive, stringing together 14 wins in a row.
The key to success for this team has been its pitching, which last week finished as the fifth best in the Major Leagues with a 2.78 ERA. Although they scored just 31 runs, they were more than enough to maintain their streak and position themselves as the second wild card in the American League with a 51-42 record.
Bottom 3
Chicago Cubs
Despite coming out on top in their last game before the mid-season break, the Cubs have dropped nine of their last ten games and are on the verge of slipping to the bottom of the NL Central division with a 35-57 record, a half-game ahead of the Reds.
Although the Cubs’ ERA improved considerably by giving up 3.47 in their last seven games, the team’s big problem was the batting, which barely hit a home run and finished last in all the major leagues in runs scored with 10.
Oakland Athletics
The Oakland Athletics finished the first half of the season where they were expected to be: last in the entire American League with a 32-61 record and losing six of their last ten games played.
Last week, the team’s offense improved a bit by scoring 33 runs, the tenth most in the league, but its pitching is still quite shaky and posted an average of 4.50 runs per nine innings, the tenth highest in all of baseball.
Washington Nationals
While in the American League we expected the worst from the Athletics, in the senior circuit the Washington Nationals also lived up to expectations by finishing the first half of the 2022 regular round as the worst team in all of baseball by posting a 31-63 record.
While their numbers last week, collectively, were not too bad, the path to victory for the capital city team remains unlikely. They have lost nine of their previous ten games, and the second half of the season does not look promising, with some of their finest players on their way out on the trade market.
