2023 MLB Baseball Preseason Predictions: Rankings, Win Totals, Projected Standings
Preseason MLB predictions for 2023 including team rankings, win totals, projected final standings, playoff odds and World Series odds.
March 24, 2023 - by Jason Lisk
Will this be the year Shohei Ohtani and the Angels finally make the playoffs? (John Cordes/Icon Sportswire)
This article lays out all of our preseason MLB team rankings, ratings and projections for 2023, including our MLB projected standings, MLB postseason seed projections and various projection details such as final win-loss records, playoff odds, and World Series champion odds.
Now that they are published, all of our MLB projections will update every morning to reflect the latest game results and our most up-to-date MLB power ratings.
2023 MLB Baseball Season Details
The 2023 MLB season gets underway on March 30, 2023. Now that the World Baseball Classic has concluded after an exciting final between Japan and the United States, we’ll get to see if this year’s MLB campaign can generate similar drama.
Several new MLB rules may impact pace of play and increase the action in 2023, from the addition of a pitch clock to shift bans to rules on the number of pickoffs. The schedule is also a little different, featuring more balance and fewer division games.
How We Create MLB Preseason Ratings
For football and basketball, we use our own data and models to come up with independent estimates of team quality. We then compare our numbers to the betting markets and to other leading projections, and make final adjustments.
We treat baseball a bit differently. So far, at least, our methods for projecting MLB aren’t as cutting edge compared to our approaches for other sports and compared to other leading analytics sites that focus exclusively on baseball.
So rather than creating our own preseason ratings, we instead base our initial MLB projected standings on a weighted average of betting market info and projected standings from other well-respected sources.
Our Baseball Ratings Process
First, we first combine projected season win totals from the betting market and other leading sites like Baseball Prospectus into a consensus win total projection for every team.
Then, we figure out what preseason team ratings would have generated those exact same season projections—a bit of reverse engineering. We publish these inferred MLB team ratings, so that our users know what preseason rating we used in our projection system for every team.
Just be aware that we haven’t done the same level of research on MLB preseason ratings as we’ve done for other sports, so we’re not confident in the utility of these projections for making preseason bets.
A Seemingly Narrow Win Distribution For MLB Projections
You may look at the 2023 MLB projections below and think that they aren’t extreme enough. For example:
- Only four teams are projected with at least 93 wins
- No team is projected for more than 95 wins
- We have just two teams projected for 100 losses
In a way, you’d be right. When the dust settles at the end of the 2023 MLB season, there will likely be several division winners (and maybe a wild card team or two) that have won more than 95 games.
Besides the heaviest favorites, though, if a team wins that many games in 2023, it’s going to be because things have gone better for them than anyone should have reasonably expected. And picking which teams will wildly exceed their consensus expectations is rather tricky (and risky).
On average, these more conservative predictions may end up being quite wrong for some teams, but the overall accuracy of the system should be better than if we made several bold calls on a handful of teams to far exceed or fall short of the consensus opinion of several smart predictors.
More Details on 2023 MLB Projections
If you’d like to see our more aggressive best case and worst case scenarios for each team, check out their team projections page. Here are the Houston Astros projections and the Oakland Athletics projections as examples.
Click through to find a chart showing the projected odds of the Astros or Athletics winning any specific number of games in 2023.
From the details in the Athletics’ chart, you can determine that as of the preseason, we project about a 21% chance for Oakland to win fewer than 55 games in 2023.
The team projections detail page also includes a list of each team’s toughest and easiest games, and a table showing how their odds of winning the World Series change depending on what seed they get in the playoffs.
Highlights of 2023 MLB Preseason Rankings & Projected Final Standings
The Houston Astros won the World Series last year, after reaching but losing the World Series the year before. The Astros did so by sweeping the New York Yankees in the ALCS, then beating a Philadelphia Phillies team that won the NL pennant after getting into the postseason with 87 wins as the final Wild Card.
The Los Angeles Dodgers, meanwhile, won 111 games last season, but were quickly eliminated in the playoffs by their divisional rival, the San Diego Padres.
Who’s At The Top of MLB in 2023?
Despite their early playoff exit last year, it’s the Dodgers that have our highest average win projection in 2023 with 94.9 expected wins, which is a bit higher than our win projection for the Astros (94.1) and the New York Yankees (94.6).
Smart projections will generally focus more on the fact that the Dodgers have won 106 or more games in each of their last three full 162-game seasons, rather than failing to reach the World Series the last two years (which requires more luck).
The highest projected regular season win total doesn’t necessarily mean the best team, though, since schedule strength has an influence there.
As it turns out, it’s the Yankees that actually rank as our preseason No. 1 team in all of MLB, in terms of their 2023 predictive rating.
Projected Standings Highlights
Some other highlights of our 2023 MLB projected standings:
- The American and National Leagues are pretty balanced this year, with half of our top 10 teams in each respective league.
- Divisions, however, are not so balanced. Neither the AL Central or NL Central has a team ranked in our preseason top 10, while the AL East and NL East both have three teams each in the top 10.
- The best teams are projected for a drop-off in 2023, notably Houston and the Los Angeles Dodgers, who have some personnel losses. But those teams had such a significant edge in recent years that they can regress a bit this year and still be projected at the top.
- Texas is projected for a big jump upward (from 68 wins last year to a projected 81.2 wins in 2023) after some key pitching acquisitions, led by Jacob DeGrom.
- San Diego is the only NL playoff team from a year ago that is projected for more wins than they had last season (89 wins last year versus a projected 93.3 wins in 2023). So the gap between the Padres and the other top contenders is narrower than it was last preseason.
2023 MLB Projected Playoff Results
Just for kicks, here is how the 2023 MLB postseason would play out, if our 2023 preseason projections are spot on and our higher-rated team won each series.
Note that the numbers below refer to each team’s playoff seed within their league, NOT our preseason ranking. For instance, even though we’d have Cleveland getting the No. 3 playoff seed in the AL based on win-loss record, our ratings still see the projected No. 6 seeded Mariners as the better team.
Remember that the MLB playoffs were expanded last year to add a sixth team in each league, and the top two division winners get a bye past the Wild Card Round.
Wild Card Round:
- No. 6 Seattle Mariners over No. 3 Cleveland Guardians
- No. 4 Toronto Blue Jays over No. 5 Tampa Bay Rays
- No. 6 Philadelphia Phillies over No. 3 St. Louis Cardinals
- No. 4 San Diego Padres over No. 5 New York Mets
Division Round:
- No. 1 New York Yankees over No. 4 Toronto Blue Jays
- No. 2 Houston Astros over No. 6 Seattle Mariners
- No. 1 Los Angeles Dodgers over No. 4 San Diego Padres
- No. 2 Atlanta Braves over No. 6 Philadelphia Phillies
League Championship Series:
- No. 1 New York Yankees over No. 2 Houston Astros
- No. 1 Los Angeles Dodgers over No. 2 Atlanta Braves
World Series:
- No. 1 New York Yankees over No. 1 Los Angeles Dodgers
Full Preseason 2023 MLB Projected Standings
Finally, here is a summary of our 2023 preseason projections for all AL teams:
| American League | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AL East | W | L | TR Rank | Playoffs | Win Division | Top Seed | WS Champs |
| NY Yankees | 94.6 | 67.4 | 1 | 86.0% | 47.4% | 26.8% | 11.9% |
| Toronto | 91.5 | 70.5 | 6 | 75.4% | 31.0% | 16.4% | 7.8% |
| Tampa Bay | 88.0 | 74.0 | 8 | 61.2% | 17.9% | 8.3% | 4.4% |
| Boston | 77.5 | 84.5 | 19 | 15.8% | 2.1% | 0.6% | 0.5% |
| Baltimore | 76.2 | 85.8 | 20 | 12.3% | 1.6% | 0.4% | 0.3% |
| AL Central | W | L | TR Rank | Playoffs | Win Division | Top Seed | WS Champs |
| Cleveland | 87.0 | 75.0 | 12 | 61.2% | 46.7% | 6.4% | 3.7% |
| Minnesota | 84.3 | 77.7 | 14 | 46.9% | 31.7% | 3.4% | 2.3% |
| Chi Sox | 81.4 | 80.6 | 18 | 32.2% | 19.3% | 1.6% | 1.2% |
| Detroit | 68.2 | 93.8 | 24 | 2.5% | 1.4% | 0.0% | 0.0% |
| Kansas City | 67.3 | 94.7 | 26 | 1.9% | 1.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% |
| AL West | W | L | TR Rank | Playoffs | Win Division | Top Seed | WS Champs |
| Houston | 94.1 | 67.9 | 3 | 85.0% | 61.5% | 25.7% | 11.3% |
| Seattle | 86.9 | 75.1 | 10 | 55.4% | 21.3% | 6.4% | 3.6% |
| LA Angels | 82.8 | 79.2 | 15 | 35.1% | 9.9% | 2.3% | 1.6% |
| Texas | 81.2 | 80.8 | 16 | 28.7% | 7.3% | 1.7% | 1.1% |
| Oakland | 60.9 | 101.1 | 29 | 0.2% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% |
And for all NL teams:
| National League | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NL East | W | L | TR Rank | Playoffs | Win Division | Top Seed | WS Champs | |
| Atlanta | 93.9 | 68.1 | 4 | 85.0% | 43.9% | 20.9% | 9.7% | |
| NY Mets | 92.6 | 69.4 | 7 | 80.6% | 35.3% | 15.7% | 7.9% | |
| Philadelphia | 88.5 | 73.5 | 9 | 65.1% | 19.0% | 7.1% | 4.2% | |
| Miami | 76.8 | 85.2 | 21 | 14.1% | 1.7% | 0.3% | 0.3% | |
| Washington | 60.8 | 101.2 | 30 | 0.2% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | |
| NL Central | W | L | TR Rank | Playoffs | Win Division | Top Seed | WS Champs | |
| St. Louis | 88.0 | 74.0 | 11 | 66.8% | 51.9% | 6.5% | 3.9% | |
| Milwaukee | 85.9 | 76.1 | 13 | 55.4% | 37.4% | 3.8% | 2.6% | |
| Chi Cubs | 77.1 | 84.9 | 22 | 16.9% | 8.7% | 0.3% | 0.4% | |
| Pittsburgh | 68.3 | 93.7 | 25 | 2.6% | 1.3% | 0.0% | 0.0% | |
| Cincinnati | 66.2 | 95.8 | 28 | 1.5% | 0.7% | 0.0% | 0.0% | |
| NL West | W | L | TR Rank | Playoffs | Win Division | Top Seed | WS Champs | |
| LA Dodgers | 94.9 | 67.1 | 2 | 87.9% | 51.6% | 25.2% | 11.0% | |
| San Diego | 93.3 | 68.7 | 5 | 83.5% | 41.9% | 18.8% | 9.0% | |
| SF Giants | 81.3 | 80.7 | 17 | 29.5% | 5.2% | 1.3% | 1.0% | |
| Arizona | 75.2 | 86.8 | 23 | 10.3% | 1.3% | 0.1% | 0.2% | |
| Colorado | 65.2 | 96.8 | 27 | 0.7% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | |