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We’re calling these lineup rankings “way-too-early” — and while that might well be true, maybe it’s not. At this point of the winter, teams across MLB have largely completed their heavy lifting. We do still have a few free agents out there and some trades have continued to trickle in, but we are at a point where we can get a pretty good grasp on how each team’s offense is going to look in the coming season.
It’s fair to say that there has been a good amount of reshuffling — both at the top and bottom of the leaderboard — in these rankings since last year’s preseason projections, even if it often feels like we’re looking at the same teams atop the same leaderboards year after year.
While specific ranking slots change frequently, wider-lens changes are a bit slower to come into focus. These are the changes that are most interesting, when a good team suddenly looks great, or when it seems to have slipped into the lower divisions of the majors.
That dynamic is on full display with these rankings, where a new top lineup has emerged, setting a high bar of expectation for a franchise that has never won a World Series. We’ve also got some perennially elite offenses that look, well, not elite. Though, of course, it might be way too early to be drawing these conclusions.
Here is our list.
