MLB Power Rankings: Final regular season rankings for 2014

Major League Baseball’s postseason has arrived. There’s a crisp in the air and leaves on the ground. There’s football hysteria. Soon we will see baseball players’ breath as they gather themselves between pitches. We will see pitchers blowing into their hands and players wearing hooded sweatshirts and stocking caps in the dugout. We will watch as teams agonize over each play, each call, and each pitch as the calendar turns to October.

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The final set of MLB Power Rankings encompasses the favorites for this postseason, as things stand now. Of course we know that these things can swing at a moment’s notice and it often is not the strongest looking team on paper that advances. It might be a Wild Card team, considered in the bottom half of the teams to reach the playoffs, that ends up getting the clutch hits, the dominant pitching performances, and the right breaks to go all the way.

With that in mind, here are the final MLB Power Rankings for the 2014 regular season. The reader will kindly note that these are not simply in the order of win-loss records; rather, these account for the results this past season as well as each team’s outlook moving forward. If it will be a bother to the reader to see that a team is “better” despite having won fewer games than a lower ranked team in 2014, I would kindly refer him or her to a Google search for “MLB Standings.”