Baseball’s best are jockeying for position in the sport’s second season — the mayhem of October. The rest of MLB’s clubs are looking back at what went wrong. In a sport where transactions and roster decisions provide clear expectations, we have separated out the rebuilding teams from the ones who entered 2022 expecting to be setting playoff rotations, not vacation plans.
We ranked the success of 2022’s rebuilders earlier this week, and now it’s time to flip things over and assess the failures of teams who didn’t mean to fail. We've provided the preseason playoff odds from FanGraphs as a baseline of what realistic expectations looked like in early April, but the order is subjective.