Through all of baseball's evolutionary steps through the decades, one thing has remained a constant: Every team sets out from Opening Day with an end goal of winning the World Series.
So here we are, back at the beginning, wading into the new MLB season. While this annual blossoming has been with us since the days of steamboats, this season feels particularly new, thanks to the new set of rules — pitch clocks, the banning of the shift, etc. — to which we are still becoming accustomed.
Yet everything we've already seen — this spring's scintillating World Baseball Classic, the preseason injuries, the first handful of refreshingly brisk games under the new rules — it's all a means to the same eternal end of winning it all.
How realistic is that aspiration for each team? The answer for each club, as ever, varies.
So where does your favorite team stand? Here is how all of the 30 clubs stack up at the outset of the 2023 season — their chances to win a ring or make the playoffs this season (if any) — and what it means for the years to come.
A note on methodology: Teams have been slotted into tiers according to their likelihood of being handed the Commissioner's Trophy after the last out of the World Series seven months from now.
That likelihood is based on my final preseason forecast for each team, a projection for each club's win total built on a rating of the rosters, depth charts, strengths and weaknesses of the consensus projections for each team. That rating is then used in a run of 10,000 simulations of the 2023 schedule to determine each team's chance to win it all.
Teams are ranked by average simulation wins and are then placed into one of five tiers according to their championship probability. For the latter tiers, a rough ETA for their arrival as contenders has been added.
TIER 1: THEIR TIME IS NOW
Teams in this group are the front-runners to land the top seed in their league and should be all-in trying to win the 2023 World Series.
New York Yankees
Win average: 95.3
In the playoffs: 88%
Champions: 12.4%
State of the franchise: For most franchises, the Yankees would be the midst of a golden era. The Yankees are not most franchises. In terms of regular-season success, there's no problem. New York has averaged 97.7 wins per 162 games over the past five seasons, a mark topped only by the Dodgers and Astros. The Yankees also have posted a winning record in 30 consecutive seasons, one of the most remarkable runs in sports. Yet it's not enough, and to make that point, consider that the only MLB franchise in history to post a longer winning-season streak is … the Yankees, who did so for 39 consecutive seasons, from 1926 to 1964. So here we are again, with the Yankees projected to finish as this season's top regular-season club, and their fans would be the first to tell you it doesn't mean a thing. The only streak that matters is New York's 13-year streak with neither a pennant nor a championship.
Pivotal issue: This team looks loaded, across the board. There's a leading MVP candidate (Aaron Judge), two leading Cy Young candidates (Gerrit Cole, Carlos Rodon) and a leading Rookie of the Year candidate (Anthony Volpe). In my preseason unit rankings, I've got the Yankees' rotation first, the bullpen third and the team defense second. Only the offense lags by comparison, and even there, the Yankees rank 10th. And yet injuries, as they so often have in recent years, hover over this towering enterprise. The key question for the Yankees as the season begins is whether or not they can get and keep their rotation healthy enough to land a top seed while being fully functional by the time the postseason begins.