The best (and worst) teams of 2021

Who was the greatest of all — the Braves, Astros, Giants, or someone else?

Here’s one last question for you, a multiple-choice selection to end the year.

Which big-league club was the best in 2021?

• A. Atlanta Braves, who won the World Series

• B. Houston Astros, who won the American League

• C. San Francisco Giants, who led the majors with 107 regular-season victories

Okay, made your choice? Well, you’re wrong.

That’s my fault, actually. I withheld the final (and correct) possibility:

• D. None of the above

The Los Angeles Dodgers actually were the best team in the majors this year, based on my annual calculation of team scores (TS).

You might remember team scores, which I have cited several times over the past year and a half. They’re generated by a formula that gives equal weight to four factors: winning percentage, the differential between runs scored and allowed per game, the differential between bases per out (BPO) attained by batters and allowed by pitchers, and postseason success.

My TS formula assigns each club a score on a 100-point scale, which is equalized from year to year. That means it’s possible to say that a 1965 club with a TS of 75 was better than a 2015 team with a score of 73.

The very best club of the Expansion Era (1961-2021), the 1984 Detroit Tigers, earned a TS of 97.109 points, while the very worst, the 1996 Tigers, was saddled with a score of just 5.197.

This year’s teams fit between 76 and 11 on the TS scale. At the very top are the Dodgers, who excelled in the first three aspects of the formula (winning percentage, runs, BPO), but fell flat in the playoffs. Their score of 75.648 is lower than you would typically expect from a season’s leading club.

It’s also fairly unusual for the World Series champion not to hold the top spot. The Braves rank fourth for 2021 because their regular season was decidedly unimpressive. Eleven clubs won more games than Atlanta’s total of 88.

You can see the full TS rankings below, though with a twist. I have stacked 2021’s teams against every single club that took the field since 1961. The rank for each team — which precedes its name below — is out of the Expansion Era’s total pool of 1,626 clubs.

The 2021 Dodgers ranked 79th on the era’s list, putting them ahead of 95.2% of all teams since 1961. Each club’s win-loss record and TS are shown in parentheses, followed by the percentage of Expansion Era clubs it outperformed.

I have divided this year’s teams into five brackets of 20 percentage points, as you’ll see below.

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Excellent

• 79. Los Angeles Dodgers (106-56, 75.648 points), 95.2%

• 88. Houston Astros (95-67, 74.809 points), 94.6%

• 102. San Francisco Giants (107-55, 73.634 points), 93.8%

• 110. Atlanta Braves (88-73, 73.126 points), 93.3%

• 168. Tampa Bay Rays (100-62, 68.089 points), 89.7%

• 280. Toronto Blue Jays (91-71, 62.303 points), 82.8%

• 307. Chicago White Sox (93-69, 61.531 points), 81.2%

• Notes: Seven of 2021’s teams ranked among the top 20% of all clubs in the 61-year Expansion Era. A couple of strange things: The world-champion Braves won fewer regular-season games than any of the others above. And one of these paragons of excellence, the Blue Jays, didn’t even qualify for the playoffs.

Above average

• 345. Milwaukee Brewers (95-67, 60.272 points), 78.8%

• 503. New York Yankees (92-70, 55.083 points), 69.1%

• 508. Boston Red Sox (92-70, 54.899 points), 68.8%

• 559. St. Louis Cardinals (90-72, 53.496 points), 65.7%

• 617. Oakland Athletics (86-76, 51.818 points), 62.1%

• Notes: The Brewers fell just short of the top echelon, outperforming 78.8% of the era’s clubs. The other teams were considerably lower. Four of the five above-average clubs qualified for the playoffs, while the Athletics finished six games off the wild-card pace.

Average

• 749. Cincinnati Reds (83-79, 48.109 points), 54.0%

• 788. Philadelphia Phillies (82-80, 46.864 points), 51.6%

• 812. San Diego Padres (79-83, 46.026 points), 50.1%

• 824. Seattle Mariners (90-72, 45.671 points), 49.4%

• 903. Cleveland Indians (80-82, 43.352 points), 44.5%

• 923. New York Mets (77-85, 42.744 points), 43.3%

• Notes: Several of these teams gave the playoffs a run, though they dropped back to average status by the end of September. All but the Indians seemed to have a real shot at the postseason at some point, though none managed to qualify.

Below average

• 1,061. Colorado Rockies (74-87, 38.902 points), 34.8%

• 1,091. Detroit Tigers (77-85, 37.951 points), 32.9%

• 1,096. Los Angeles Angels (77-85, 37.806 points), 32.6%

• 1,182. Kansas City Royals (74-88, 35.262 points), 27.3%

• 1,188. Minnesota Twins (73-89, 35.010 points), 27.0%

• 1,210. Miami Marlins (67-95, 33.754 points), 25.6%

• 1,260. Washington Nationals (65-97, 32.604 points), 22.5%

• 1,274. Chicago Cubs (71-91, 32.261 points), 21.7%

• Notes: The news isn’t all bad here. The Tigers notched the most victories since 2016, the Rockies the most since 2018. But they were counterbalanced by the collapses of two recent world champions, the Nationals and the Cubs.

Poor

• 1,525. Texas Rangers (60-102, 21.157 points), 6.2%

• 1,527. Pittsburgh Pirates (61-101, 21.054 points), 6.1%

• 1,578. Arizona Diamondbacks (52-110, 16.829 points), 3.0%

• 1,610. Baltimore Orioles (52-110, 11.059 points), 1.0%

• Notes: It doesn’t matter which way you slice it. These four clubs were absolutely terrible in 2021, all languishing among the 102 worst teams since 1961. At the very bottom were the Orioles with 110 losses and a negative differential of 1.83 runs per game.