Do We Have Any Idea Who's Going to Win the World Series?

With no real juggernauts and (almost) every contender showing flaws, baseball this October looks to be as unpredictable as ever.

We’re currently less than a week away from the start of the 2025 MLB postseason, and all eyes in the baseball world are still rightly on the wild-card (and division) battles playing out in both the AL and NL.

Once those get resolved, though, we’re going to need to zoom out and take stock of a World Series race that truly could be anyone’s to win.

On Tuesday, the title favorite in my Elo model was the Milwaukee Brewers — who are No. 1 in the power rating — at 20 percent, followed by the Philadelphia Phillies at 15 percent, the Seattle Mariners at 13 percent, the New York Yankees at 11 percent and the L.A. Dodgers and Toronto Blue Jays tied at 9 percent each.

FanGraphs, meanwhile, had the Mariners first at 22 percent, then the Dodgers and Yankees at 14 percent apiece, the Jays at 11 percent, the Phillies at 10 percent and the Brewers at 7 percent. Then there was Polymarket, who had the Phillies and Dodgers tied at 17 percent, while FanDuel listed Philly as the outright favorite (+430).

My point in all of this isn’t necessarily to compare and contrast which perspective is right or wrong. It’s to point out that a bunch of different, very reasonable approaches can scramble around the same group of teams in different orders, because this is shaping up like an exceptionally difficult postseason to predict. (Even by baseball standards, which is saying something.)

Why is that? One reason is that this year’s top teams haven’t really differentiated themselves anywhere near as much as we’ve gotten used to in previous seasons. After featuring at least three 100+ win teams (per 162 games) every season from 2017-23, MLB is tracking for zero 100-win teams for the second straight season. And while last year at least featured six teams with 93 or more wins per 162, this year will likely only carry three such teams, the fewest in a season since 1997.

If we compare the distribution of this year’s team wins to the average since the second wild-card was instituted in 2012 — tossing out the pandemic-shortened 2020 campaign — we see a pretty noticeable difference in how teams are arranged this season. The best teams have won significantly less than usual, while the worse teams have won more often (with the exception, as always, of the Colorado Rockies, who are underdogs to win 45 games).¹