Cubs Org Heads North, White Sox Org Heads South: The Baseball Organizational Rankings Week in Review

The Baseball Organizational Rankings have been out for a few weeks now, and it’s time to take a look at the changes that have happened since launch.

For those unfamiliar with the Baseball Organizational Rankings, they’re a simple metric that takes winning percentages and weights each tier of major and minor leagues by some AMSTS-defined defaults (but are also user-customizable to play around with different results!).

To start off, this week the Chicago Cubs take the top spot, largely on the back of their MLB success. Being a whole 3 games ahead of the second best team in baseball, the Nationals, has helped the Cubs, who have jumped four spots since April 20th.  In fact, if you were to weight MLB at 0, the Cubs drop down to 13th overall.  For now, it seems that the Cubs’ pace to win 126 games will likely slow down as the season progresses, and with it, they stand to lose ground to the surprising second-best organization.

That surprising second-best organization? It turns out that it’s the Cleveland Indians, of all teams! With a 13-12 MLB record, the Indians rely on their successful minor league affiliates to make up the difference in the weighting.  AAA-affiliate Columbus, who are 17-9 this year in the International League for the league-best record. They’re further buoyed by their AA team, the Akron RubberDucks, who are second in the Eastern League with an 18-8 record.  Even at the A-Advanced and A levels, the Indians are 2nd best for both, with the 19-7 Lynchburg Hillcats and 19-9 Lake County Captains, respectively.  Despite the strength of the minor leagues, the Indians hype train doesn’t seem ready to take off, as they’re still the only team in MLB to report a sub-10,000 attended game this year.  Sorry, Indians fans, but at least the future looks bright.

On the bottom end of the scale, our worst organization of the week belongs to the Atlanta Braves, the owners of the worst record in Major League Baseball.  The Braves have dropped 4 spots this week to take the title away from the Minnesota Twins.  The good news for Braves fans is that the organization jumps to 20th when you remove all weighting of MLB teams, so there may be brighter times ahead for the once-storied franchise.  Of course, whether to include the MLB team in with organizational rankings makes the discussion more complicated: the Braves organization, making an exception for the garbage put on Turner Field so far this season, does not seem too far off from average.

When you remove the weighting for MLB teams, your worst minor league system belongs to the Chicago White Sox. Despite success at the MLB level which puts them at the top of the AL Central, all of their minor league affiliates current sit with sub-.500 records. The Charlotte Knights (AAA) are 12-15, while the Birmingham Barons (AA) are a Southern League-worst 10-17.  A-level baseball is not much kinder to the White Sox organization, as the Winston-Salem Dash also sit 10-17 in the A-Advanced Carolina League, while in regular A, the Kannapolis Intimidators are less than intimidating with their 12-15 record.

Biggest mover: Philadelphia, up 16 spots this week to 8th overall.

Biggest loser: NY Yankees, down 13 spots to 19th overall.

Here are your full week changes, and of course you can always play around with the Baseball Organizational Rankings yourself.