As we enter the final week of the MLB season, we will wave 12 teams into the playoff field, which means we wave goodbye to 18 others. Some of those 18 are not major surprises; teams such as the Rockies, Nationals and Cardinals are just pleased with the progress they’ve

These are the last MLB.com Power Rankings of the 2026 regular season. In exactly one week, 18 of these teams will go home, and 12 will be left. We have made it all the way through. Since these will be the final rankings, let’s take a look at each team,

This story was excerpted from Will Leitch’s Cardinals Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

In the final weeks of the regular season, some teams are in the thick of the postseason chase, some teams are just trying to make sure they stay healthy before the playoffs start and some teams are just playing out the string. But for some other teams that are building

This week, we had our first clinchers. The Rays and Brewers are in; the Dodgers and the Yankees are right behind them, perhaps as soon as Monday. With now less than two weeks left in the season, it is going to be a near-nightly occurrence. It has been a long

This story was excerpted from Will Leitch’s Cardinals Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

Who are the best players born on each day of the year? We have a list for every day on the calendar. Here’s a subjective ranking of the top five for Sept. 11.

At this time of year, focus inevitably lands on the final stages of the playoff chases, specifically on which teams will make it to the postseason and which ones won't. That’s perfectly natural: Just getting into the playoffs is a major achievement, and the difference between a postseason series and

It’s Labor Day, and because Labor Day was later than usual this year, and the MLB playoffs actually begin in September, we are closer to the start of the postseason than perhaps many realize. They begin three weeks from tomorrow. We’re not coming up on the stretch run. The stretch

Who are the best players born on each day of the year? We have a list for every day on the calendar. Here’s a subjective ranking of the top five for Sept. 7.

This story was excerpted from Will Leitch’s Cardinals Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

We have reached the final month of the season. Remarkable, isn’t it? Feels like we just got started, and now we’re in the stretch run. By the end of September, the Wild Card Series will be in full swing; some of them may, in fact, already be over. (They start

August might have felt like the longest month in a long time -- that’s what happens when Labor Day is so late -- but there were no dog days in baseball: There was dramatic movement, particularly from teams like the Phillies, Rays and Brewers, all of which look like teams

This story was excerpted from Will Leitch’s Cardinals Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

For the first time since 2004, it appears that Rich Hill will not appear in a Major League Baseball game. He got in two games for the Royals last year, at the age of 45, giving a whole bunch of people one last chance at the “is there anyone in

Congratulations, at last, to the Brewers who, for the first time all season, are atop these Power Rankings. They’re actually the fourth team to hold the No. 1 spot this year, and the others are, like them, from the National League: The Dodgers (who had been No. 1 for the

This story was excerpted from the Cardinals Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox

The Trade Deadline is supposed to be clarifying. Sure, it’s not entirely accurate to classify every team as either “buyers” or “sellers”; it’s far more complicated and less binary than that. But you’d like to get a sense of what teams consider themselves, at least for the season that we

Some might call these the dog days of summer, but with as much activity and excitement as there has been in baseball for the last week — Field of Dreams! Joshua Báez! A wild Brewers-Dodgers series featuring the best pitchers on earth — we’ll confess to not feeling particularly dogged

Who are the best players born on each day of the year? We have a list for every day on the calendar. Here’s a subjective ranking of the top five for Aug. 16.

This story was excerpted from Will Leitch’s Cardinals Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox

This story was excerpted from Will Leitch's Cardinals Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

You can now take a breath: The Trade Deadline has passed. That means it’s time to get our bearings and prepare for the stretch run ahead … and see how all this roster upheaval ends up playing out. Thus, it’s the perfect time for our first post-Deadline Power Rankings: Who’s

The biggest move of the Trade Deadline came a couple of days early, with Tarik Skubal heading to the Dodgers. (You may have noticed some conversation about that -- it was kind of a thing.) But the final hours heading toward Monday’s 6 p.m. ET Deadline were wild and wooly

The Trade Deadline is coming at 6 p.m. ET on Monday -- a little later than usual this year -- but do not think that is all that’s happening in August. August can get a bad rap sometimes, the supposed “dog days” of the MLB season. But the games matter