2024 World Series contender tiers: When will your team win? - ESPN

Is your favorite team a potential 2024 World Series contender… or is 2025 (or beyond) a more realistic target?

One thing we were reminded of last season is that prognostications are all about expectation, not destiny.

We divide the clubs into five tiers based on projections and probabilities. The higher the tier, the more likely a team is to find itself in the next Fall Classic. Last season, the eventual champion Texas Rangers landed in my preseason Tier 3; their World Series opponents, the Arizona Diamondbacks, were in Tier 4.

This reflects the new reality in Major League Baseball, with its expanded postseason and more room for chaos. To paraphrase managers and executives around the game: «We just want to get into the tournament.»

With that in mind, let's see how teams stack up based on my most up-to-date simulations, run just before last Thursday's openers, and what the outcome of those simulations tells us about where each franchise is and where it might be going.

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 2024 schedule to estimate 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 playoff and championship probabilities. For the latter tiers, a rough ETA for their arrival as contenders has been