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Baseball

Thirty MLB teams in 2025: wins against what runs scored and allowed

A table built from the official 2025 regular-season standings: each of the 30 MLB clubs' runs scored, runs allowed and record, set beside the Pythagorean expectation at exponents 2 and 1.83, with the gap between actual and expected wins.

By Journal Info Editorial Team · Published 2026-11-05

A baseball record says how many games a team won. The runs it scored and allowed say how it won them. Put the two side by side and some clubs look a little lucky, others a little unlucky. The Pythagorean expectation is the oldest tidy way to do that, and the 2025 regular season, now complete, gives a full set of 30 teams to try it on.

This note lays out the official numbers for every club, the formula in plain arithmetic, and what the gaps do and do not tell you.

The formula

The MLB glossary credits the formula to the statistician Bill James. Its original form is:

expected win share = RS² ÷ (RS² + RA²)

where RS is runs scored and RA is runs allowed over the season. The glossary adds that Baseball-Reference.com uses 1.83 as its exponent in place of 2. Both versions are shown below. Multiply the share by 162 games to turn it into expected wins.

A worked example from the table: the Angels scored 673 runs and allowed 837. Squared, those are 452,929 and 700,569. The share is 452,929 ÷ 1,153,498 = 0.393, which over 162 games is 63.6 expected wins. They actually won 72, so they finished 8.4 wins above that line. The White Sox sit at the other end: 647 scored, 742 allowed, 60 wins against 70.0 expected at exponent 2.

The 2025 table

Sorted from the largest positive gap (more wins than the runs suggest) to the largest negative one, using exponent 2. Every club played 162 games.

Team W–L RS RA Pythagorean W% (exp. 2) Pythagorean W% (exp. 1.83) Expected wins (exp. 2) Wins minus expected (exp. 2) Wins minus expected (exp. 1.83)
Angels 72–90 673 837 0.393 0.402 63.6 +8.4 +7.0
Guardians 88–74 643 649 0.495 0.496 80.2 +7.8 +7.7
Marlins 79–83 709 798 0.441 0.446 71.5 +7.5 +6.7
Nationals 66–96 687 899 0.369 0.379 59.7 +6.3 +4.5
Orioles 75–87 677 788 0.425 0.431 68.8 +6.2 +5.2
Blue Jays 94–68 798 721 0.551 0.546 89.2 +4.8 +5.5
Cardinals 78–84 689 754 0.455 0.459 73.7 +4.3 +3.7
Athletics 76–86 733 817 0.446 0.451 72.2 +3.8 +3.0
Astros 87–75 686 665 0.516 0.514 83.5 +3.5 +3.7
Rockies 43–119 597 1021 0.255 0.272 41.3 +1.7 −1.1
Mariners 90–72 766 694 0.549 0.545 89.0 +1.0 +1.7
Phillies 96–66 778 648 0.590 0.583 95.6 +0.4 +1.6
Twins 70–92 678 773 0.435 0.440 70.4 −0.4 −1.3
Royals 82–80 651 637 0.511 0.510 82.8 −0.8 −0.6
Padres 90–72 702 621 0.561 0.556 90.9 −0.9 0.0
Tigers 87–75 758 691 0.546 0.542 88.5 −1.5 −0.8
D-backs 80–82 791 785 0.504 0.503 81.6 −1.6 −1.6
Pirates 71–91 583 645 0.450 0.454 72.8 −1.8 −2.5
Reds 83–79 716 681 0.525 0.523 85.1 −2.1 −1.7
Giants 81–81 705 684 0.515 0.514 83.4 −2.4 −2.2
Brewers 97–65 806 634 0.618 0.608 100.1 −3.1 −1.5
Dodgers 93–69 825 683 0.593 0.586 96.1 −3.1 −1.9
Mets 83–79 766 715 0.534 0.531 86.6 −3.6 −3.1
Braves 76–86 724 734 0.493 0.494 79.9 −3.9 −4.0
Red Sox 89–73 786 676 0.575 0.569 93.1 −4.1 −3.1
Yankees 94–68 849 685 0.606 0.597 98.1 −4.1 −2.7
Cubs 92–70 793 649 0.599 0.591 97.0 −5.0 −3.7
Rays 77–85 714 683 0.522 0.520 84.6 −7.6 −7.3
Rangers 81–81 684 605 0.561 0.556 90.9 −9.9 −9.1
White Sox 60–102 647 742 0.432 0.438 70.0 −10.0 −10.9

What the table shows

  • The gaps are not small. Averaged over the 30 clubs, the distance between actual and expected wins is 4.05 wins at exponent 2 and 3.65 at exponent 1.83. Eleven clubs land within three wins of the exponent-2 figure and 21 within five.
  • The two exponents mostly agree. The 1.83 version pulls the expectation for strong and weak teams slightly toward .500, which is why the Rockies move from +1.7 to −1.1.
  • Record and run difference can point in opposite directions. The Guardians finished 88–74 while allowing six more runs than they scored. The Diamondbacks (80–82) and Rays (77–85) scored more than they allowed yet finished below .500.
  • The same data gives a rough scale: across these 30 teams, each run of run difference went with about 0.086 wins above 81, roughly one win per 11.7 runs; that figure is our own fit through the origin on this one season, not a published constant, and it would change with another season.

What it does not tell you

  • It is a description of one finished season, not a forecast. The glossary says the formula was found more informative than a plain win percentage when looking ahead, but a gap in one year is not a promise that the next year will close it.
  • It ignores when and how the runs were scored. A team that wins many one-run games and loses a few blowouts will sit above its line without any trick being involved.
  • It uses season totals only. Trades, injuries and a changed roster mean the team that scored the runs in April is not the team that finished in September.
  • The exponent is a convention. Neither 2 nor 1.83 is a law of baseball, and the gap in any one row is partly a product of that choice.

Check it yourself

  1. Open the standings for the 2025 season and write down a team’s runs scored, runs allowed, wins and losses.
  2. Square both run totals (or raise them to 1.83), then divide runs scored raised to the exponent by the sum of the two.
  3. Multiply by 162 and subtract the result from the team’s wins.

Because runs scored across the league equal runs allowed across the league, the 30 values for RS add to the same total as the 30 values for RA: 21,614 runs each in this data.

Method

We downloaded the regular-season standings for the American and National Leagues for 2025 on 2026-10-31 from the MLB Stats API, which returns wins, losses, runs scored and runs allowed for each club. All 30 clubs show 162 games played, and league runs scored equal league runs allowed. We then compared wins, losses, runs scored and runs allowed for all 30 clubs against a second, independent source, ESPN’s standings data, and all 30 matched. The Baseball-Reference season page was not used as a further check: it answered the automated request with an access challenge. A script calculated the expectation at both exponents and rounded half up to three decimals for percentages and one decimal for wins; the raw downloads and the script are kept with our working notes.

Sources

AI assistance recorded as: AI draft, not edited

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