Cubs, Nats lead pack in first Power Rankings

The 2016 season is right around six weeks old, and so far, there hasn’t been much drama surrounding the two teams sitting at the top of our first MLB Power Rankings.

The Cubs and Nationals entered the season with high expectations — Chicago, to build on its 97-win, National League Wild Card-winning campaign, and Washington, to simply be as good as the talent on its roster dictates, rather than the dysfunctional mess it was at the end of 2015.

So far, both are living up to the hype as the undisputed best teams in baseball. No huge surprises with most of the remaining three teams in our top five, although in an honest moment, can we really say we saw the White Sox being quite this good?

1. Cubs: When your season-high losing streak is two games, and it didn’t happen until the fifth week of the season, it’s not difficult to deduce that there’s something special going on with the Cubs. Maybe it’s their gigantic, posh new clubhouse underneath Wrigley Field. More likely, it’s because the Cubs are loaded at every position, employ several of the game’s best young hitters and have the reigning NL Cy Young Award winner, Jake Arrieta, doing superhuman things at the top of the rotation. There’s plenty of credit to go around for a club playing at a .750 clip and on pace for an insane (and record-breaking) 121 wins.

2. Nationals: Most of what went wrong for the Nationals during their epic crater late last season seemingly had very little to do with the talent on the roster, …

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