Power ratings for all ten Korea Baseball Organization teams, built from this season's results and nothing else. This page is rebuilt daily, so the numbers below are current rather than a snapshot someone forgot to update. No picks here, no odds, no affiliate links.
| # | Team | Rating | W-L-T | Win % | Expected win % | Run diff |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | KT Wiz Suwon | 1628 | 75-45-3 | 0.625 | 0.591 | +124 |
| 2 | KIA Tigers | 1575 | 67-56-2 | 0.545 | 0.558 | +81 |
| 3 | Samsung Lions | 1572 | 73-49-3 | 0.598 | 0.608 | +153 |
| 4 | Doosan Bears | 1527 | 63-60-4 | 0.512 | 0.540 | +49 |
| 5 | NC Dinos | 1512 | 58-61-2 | 0.487 | 0.485 | -20 |
| 6 | SSG Landers | 1509 | 54-68-5 | 0.443 | 0.438 | -92 |
| 7 | LG Twins | 1499 | 69-55-1 | 0.556 | 0.496 | -5 |
| 8 | Hanwha Eagles | 1434 | 54-67-3 | 0.446 | 0.515 | +24 |
| 9 | Lotte Giants | 1405 | 53-68-2 | 0.438 | 0.449 | -69 |
| 10 | Kiwoom Heroes | 1340 | 45-82-3 | 0.354 | 0.324 | -245 |
Every team starts the season at 1500, so anything above that is points taken off the field. The column worth your attention is expected win percentage: what a team's record would be if it converted runs into wins at the normal rate. It comes from runs scored and runs allowed alone, using the standard baseball exponent of 1.83. Where it disagrees sharply with the real win percentage, the column is coloured, and those are the rows to read twice.
If you take one practical thing from this page, take this one. The average KBO game produces the combined run total in the header above. The average game in Japan's NPB produces about three runs fewer. Two leagues that look interchangeable from the outside are playing in scoring environments far enough apart that a totals line which looks generous in one is ordinary in the other.
A number that feels high next to a Japanese game is usually just Korean baseball. The environment is the context, not the edge.
We measure this from the season rather than assuming it, because it moves. Both leagues get their own measured figure in our model rather than a shared baseball default, and you can see Japan's in our NPB ratings page, which also carries the formula for turning any two ratings into a win probability.
The commentary in this section was written on 14 September against the tables as they stood that day. The tables refresh daily; these paragraphs do not. Check them against the current numbers rather than assuming they still hold.
Two teams sit at opposite ends of the same effect, and between them they make the case for why a league table is not a power ranking.
LG Twins. Third in the standings at 69-55, and a run differential of minus five. Their expected win percentage from runs is .496, which is to say exactly average, while their actual mark is .556. That is the largest overperformance in the league. The mechanism is visible in close games: 19-14 in games decided by a single run. Winning one run games is a real thing that happens, but it is close to the least repeatable result in baseball, which is why our rating has them seventh while the table has them third.
Hanwha Eagles. The mirror image, and the more interesting of the two. They are 54-67, which looks like a bad team, and yet they have outscored their opponents on the season by 24 runs. Expected .516, actual .446, the largest underperformance in the league. Same mechanism pointing the other way: 9-15 in one run games. They also face the second hardest schedule in the league.
Neither of those is a prediction about the rest of the season. It is a statement about what has already happened and how it was distributed. A team can keep losing close games for another month. But if you are pricing a game and your only input is where the two teams sit in the table, these are the two you are most likely to be wrong about.
| Team | Rating | Average opponent | Record vs top tier |
|---|---|---|---|
| KT Wiz Suwon | 1628 | 1485 | 11-15 |
| KIA Tigers | 1575 | 1490 | 15-13 |
| Samsung Lions | 1572 | 1491 | 15-13 |
| Doosan Bears | 1527 | 1494 | 17-21 |
| NC Dinos | 1512 | 1496 | 18-23 |
| SSG Landers | 1509 | 1497 | 16-25 |
| LG Twins | 1499 | 1499 | 20-22 |
| Lotte Giants | 1405 | 1510 | 15-24 |
| Hanwha Eagles | 1434 | 1511 | 12-28 |
| Kiwoom Heroes | 1340 | 1520 | 11-31 |
Worth publishing precisely because it comes out flat. The average opponent rating across the league spans a narrow band, which is what a ten team round robin with a balanced schedule should produce. In Japan, where two leagues meet only in interleague play, the same measure spreads more than twice as wide and genuinely distorts the ratings, which we wrote about on the NPB page.
So in this league, schedule strength is not the explanation for anything much, and we would rather show you the table that rules it out than quietly leave out the check we ran. The record against the top tier in the right hand column is the part that still carries information.
Our KBO record is 75 settled bets, and unlike Japan it is almost entirely moneylines: 65 of the 75. Across the whole sample the league is modestly ahead, and the totals slice looks far better than that, on ten bets, which is not a number anyone should reason from.
The honest part is the recent shape of it. Over the last two weeks this league has given back 6.37 units of the 12.28 it had earned over the previous two months. Two losing weeks in a row, both driven by Korea. We have not paused it. Sixteen bets is nowhere near enough to call a trend, and when we did pause a league in July we did it on fifty five settled bets, not sixteen. Reacting to a fortnight is how people end up switching approaches at exactly the wrong moment.
All of it, including the fortnight, is on the public record, which we do not edit after the fact. Our overall yield across every league is slightly negative right now. We would rather you read that here than discover it later.