Between the record-smashing rookie campaign of Aaron Judge, the Cleveland Indians’ win streak and the Houston Astros’ ridiculous feats of offense, the National League has felt like a bit of an afterthought this season. (A huge amount of NL attention went to a player who isn’t even in the playoffs.) But in any other season, elite contenders like the Los Angeles Dodgers and Washington Nationals wouldn’t be flying under the radar. As we did with the American League earlier this week, we picked out each National League team’s most important strength, plus the one weakness that might trip them up en route to the World Series.

Los Angeles Dodgers

(17 percent chance of winning the World Series)

Strength: Best form.

Although the Dodgers had baseball’s best Elo rating (FiveThirtyEight’s pet metric for judging a team’s strength at any moment) for a decent chunk of the season, they ultimately finished the year behind the Indians. But when the Dodgers were at their very best, they reached a higher peak than any other team this season — including Cleveland during its 22-game winning streak. In the course of a scorching midseason run — winning 52 times in 61 games — LA’s Elo rating hit a high of 1612, not only the best of any MLB team this year, but also the 19th-best of all time (and the second-best of the last 48 seasons, trailing only the 1998 Yankees). The Dodgers looked totally unbeatable for more than two months, with a lineup full of hot hitters crawling out of the woodwork and an excessively deep pitching staff.

Weakness: Recent form.

As invincible as the Dodgers seemed during their hot streak, they stumbled badly beginning in late August, losing 16 of 17 games (including 11 straight at one point) before righting the ship with a 12-6 finish to the regular season. In the process, they became the only team in baseball history to have separate 16-game stretches where they both won and lost 15 times. A late-season swoon doesn’t carry any special penalty in terms of “momentum,” but the fact that LA was even capable of such putrid play for a sustained period means there are still some questions to be answered about how reliable a favorite the Dodgers really are.

Arizona Diamondbacks

(6 percent chance of winning the World Series)

Strength: Power, speed and pitching.

As they showcased in the wild-card game against the Colorado Rockies — crushing two home runs and legging out three triples — the D-Backs can beat you in a variety of different ways. During the regular season, they ranked second among all MLB teams in isolated power (trailing only the hard-hitting Astros), first in baserunning value over averageAveraging together the baserunning metrics found at Baseball-Reference.com and FanGraphs.com.

‘>¹ and first in Bill James’s Speed Score (a composite that indexes a bunch of speed-related stats). Before Arizona did it this year, no team since 2001 had posted a .190 slugging and a 5.0 Speed Score in the same season. Add in a pitching staff that ranked second overall by WAR, and the Diamondbacks might have the most unique combination of strengths in this playoff field.

Weakness: Hitting for average.

Despite playing in a ballpark that boosts batting average the second-most of any team’s home digs (only Coors Field is better to hit in), the Diamondbacks hit just .254 this season, 18 points lower than we’d expect of an average team in the same park. Only three teams — the Blue Jays, Rangers and Padres — hit for a lower average relative to expectations, and all three of those teams had below-average offenses. Arizona managed to make things work anyway because of their rare combination of power and speed, but the D-Backs’s lousy average meant they were mediocre at plating base runners with two outs, and generally subpar in the clutch. On Wednesday night, Arizona’s lineup showed everyone how it can erupt in big offensive outbursts, but it still needs to prove it can do some of the situational hitting the playoffs will inevitably require.

Washington Nationals

(11 percent chance of winning the World Series)

Strength: Ace-level starters.

The Nationals have long been led by a superb starting rotation, but Max Scherzer, Stephen Strasburg and Gio Gonzalez put up some of their best career performances this year. According to The Baseball Gauge’s wins above replacement meta-metric,The metric takes Baseball Gauge’s own WAR metric and averages it with aspects from two other versions of WAR — Baseball-Reference.com’s and FanGraphs’. Specifically, for this article, I set the meta-metric to average together every option equally in each category, with no regression for fielding metrics and the positional adjustment not included in offensive and defensive WAR. To see the leaderboards I saw while writing this piece, click through to the Baseball Gauge links and make sure the filters are set correctly.

‘>² the Nationals ranked third in the majors in total WAR from their starting pitchers, and the Scherzer-Strasburg-Gonzalez trio was especially great — each ranked among baseball’s 10 best starters by WAR.Cleveland, with Corey Kluber and Carlos Carrasco, is the only other team that can even claim two of the top 10.

“>³ For Strasburg and Gonzalez, the 2017 season was somewhat out of line with their recent track records, but Scherzer has been dominant forever — only LA’s Clayton Kershaw has been a more valuable starter over the past five seasons. In the postseason, when top-of-the-rotation pitching is paramount, Washington’s aces give them an enviable advantage against just about anybody.

Weakness: Their best might not be enough.

There aren’t many holes in Washington’s roster, especially now that two of its top players — shortstop Trea Turner and, more recently, right fielder Bryce Harper — are back after missing large portions of the season with injuries. But even with all their stars, it’s fair to ask where the Nationals stand relative to what might be the most stacked postseason field ever. Our Elo ratings currently place Washington seventh in MLB.Behind the Indians, Astros, Yankees, Cubs, Dodgers and Red Sox.

“>⁴ Most years, a team as good as Washington would rank third or fourth,Since the wild-card era began in 1995, the average MLB ranking for teams who finished the regular season with an Elo between 1550 and 1560 was 3.48.

“>⁵ but this is no ordinary season. And as much as MLB’s playoffs have earned their reputation as a crapshoot, there’s a definite relationship between a team’s talent and its World Series chances.

Chicago Cubs

(10 percent chance of winning the World Series)

Strength: Completeness.

The defending-champion Cubs were nowhere near as dominant in 2017 as they were in 2016, dropping from No. 1 in WAR (by far) to a lowly seventh. But one area where the club still had that championship feel was in its lack of a glaring weak point. A year removed from sending an absurd number of players to the All-Star Game, Chicago still had one of the best top-to-bottom teams in baseball. According to WAR, the Cubs got the most production in baseball from its catchers, the second-most from its third basemen, the third-most from its first basemen and — most importantly — didn’t rank any lower than 14th at any single position.Including pitchers but excluding designated hitters, to fairly compare NL and AL teams.

“>⁶ Not even the mighty Indians can say their weakest links were so strong. In the playoffs, important contributions often come from unlikely sources. Chicago should be covered.

Weakness: Inexplicably mediocre pitching.

One of Chicago’s deadliest weapons a year ago was its stellar pitching staff, led by an outstanding crop of starters. The group got a lot of help from a historically sturdy defense, which fell back to earth (though was still excellent) this season, but that doesn’t explain why Chicago’s pitchers declined in fielding-independent measurements. Chicago hurlers fell from 3rd to 8th in strikeout rate this season, from 18th to 24th in walk rate and from 6th to 16th in home run rate — perhaps because their average fastball velocity was among the slowest in baseball. As a result, the Cubs’ top pitchers saw their value drop almost across the board, and as a group they generated about 7 fewer wins this year than last. Without that fearsome rotation, Chicago’s title hopes are a shadow of what they were this time last season.

By not opening his mouth, Justice Anthony Kennedy may have tipped his hand in one of the biggest Supreme Court cases of the year. If history is any indication — and although it’s a handy guide, it’s hardly infallible — things don’t look good for extreme partisan gerrymandering.

The Supreme Court is hearing a case on whether partisan gerrymandering can be considered unconstitutional, and Kennedy is likely to be the deciding vote. (For more on why, listen to our podcast on the case.) Wisconsin is appealing a decision by a lower court, which ruled that the way Republicans crafted the state’s electoral maps in 2010 was illegal. The attorneys for the state, who are defending the maps, got plenty of questions from Kennedy, while the Wisconsin Democrats, who want the maps struck down, got none. Kennedy spoke 10 times during the state of Wisconsin’s arguments. He asked five questions and made five statements.

“If you get a lot of questions, you’re going to lose,” Adam Liptak, The New York Times’ Supreme Court reporter, told FiveThirtyEight in 2015.

Justices aren’t just asking questions to get information from the lawyers arguing their cases. In some ways, the questions aren’t meant for the lawyers at all. The justices ask questions to signal their positions to their fellow members of the court, and to potentially sway other justices to their side. If they’re skeptical of one side’s argument, they often pepper that side with queries. Chief Justice John Roberts has even described the lawyers as a “backboard” — the questions bounce off them and come right back to the bench.

A body of academic research has confirmed this conventional wisdom, showing empirically that questions from the justices are usually bad news for the party on the receiving end. The number of questions, their length, their linguistic content and even the tone of voice in which they’re asked are all statistically significant factors in predicting the court’s eventual decision.

Bryce Dietrich, a political scientist at the University of Iowa, provided us with data on the questions Kennedy has asked in cases from 1988 to 2014, gathered from transcripts of the oral arguments. There are 5,151 lines in these transcripts that Kennedy directed toward either the petitioner (the party asking the high court to hear the case) or the respondent (the party that won the case in the lower court) when asking a question.Dietrich and his co-authors scraped the transcript data from Oyez. A “line” is a line of text as displayed in the transcript — essentially a sentence of speech. To determine to whom the question was directed, they searched subsequent lines until they found a lawyer speaking, and matched that lawyer with the party that he or she was representing in the case.

‘>¹

That data shows that Kennedy is no different from the rest of the court: You don’t want to be on the receiving end of his questions. When Kennedy votes for the respondent (which would be the Wisconsin Democrats, in this case) he directs 93.3 words to them (57.5 percent of his speech). When he votes against the respondent, he directs 102.0 words to them (61.1 percent of his speech).

And on Tuesday, he directed zero words to the respondent. Historically, he directed zero words toward the party he went on to vote for 272 times, out of 1,022 cases in this data set. He directed zero words toward the party he wound up voting against only 177 times.

But when he did speak, what did he ask? Kennedy was the first justice to speak during the state of Wisconsin’s arguments, and he dove right into a suggestion he made in a 2004 opinion on a separate case: that the best argument against partisan gerrymandering may be that it’s a violation of the First Amendment. Previously, these kinds of cases have been argued as violations of the 14th Amendment, which covers “equal protection of the laws.” The First Amendment protects freedom of speech, religion and assembly, and it has been interpreted as protecting Americans’ freedom to associate with whatever groups they choose, including political parties.

Kennedy’s other main question also came straight out of his 2004 opinion. He proposed a hypothetical, asking whether it would be unconstitutional if a state wrote a law explicitly saying that “the overriding concern is to … have a maximum number of votes for party X or party Y.”

At that point Ginsburg, Alito and Kagan all jumped into the debate. It was a hotly contested hypothetical and is likely key to the case, as Kennedy wrote in 2004:

“If a State passed an enactment that declared ‘All future apportionment shall be drawn so as most to burden Party X’s rights to fair and effective representation, …’ we would surely conclude the Constitution had been violated. If that is so, we should admit the possibility remains that a legislature might attempt to reach the same result without that express directive.”

Kennedy didn’t speak during the Wisconsin Democrats’ arguments, but they were clearly speaking to him. Their attorney cited him twice during his arguments, and, as one of their attorneys in lower court, Nicholas Stephanopoulos, told FiveThirtyEight, “Our first Supreme Court brief … cites Anthony Kennedy all over the place and that’s not purely for tactical reasons, it’s actually because he’s said a lot of things that we think our test is consistent with.”

Of course, some of the other justices had plenty to say during the Wisconsin Democrats’ arguments. The most junior justice, Neil Gorsuch, dismissively compared their legal test to the hodgepodge of spices in his steak rub, and Chief Justice Roberts called it “sociological gobbledygook.” But Kennedy sat in silence, taking in a case that was tailor made for him.

We’re a quarter of the way through the NFL season, and Week 4 brought its fair share of surprises. The Buffalo Bills upset the Atlanta Falcons on the road, a last-second Carolina Panthers field goal delivered Tom Brady’s New England Patriots their second home loss of the year, and Andy Dalton was actually good.

Through four weeks, very few teams are following the course predicted for them at the season’s outset. Many pundits thought a Los Angeles team would be sneaky dangerous this season — they just didn’t think it would be the Rams. Others assumed a New York team would start 0-4 — they just didn’t pick the Giants. But in a season marked by surprises, the most perplexing start may belong to the Dallas Cowboys.

After Week 1, Dallas had every reason for optimism: The expected suspension of running back Ezekiel Elliott was delayed by the courts, and the team that was 13-3 last year was fresh off a dominating win over the New York Giants. Dallas’ Elo rating climbed, and many analysts (most of them in Texas) viewed the Cowboys as a surefire Super Bowl team. As it turned out, the Giants are terrible and Dallas would spend the next three weeks showing that it was not the same team it was last year — even with Elliott in uniform.

“America’s Team” had an Elo advantage of 160 points heading into Sunday’s game with the Los Angeles Rams, meaning they were favorites to win the game by about six points.Every 25 Elo points is equivalent to 1 point in an actual game.

“>¹ The Cowboys lost and fell to 2-2 and, in the process, saw their chances of making the playoffs drop to 40 percent — their lowest of the season — according to our 2017 NFL Predictions. For Dallas — which dropped to a tie for eighthWith the Seattle Seahawks

“>² in our power rankings — a 4-in-10 chance of making the playoffs with three-quarters of the season left to play may not sound all that bad. But compared with the rest of the teams in the top 10, the Cowboys are noticeably out of place.

Most of Dallas’s metrics are roughly the same as they were last season, with the major exception of the passing game (and some faulty special teams). Last year, in QB Dak Prescott’s first NFL season, he led the Cowboys to the sixth-most expected points added (EPA) through the air of any offense in football — a highly effective complement to Dallas’s second-ranked running game. But although the Cowboys still rank among the top five in rushing EPA, Prescott and the passing offense has fallen to 19th in the league in EPA. Prescott’s traditional numbers aren’t bad, but he’s all but stopped throwing the deep ball and the Dallas receivers are picking up very few yards after the catch. The result has been an aerial attack that struggles to move the chains, keeping the Cowboys from scoring as many points as they should.

The bad news doesn’t stop there for Dallas. The Cowboys face a tough road if they hope to win the division, because even though the Giants are floundering, the rest of the NFC East has played better than we predicted in the preseason. And based on FiveThirtyEight’s Week 5 NFL Elo ratings, Dallas has the toughest remaining schedule of any team in its division; the Cowboys’ opponents have an average Elo rating of 1525, while the teams New York is facing average 1514, Washington’s opponents average 1499, and the rest of Philadelphia’s schedule averages 1496.

The Cowboys and Eagles’ next five games could further increase the gap between those two teams — the Eagles currently have a one-game lead. Dallas’ next five opponents have an average Elo of 1549, and the Cowboys will face three of those teams on the road. Compare that with Philadelphia’s next five games — in which the Eagles’ opponents average an Elo of 1490 and only one game will be on the road — and the Cowboys’ playoff hopes could be essentially done by Week 10.

FiveThirtyEight vs. the crowd

Weeks 3 and 4 in our NFL prediction game — in which we invite you to pick football games and try to outsmart our Elo algorithm — were triumphant victories for machine over man. Over a combined 32 games, our Elo model beat you, the readers, by a whopping 146.2 points! You can blame the New York Jets for your two largest net losses. The Jets upset the Miami Dolphins in Week 3 — which both our model and the readers got wrong — and this weekend the Jets pulled out an overtime victory over the Jacksonville Jaguars, which our Elo picked right and you readers got wrong. (Note: We don’t blame you for not picking the Jets.)

Despite Elo correctly predicting the winners in only two more games than readers through Week 4, our model holds a lead of 181.7 net points. This is because our game rewards not just correct picks, but also how much confidence the model and our readers had in the outcome. For example, despite our bashing the Cowboys here, both Elo and the readers predicted Dallas would win at home over the Rams this past weekend. Though we both predicted incorrectly, the readers netted 5.5 points on that game because Elo had more confidence in Dallas winning (78 percent) than readers did (72 percent).

Whenever President Trump lashes out against someone or something in a way that defies traditional expectations for presidential behavior — for instance, his decision to criticize the mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico, on Saturday morning after her town was just devastated by Hurricane Maria — it yields a debate about what was behind it. After Trump’s series of attacks on the NFL and its players earlier this month, for example, there were two major theories about what motivated his conduct.

The first theory is that it was a deliberate political tactic — or as a New York Times headline put it, “a calculated attempt to shore up his base.” We often hear theories like this after Trump does or says something controversial or outrageous. His response to the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August was sometimes explained in this way, for example. “Mr. Trump has always appreciated the emotional pull of questioning bias and fairness, especially with his white working-class base,” the Times wrote, portraying Charlottesville as an issue that drove a wedge between the Trumpian and the Republican establishment.

It’s also often claimed that Trump leans into controversies such as the NFL protests as a way to distract the media from other, more serious issues, such as the repeated Republican failures to repeal Obamacare, or the various investigations into Trump’s dealings with Russia. These claims also assume that Trump’s actions are calculated and deliberate — that he’s a clever media manipulator, always staying one step ahead of editors in Washington and New York.

The second theory is that the response was impulsive and primarily emotional. Trump initially began criticizing the NFL and NFL players at a rally last Friday in Huntsville, Alabama, including referring (although not by name) to former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick as a “son of a bitch” for protesting during the national anthem. Perhaps encouraged by the raucous response he received from the crowd, Trump went on a tweetstorm about the NFL, its owners and its players that lasted intermittently over the next several days. Somewhere along the way, he also disinvited former NBA MVP Stephen Curry from attending the White House ceremony scheduled to honor the NBA Champion Golden State Warriors. (Curry had already said that he didn’t like what Trump stood for and didn’t plan to attend.)

Not all of this — particularly not roping the popular Curry into the controversy — necessarily seemed all that “calculated” to me. Instead, it seemed to fit a different behavioral pattern: Trump is piqued by criticism and rarely backs down, especially when he’s challenged by women or minorities — such as Curry, the predominantly black NFL player pool, ESPN’s Jemele Hill, Khizr and Ghazala Khan, Judge Gonzalo B. Curiel, London Mayor Sadiq Khan, former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly or Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, to take some of many examples.

I know what you, as an analytically inclined FiveThirtyEight reader, are probably thinking: Are these theories necessarily mutually exclusive? Couldn’t these responses reflect fits of emotional pique on Trump’s behalf — and yet also have the effect of pleasing his base, or distracting the media from health care and Russia?

Sure, they could. Trump’s base support isn’t quite as immovable as some pundits seem to assume — but public opinion on many issues such as Charlottesville quickly polarizes itself along partisan lines. And Trump’s tweets and insults often have the effect of upending the news cycle; covering Trump is in some sense covering one distraction after another.

But the theories are in conflict because they’re about the intent and motivation for Trump’s behavior and not necessarily its effects. The first theory says that Trump is calculating and rational; the second says that he’s impulsive and emotional. The first theory implies that Trump may be employing “racially charged” rhetoric and actions for political gain. The second implies that Trump himself may harbor degrees of racial resentment, and resentment toward women, and that it colors his response to news events. Either way, Trump’s actions could be politically effective or ineffective. (Trump’s approval rating declined slightly this week after his NFL comments, although it’s hard to know if they’re the reason why.) However, it seems important to know what motivates them. If Trump’s actions are driven by emotional outbursts more than calculated trollishness, that might predict a different response to how he deals with escalating tensions with North Korea, for example.

After Trump’s NFL remarks, you really could have argued either theory. In addition to the racial dynamics at play, Trump has some personal grievances with the NFL, including his failure to purchase an NFL franchise. But the protests from Kaepernick and others have been unpopular, and the response to them has been highly partisan. One can imagine Trump thinking it was effective politics to bring them up as a wedge issue, especially at a political rally in Alabama.

It’s much harder to describe some of Trump’s other outbursts — like those against the Khan family or Judge Curiel, for example — as representing a calculated political strategy. The same goes for Trump’s tweetstorm on Saturday morning about San Juan mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, who had criticized the White House’s response to Hurricane Maria.

No matter how cynical one is, it’s hard to see what possible political benefit Trump could get from criticizing Cruz, whose city was devastated by Maria and remains largely without power and otherwise in crisis. Nor is the government’s response to Maria necessarily something that Trump wants to draw a lot of attention to. I’ve seen debates back and forth in the media over the past week about whether Trump’s response to Maria is analogous to the one former President George W. Bush had to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Trump’s dismissiveness toward Cruz almost certainly won’t help his side of the argument; instead, it will amplify growing criticism about how the government handled Puerto Rico and why Trump seemed to be more interested in the NFL protests than in his administration’s hurricane recovery plan.

I’m happy to acknowledge that Trump’s responses to the news are sometimes thought-out and deliberate. His criticisms of the media often seem to fall into this category, for example, since they’re sure to get widespread coverage and Republican voters have overwhelmingly lost faith in the media.

But at many other times, journalists come up with overly convoluted explanations for Trump’s behavior (“this seemingly self-destructive emotional outburst is actually a clever political strategy!”) when simpler ones will suffice (“this is a self-destructive emotional outburst.”). In doing so, they violate both Ockham’s razorWhich can roughly be stated as: Given two theories that explain a phenomenon equally well, the simpler one is usually better

“>¹ and Hanlon’s razor — the latter of which can be stated as “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” One can understand why journalists who rely on having close access to Trump avoid explanations that portray Trump as being irrational, incompetent or bigoted. But sometimes they’re the only explanations that make sense.