Baseball’s Competitive Balance Problem
The current landscape of the game might charitably be called an era of superteams. Last year, the Yankees, Astros, Twins, and Dodgers all won more than 100 games. In 2018, it was the Red Sox, Astros, and Yankees; the year before that, the Dodgers, Indians, and Astros all won at least 100 times. The Cubs won 103 on their way to a World Series title, bringing the total number of 100-win teams over the past four seasons to 11. In the 10 years heading into 2016, only four teams hit the 100-win mark, and only the 2009 Yankees and 2011 Phillies won more than 100 games. Superteams are made possible by great players and smart organizations, but they are also made possible by having a bunch of bad teams to beat up on. The lack of competitive balance in today’s game is worse than it’s been in more than 60 years, back when there were only 16 teams and the reserve clause kept players from ever choosing their own employer.
One way to test baseball’s competitive balance is simply to take every team’s winning percentage in a single year and find the standard deviation. The smaller the standard deviation, the more teams are bunched toward the middle in a more competitive atmosphere. The bigger the standard deviation, the more teams are spread apart. Going back to 1903, this is what the standard deviation for team winning percentage looks like:
That line goes way up at the end and shows the least competitively balanced season since 1954. For a closer look, let’s break things down since 1961, when baseball first began to expand beyond 16 teams:
It isn’t difficult to see a pattern of imbalance in the expansion years. This should be expected, given that the league is adding two or four bad teams. The only other season that comes close to the last two years is 2002, at the height of the steroid era. That was mostly before the surge in popularity of advanced analytics; older, more expensive players were performing better than many of their peers, in part due to how two rounds of expansion had diluted the talent pool (and possibly in part due to chemical enhancement), which made it easier to buy wins on the free agent market. My theory is that the rise of analytics combined with steroid testing served to even things out between large- and small-payroll teams. It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that during that time, the correlation between spending and wins was fairly low at the beginning of this decade, and has risen over the last few years as competitive balance has gone down, as seen in the graph above.
There were calls back in the early 2000s to fix the game’s lack of competitive balance. As we see in the graph above, the balance was fixed shortly thereafter for about a decade. To get a better sense of the trend, the graph below shows the three-year rolling average of the standard deviation of win percentage:
We have those early 60s years, which were less competitive as the league grew by 25%. That makes sense. There are a couple of other expansion-related spikes before 1980, and then we have one other big spike at the turn of the century comparable to what we are seeing now. Looking at the graph, it is fair to say that competitive balance is cyclical, and will go back down. The problem now is how quickly the problem has escalated. Just 20 months ago, competitive balance didn’t really seem like a major issue. In March of 2018, Ben Lindbergh wrote about the potential for Cubs and Astros copycats for The Ringer, but noted that the imbalance wasn’t that great at the time. In 2017, the standard deviation for winning percentage was .071, which looked right in line with the average over the last 60 or so years. Since that article, the lack of competition has become much clearer.
In his piece, Lindbergh noted that FanGraphs projections showed more expected imbalance for 2018, the fourth straight year of increasing standard deviation for projected wins. That season, the standard deviation approached 10 wins, after coming in around six to eight wins over the previous dozen years. Those projections proved accurate; the standard deviation for wins was higher in 2018 than any season since 1970 except for the 2002 season. And the projected standard deviation of wins got worse heading into this season, topping 10 for the first time. Again, the projections were correct, as this past season had the highest standard deviation for winning percentage since 1954.
Wins aren’t the only way we can measure the league’s race away from the middle; WAR can help out as well. The talent gap in baseball has never been wider than it was this past season:
Since the dawn of free agency about 45 years ago, the average standard deviation of team WAR has been right around 10, and had been above 13 just once, when the league added two teams in 1977. The standard deviation has been above 13 in each of the last two years and was 50% higher than average in 2019. As for why it matters, Baseball Prospectus‘ Rob Arthur found that non-competitive teams were a big driver of in-person attendance losses. Arthur looked at daily playoff odds to determine the competitiveness of the league instead of projections or year-end totals, but he reached the same conclusion: baseball has become increasingly non-competitive. (Arthur’s own analysis of competitive balance found that the Astros, Dodgers, and Yankees held an unprecedented share of the World Series win probability, using Baseball Prospectus‘ measures.)
Parsing how much of the current imbalance is due to the very good teams pressing genuine advantages in drafting, player development, and analytics versus playing against a league with an increasing number of teams voluntarily entering down cycles is difficult; this piece isn’t a commentary on “tanking,” which comes in many different forms, with some rebuilding efforts resulting in a better experience for fans than others. Some teams are really bad even when they try to win. And what’s good for the future of individual teams isn’t necessarily what’s best for the long-term future of the sport, either. But however those forces balance against each other, and they are each worthy subjects of analysis, it’s undeniable that the game is less competitive than it’s been in generations. And while this lack of competitiveness could be cyclical, there isn’t a clear solution to getting out of the current cycle. The big-market teams have caught up to, and in some cases passed, the smaller markets analytically. We’ve already gone two decades without expansion, so we can’t expect a more competitive landscape due to adjustments resulting from more teams. There doesn’t appear to be an easy solution. This is what Commissioner Rob Manfred had to say in June:
“When you talk to our owners, everybody’s competing,” Manfred said, when asked about the concerns of teams not competing. “The question is what are they doing to be competitive and at what stage in that process are they. I think at the end of the year, my guess is you’re going to have more parity in terms of the spread of winning percentages than we had last year, and that’s a good thing.
“Obviously the tighter the clubs are grouped, the better it is for us and for our business. I do think that in today’s game, it’s important to realize that as always there’s been a cycle to competitiveness and clubs are going to continue to go through those cycles.”
Manfred was wrong about his guess. He understands what the issue is (or at least could be) in terms of competitiveness, but it’s not clear he has come to grips with the fact that the problem is real and right in front of him. Worse, based on his “cycle of competitiveness” quote, he doesn’t appear to have a plan to solve the problem, instead hoping the issue will resolve itself. Hope and faith is fine for the rest of us, but ending this cycle will likely need some intervention from the owners and players to make the game healthier and more fun for its fans.
Craig Edwards can be found on twitter @craigjedwards.
Craig chooses a good metric in w/l standard deviation to view competitive balance over the years, but I agree more with Manfred. Everything looks like a big problem if you look at the short-term of 1-3 years. Over longer cycles, the current superteam/tanker dichotomy is going to smooth out as teams that are currently bad focus more on developing strong farm systems so that they can maintain a higher win baseline over longer periods. I think baseball writers have been slow in recognizing the change from free agency as a big source of wins to minor league development and thus have been alarmist at every turn. In a few years, we’ll look back and laugh and how weirdly alarmist we all were.
I feel like saying it’s cyclical is hand waving. It’s not like “developing strong farm system” hasn’t been the mantra for 30+ years. You *need* several 5+ win players to compete for a title, and the best way to get them right now is to continue collecting lottery tickets and high draft picks until you hit on a few at the same time. Big market teams can afford to lock those players up and extend the window for their lottery tickets to hit, small markets can’t. So small markets trade their winners for more tickets. In the mean time, you count on ticket sales from the super teams coming to town to keep your organization afloat. There is no compelling reason for teams without a ton of cash to change that formula.
Mantra? The J2 draft/Dominican has really only taken off in the last 7-8 years and I’d say that’s a bigger source of the spread between good and bad teams than big-market/small-market. Prospects are a much more important currency than Payroll $. Said differently: Farm System Rankings are a forward-looking indicator on team success and Payroll-Ranking is a lagging indicator. Build your core first, have success, then increase payroll to add good veterans to get to the WS. I agree that big-markets can have longer “windows” since they can extend their best players, but that doesn’t mean a small market can’t be playoff-able for a couple years, take a step back for a couple years, and then back in the playoffs .
Well, small-market teams have done a pretty good job of extending one franchise player at a time, but ironically pretty much all of those contracts turn out to be disasters by the time the team is ready to compete again. The classic example of this is Joey Votto. You haven’t seen a lot of Joey Votto-ish contracts lately except Arenado and Blackmon, and while those contracts are/may turn into an albatross and the Rockies’ front office isn’t all that smart they did seem to sincerely think that they were going to keep on winning for a while.
Where the bigger market teams really shine is being able to do that with multiple guys at once. The Red Sox managed to extend Dustin Pedroia, and that didn’t keep them from extending Rick Porcello, which didn’t keep them from extending Chris Sale, etc. None of these contracts looked good eventually and they also didn’t keep them from locking up someone else later. The Giants also tried this, except they all turned into pumpkins at the same time. But smaller market teams, if they want to do that, they have to hit on an Evan Longoria really early. I don’t know exactly how fix it so that a team like the Royals hang on to a guys like Eric Hosmer after locking up Alex Gordon, but if you could that would solve a bunch of problems mentioned in this article.
I think I understand your point, but that seems like an odd example since Hosmer has produced -0.5 fWAR since leaving the Royals.
I’m struggling to think of a better recent example, though. Seems like small market teams have completely avoided large contracts since the Votto signing. It’s more like the small markets think they can’t afford any risk, with the A’s trading Donaldson, Grandal only getting a 1-yr contract with the Brewers, the Indians not even giving Brantley a QO, etc.
I struggled with that example too, but it’s also hard to find guys who would make sense to extend. Hosmer, being a face of the franchise and pretty young, seemed like a decent way to illustrate the point. Perhaps the Rays trading David Price instead of locking him up?
I think Craig was thinking about the Rockies when he wrote this line: “Some teams are really bad even when they try to win.”
Plenty of teams would like to have been to the playoffs 2 out of the last 3 years. Rockies get a bum rap. They are dealing with the hardest to crack nut in baseball in their home stadium, and have still played October baseball quite a bit lately. How far they got in the playoffs is, as always, a crapshoot.
There’s been a lot of hand-wringing about teams “voluntarily entering down cycles” lately, and I appreciate that Craig says this isn’t about “tanking” which is really not what most teams are doing. First off, aside from the Astros, it’s not clear there have been *any* real tank jobs in the past few years (some people cite the Cubs). The benefits to getting a higher draft pick in MLB are not anything like in the NBA, so teams aren’t trying to lose games. And then if you look at the bad teams this year: The Padres signed Manny Machado (and Eric Hosmer) and wound up at the bottom of their division. The Mariners and Pirates and Blue Jays essentially made a commitment to mediocrity and accidentally wound up terrible. The Royals didn’t try so hard this year but they also kept their entire core around for one last run rather than trade them away. The Orioles were terrible but that was a year after they were trying to make a playoff run and unexpectedly wound up as one of the worst teams of the century. The only real examples of teams that have just given up are the Tigers (whose payroll isn’t exactly tiny) and the Marlins.
I think a lot of teams have decided that it isn’t any better to win 82 games than it is to win 72 or even 62 games on a yearly basis. It costs more and you still aren’t making the playoffs. The White Sox tried to spend a little money each year by signing FA’s and try to catch lightning in a bottle, make the playoffs, and hope Sale and Quintana would get hot and carry them. That just resulted in Rick Hahn calling them “mired in mediocrity” and was no better to watch than the last couple of years when they have been simply bad. At least now I can tune in to see if the kids are any good instead of to see if Adam LaRoche or Melky Cabrera are suddenly not old. So why not save money and improve your draft position? Yes, the draft is largely a crap shoot, especially after about the top 3 or 5 selections, but at least you have more choice higher up in the draft. Also, once you decide you aren’t interested in signing mid-level free agents to improve by 2 or 4 meaningless wins, you get to hold on to more of those draft picks and get more chances to find players.
It’s also a copy-cat league and it worked for the Astros and Cubs. You could argue it worked for the Royals, too.
I agree. Plus, the White Sox have picked Rodon 3rd, Madrigal 4th, and now Vaughn 3rd — all guys who will start on the ML Club less than 2 years after being drafted. They did pick Sale 13th years ago, but other than that you get guys like Fulmer, Burger, and Collins. There’s a steep drop in draft quality once you get past the top 4 or 5 picks in the 1st round. Tanking has more value than winning 70 games rather than 65 games does.
You’re unintentionally making the opposite point. Rodon is a huge risk to be an injury bust. Madrigal and Vaughn are still very much question marks. The best coming player on their team was someone they got in a trade (Luis Robert), who wasn’t even the best prospect they got in that deal.
You are exactly correct. Once the baseball universe realized that it is a terribly inefficient use of resources to try to build a 70 win team into an 80 win team, the obvious strategy became taking those resources (i.e. money) and dumping it into drafting, scouting and player development.
and hence why baseball is in the position it is today compared to even 5 years ago….
MLB needs a salary floor and it needs it now.
I think that is not unreasonable, but a floor comes with a cap. It should be possible to set both so that the total player expenditures are the same as they are now. Total MLB payroll was about $4.2B, average was about $139M. Set the inital cap around $210M and the floor around $105M and last year only 3 teams would have had to cut payroll, but 8 would have been under the floor, although 2 by less than $1M. Set a formula to recalculate it yearly to rise with revenues and maybe a penalty (rising floor?) if total MLB payroll is less than a certain percentage.
Really, if the players would set those requirements for a cap and negotiate it well, they could easily come out ahead in the short term and avoid the current problem of basically stagnant payrolls while revenues increase.
But payrolls aren’t stagnant, they’re pretty much a constant percentage of revenue, and the PA admits that right?
Who says a floor needs a cap? It’s perfectly viable to set a strict salary floor while still maintaining the soft cap we have now. The luxury tax line just needs to be updated more accurately to better match the game’s rising economics.
Poor teams are punished the most by salary floors. You’ll never see the Yankees or Dodgers even come close to the floor, and a floor would help inflate the salaries of talent that the poor teams still couldn’t afford.
I have no idea what a salary floor has to do with anything. The purpose of a salary floor is to help players earn more money. And it has the secondary effect of making it even harder for poor teams to keep players.
i dont know what a floor would actually do. if it’s anything like hockey, where there is a salary floor, poor/bad teams will just trade for dead contracts in exchange for better assets. ex: tim thomas being traded to the islanders and never playing, pavel datsyuk being traded to the coyotes and never playing. a salary floor in baseball wouldn’t necessarily mean an average free agent gets paid more, but instead means a guy like jacoby ellsbury gets moved along with a prospect because a rebuilder needs to hit an artificial floor, and it’s better to have the young prospect than a 2 WAR position player free agent.
Not only that but the cap in hockey has shrunk if not eliminated the market for “middle class” players. Those good but not great older (27-31ish) players who have played out their cheap years. Teams now rely on one or two high paid stars and/or a bunch of guys on cheap entry level deals. NFL teams employ a similar model these days too.
Which should sound pretty familiar to MLB fans because that is whats been at the core of the free agency “problem” the past couple off season. So I’m not sure a cap/floor system is going to do what alot of fans think it will. Most likely it will just solidify/accelerate what has already become the base model for team building over the past few years.
Yeah, so that’s why you just keep the soft cap that exists now while just adding a floor. Problem solved.
Hmm, the dead contract thing is a possibility, but at least teams are getting smarter about handing out those bad deals in the first place, and many of those guys are still good enough to serve as starters on the rebuilding teams that would use this method.
As for hurting poor teams, I don’t see how it makes them any worse off than they are now. They can’t go after the top talents in free agency either way, and if they take the opportunity to extend a player or two when they can afford to do so, they can get away with not spending as much on free agency while still meeting the floor, just like they do now. However, when they are cutting payroll in a rebuilding effort, they’ll still need to sign some decent low-to-mid-tier free agents as stopgaps to meet the floor, which is a benefit for both those players and the team’s own prospects who won’t be rushed to the big leagues before they’re ready.
Agreed that I don’t think teams tanked for the highest draft picks. But I do think they were willing to compromise the here and now to stockpile lots of talent in the minors. It’s a numbers game. Not all prospects work out. The more highly regarded entry level players you have the more likely a good number work out for you. As a Cubs fan I look at how that 2016 World Series winner was built. Be interested in seeing how the Astros, Yankees, Dodgers, Giants and Nats built their teams since they also have been recent standard bearers for creating a string of highly competitive teams (not teams that “sneak” into the players) in the last 7-8 years.
– Baez was already in the farm system when Epstein arrived
– Contreras was signed internationally
– Hendricks was acquired in a trade for Ryan Dempster. He was a prospect.
– Rizzo was acquired in a trade for Andrew Cashman. He was a rookie.
– Edwards and Grimm were key bullpen pieces and were acquired along with Mike Olt for Garza in a trade. Both were prospects.
– Arrieta and Strop were acquired in a trade for Scott Feldman. One had failed already and the other was a prospect.
– Bryant was drafted in the first round
– Almora was drafted in the first round
– Russell was acquired in a trade for Hammels (who was then resigned the next year) and Shark
– LaStella was acquired in a trade with the Braves
– Heyward was signed as a FA
– Lester was signed as a FA
– Zobrist was signed as a FA
– Soler was signed as an international prospect
– Fowler was acquired in a trade for Luis Valbuena and then resigned to a one year deal in 2016
– Montero was acquired in a trade for prospects
– Montgomery was acquired in a trade for prospects
Yes, high draft picks helped. But it took a ton of other moves to build that team and many of those trades were done to help other teams try and win in return for young, cost controlled talent that let the Cubs spend in FA to round out their roster after the 2-3 years of sucking ended.
I find it semi-amusing that the byline of this article:
“It’s possible baseball has never been as competitively imbalanced as it is right now.”
gets contradicted to a degree by the very first graph in it.
Read the Mookie Betts article. It was one glaring contradiction after another.
Craig enjoys his narratives.
This is a very good piece. I want to throw in a few points that I think many would disagree with, but I’m interested in their opinions.
1) Get rid of the draft pick penalty for signing QO’s. It’s not a real deterrent with the superstars, and, to the extent the loss of a pick keeps a high revenue team from drafting, a solid player and developing him, it makes that team go into the Free Agent market and bid someone up. Free agent signings are built around need, and there’s no real need if you have a 2 1/2- 3 WAR player already filling the position. You can still keep the QO for the teams losing a pick.
2) Seriously review how Competitive Balance picks are awarded. The incentives to lose are unquestionably there. The present CBA has a formula that includes winning percentage–and that’s on top of reverse order. Let’s be realistic, no big market team needs an extra pick for deciding to be lousy,
3) Make all draft picks freely tradable (once)–allows higher pick/lower revenue teams to choose how to allocate their resources
4) Consider a new system on revenue sharing that ties (in part) to player contracts, I have nothing agains big market teams subsidizing smaller ones, so long as those smaller market teams invest in players. Consider a formula that pools revenue sharing per team as a subsidy for retaining players or purchasing new ones….but if you don’t use it, you lose a percentage of each dollar.
Yes to number 4. There needs to be SOMETHING to penalize a team financially for not spending money on the product on the field. If the league is going to be giving teams money to subsidize the team then one way or another, make the teams use that money for the team. I may hate the Yankees, but at least their money goes on the field, I’d far rather they had it than that we give it to the Marlins to spend on ownership. If you’re not going to require the league money to be spent on the field, then drop the concept and let teams sell their own merchandise and keep their own income.
Actually the Yankees have the lowest ratio of payroll to revenue in the MLB. They do the exact opposite of what you said.
1 & 2) Who cares though why does STL get a cb pick? They sell 3M tix/year and are almost always successful, who cares that their market is small?
3) Sure.
4) Why not just tie revenue sharing to wins? Small markets get $X if they win 65 games but $XX if they win 80 and $XXX if they win 90. Although maybe they have other problems if fans aren’t sufficiently rewarding the team with more revenue when they’re winning.
Writers and fans really want to subsidize free agents for some reason. Maybe Craig could write up something on Forbes’ estimates of team revenues vs team payrolls over the last 5 or 10 years to see who is spending and who isn’t.
“Writers and fans really want to subsidize free agents for some reason.”
It would be interesting if fangraphs asked this question and fairly answered it, but I don’t think anyone thinks to ask it.
The problem is that tying revenue sharing to wins means that it’s too easy to get stuck in a cycle of non-competitiveness. Fewer $ means spending less, and it just sinks from there.
Also, there’s an ugly little problem which is that once you start rewarding teams for wins like that, it becomes obvious that free agency is a terrible buy and insulates teams from spending money. If it costs $8M/win on the free agent market or something like that, and you’re only giving them $1M/win, you’ve set up a scenario where teams have a built in excuse for cutting costs.
WRT proposal #4, free agents are a terrible buy and that it doesn’t make a lot of sense for teams to splurge there, but it does put you at a competitive disadvantage, and even more so if you have trouble extending your home-grown stars.
I agree that FA is a terrible buy and that’s why I think wins cause Payroll Increases (mainly through extensions of good young players and trades for veterans) and not vice-versa, thus I don’t think there would be a cycle of non-competitiveness.
Farm systems may be why NFL-like payroll caps & ceilings won’t work in MLB. Teams can choose different levels of spend on Farm Systems (not sure why they’d choose less, since that’s the best investment). Fruits from which and past decisions determine how much to spend on the ML Club. Forcing teams to cross some payroll floor when they hit a dry well in their farm for a given period is a bad idea.
The Nats with noted Free Agents Max Scherzer and Patrick Corbin say hello(not to mention Anibal Sanchez and Kurt Suzuki.).
Go back and look at the Free Agent Lists of the last 5 years and tell me how many provided surplus value like Scherzer and Corbin. You have a lot more Pujols, Hosmer, and Chris Davis’s.
We’re looking for repeatable processes where you spend a small amount and hope to win a lottery in return like the Amateur Draft or J2 Dominican recruiting, not where you have to spend a lottery and cross your fingers that you get a lottery back in return for an even trade.
You’ve endorsed the dumb idea of a salary floor. Assuming the top-15 FA’s on Kiley McDaniel’s list prefer contending teams, what FA’s should teams like the Tigers, Orioles, Marlins, and Royals spend $50M/yr on? Is that better than saving in down years and then going ape with the accumulated savings in up years?
When you support ideas, you have to have a clear idea of the problem you are trying to solve. If you’re trying to solve competitive parity, then Antonio Bananas’ idea of expanding Rule 5 to an expansion-like draft is the answer. Salary Floors just solves the problem of getting mediocre FA’s paid and bidding up the real good ones, which as I wondered about above: why does anyone care about FA salaries?
It’s sure better than seeing teams with a 40 million dollar payroll to be a AAA team for other teams…. No reason to have 4 teams losing 100 games. With another 6 losing 90. The problem is that teams aren’t just not trying to go from 72 to 82, but they’re trying just as hard to go from 72 to 52.
St Louis is not a small market. They are a regional team. So are the Braves.
I don’t know if I agree with most of these, but I applaud some out of the box thinking here. #4 is my favorite of the bunch, and would be the most effective and direct solution, and it’s easy to define because it would apply to guaranteed contracts (not team control, not arbitration, not minor league deals). But wow is that going to be a big ask in the CBA.
I don’t know of any good reason not to make draft picks tradeable, but your fourth suggestion is the highest-impact change possible. Maybe not that specific implementation, but if you want to change the money in baseball, start by changing the money in baseball.
This sounds like a good idea on paper but there are just so many picks in MLB. The first time a big money team trades like 35 picks to a rebuilding team for a good player, fans and media would riot.
Even if it’s unbalanced within a season, is it really unbalanced across seasons?
Here’s the full list of teams that have failed to make the playoffs in the past 10 years:
White Sox
Mariners
Marlins
Padres
And here’s the list of teams that have made the playoffs only once in the past 10 years:
Angels
That’s it.
Which means that 25 of the 30 teams have made the playoffs multiples times in the past decade. That strikes me as pretty darn competitive.
And of those five teams, only the Marlins are truly hopeless. I’d bet the ChiSox and Pads are at least WC teams within two years, and the Angels are just pitching health away from being a real contender.
BTW, I’ll add…the three big spenders – The Red Sox. the Dodgers, and the Yankees – are competitive nearly every year.
The rest of the teams seem to have 2-5 year periods where they make the playoffs and then fall away. That strikes me as a good thing.
It would be interesting for somebody to repeat this analysis discarding those three teams (I’d do it myself if I had the statistical tools close at hand). Obviously results before the end of the Reserve Clause are going to be weird and probably meaningless if you do that, because of the complete change in how talent is acquired and maintained; it’d be apples and oranges. It might shed light, however, on whether this “competitive balance” issue has anything more to it than just the age-old belief that it’s easier for rich teams to be competitive, and it’s easier for large-market teams to be rich.
More teams could be competitive every year. The Cubs are about to have their TV network come online. And the Giants, Braves and Cardinals could all do the same. Those teams all have really big fan bases.
If the last couple two tree years are the beginning of a new trend & not just a blip on the radar (I lean towards the former without big changes to the CBA) the next ten years are unlikely to see a level of competitive balance similar to the previous ten, which I agree, were pretty darn competitive on the whole.
And what if MLB adds two teams and moves to four divisions in each league with no Wild Card? Perhaps part of the problem is teams have a reason to believe they can sneak into the playoffs and get hot. If you had to win your division that could change things. That also could be really hard to pull off though as how do you create 4 reasonably balanced divisions without destroying rivalries? And where do you put two new teams?
Does that include wild card as part of the playoffs?
Yes, of course, it includes the wild card. Why wouldn’t it? They’re part of the playoffs. Plus most wild card teams are good teams. And, as we’ve seen, they can win the WS.
Well, it does seem like there is a qualitatively different level of competitiveness there. I don’t know whether that’s enough to split them out or not, but it’s an open question to me.
Well if you want Division winners, the list of teams that haven’t won a division crown in the past decade are:
White Sox
Mariners
Marlins
Padres
Pirates
Rockies
So again, only 6 of the 30 teams have failed to win a division crown.
(Pirates, of course, were the hard-luck team, making the wild card 3 years in a row while finishing 3, 2, and 2 games back.
Yeah, I don’t know what I want out of that stat, but it’s the same point either way so I don’t think it matters that much. Maybe the multiple division winner thing would show more of a difference.
Well, I don’t have an issue with Wild Card teams themselves. I just don’t see any team that loses the Wild Card Game as having “made the play-offs” that year, as they only managed to play a single “play-in game.”
If W/L record is random (i.e., maximally competitive), the chances of one team not making the playoffs 10 years in a row equals the chance of not making the playoffs (0.733) to the 10th power,
0 .733^10 = 0.045 — about ~1/25. The chance of this happening randomly for 4 teams is microscopically small = 0.045^4 = 0.0000041.
Even a very bad team, let’s say with only a 15% chance of making the playoffs each year, would make the playoffs ~20% of the time.
For 4 equally bad teams, the chance of none of them making the playoffs is 1/100.
This suggests that the league these teams are in is not in any cyclical competitive balance pattern.
emh1969 is not saying that all teams started at the same cumulative talent levels in 2010. Some teams had strong major league clubs AND strong minor league systems, so that endowment gives them an advantage over the next 10 years.
In other words, W/L record from an unequal starting point can’t be random, by definition. Starting from now, for example, I think the Rays, Padres, and Braves will have the most wins over the next decade. The Twins, Astros, Dodgers, and Yankees look really good. The Red Sox and Cubs have a bleak decade coming up, unless of course, they strike gold in their minor league player acquisition.
I appreciate your defending me though I wasn’t really making any grand pronouncements. As I mentioned below to dl80, it was just a quick and dirty analysis. And I was a bit surprised by the results. I particularly didn’t expect so many of the teams to have made the playoffs at least twice.
Anyway, yes I agree that the starting point matters. Also, wins/losses aren’t independent from year-to-year. Whereas (I think) the analysis by slinger assumes independence.
No, baseball is not random. However, the aforementioned teams with no playoff appearances over 10 years are doing worse than one would expect if it is.
Are you saying that 10 years is too short a period?
The Astros have gone from the pits to the pinnacle in a 10-year period
Over the last 10 years, the Astros have averaged 78.9 wins, pretty close to a random expectation of 81. In those 10 years, they had a low of 51 wins and a high of 107.
So that’s a full cycle for a team that perfected tanking. Even with their tank years, they’ve not gone 10 years without a playoff appearance (at least since ’86)
Your odds are off. You want the chance of any four teams not making for 10 years, you calculated the chance of a specific four. There are 27,405 combinations of 4 teams in MLB. Using your .733 chance per team year, it is well over 4% that some set of four or more teams will miss for a 10 year interval.
Are you counting the play-in game as “playoffs,” though? I wouldn’t, especially for the team that is away and loses.
Yes, they are part of the playoffs so I did include them.
Honestly, though I think some people are getting too caught up in the details of this. I was just trying to do a quick and dirty analysis and used “playoff team” as a proxy for “very good” team. Obviously something like 90+ win seasons or Team WAR would be a better markers for team quality but that would have taken a little more time than I had at the moment.
(for reasons I don’t understand, Fangraphs refuses to pay me for my random comments on their articles so I have to do other things to make money)
how about in the last 5 years??? A lot of teams you’re counting as being in the playoffs made it 9 and 10 years ago.
Only 15 teams have made the playoffs in the last 3 years.
oh, and before you say what about other sports-
NFL- 28/32 teams made the playoffs last 3 years
NBA- 24/30 teams made the playoffs last 3 years
NHL- 28/31 teams made the playoffs last 3 years
I get NBA/NHL a lot easier to get in playoffs…. But NFL only has 2 more spots per year. Even with that, taking next team would have added 2 teams to MLB so 17/30.
Well, I didn’t say anything about other sports. So I’m not sure why you want to go there. But since you did…
Football has had a superteam (the Patriots) that has towered over the NFL for the past 16 years. No, they don’t win every year but they have made 8 Super Bowls in that time. Assuming I’ve counted correctly, MLB is led by the Red Sox, Astros, and Giants with only 3 WS appearances in that time frame.
Basketball, meanwhile, recently went through an 8 year period in which the finals came down to Lebron James’ team vs another team. Or I could point out that the finals were the Cavs vs the Warriors for 4 straight seasons.
Competitiveness comes in different shapes, sizes, and flavors. Perhaps MLB is less competitive than other sports in terms of how many different teams make the playoffs. But other sports (particularly basketball) are less competitive in terms of what teams actually have a chance of winning the championship.
(btw, I don’t have time to look at all your numbers. But I looked through about half the NFL teams and with just those found 5 teams that haven’t made the playoffs in the past 3 seasons (Browns, Jets, Bengals, Broncos, and Redskins. So something appears off with your numbers).
Browns, Bucs, Jets, and 49ers are the teams…. Broncos and Redskins made the playoffs 3 years ago(2016 season). Yes 4 teams will fall off here in a few weeks when the playoffs get seeded(Broncos, Redskins, Cardinals, and Bengals)- BUT 49ers are making the playoffs for sure. Browns are not out of it at all right now. So at worst, NFL will have had 23/32 teams make the playoffs in the last 3 seasons after this year.. And all but 4 making the playoffs in the last 4 years..
I think the problem with baseball is that up until about 4-5 years ago- baseball was extremely competitive. But I don’t think anyone with a straight face can say that today is the same as 4-5 years ago… Baseball is not trending well…
Check again. Broncos and Redskins last made the playoffs in 2015.
And that now was 4 years ago.
Anyways, if you just take the 2017 and 2018 seasons- 19 different teams made the playoffs. And 2 more are likely to make it that missed the last 2 years- Green Bay and San Francisco. That’s over 2/3 of the teams in the NFL making the playoffs- and the Raiders still unbelievably have a shot.
BTW, one other point. Football and basketball are clearly far less competitive WITHIN a season than baseball. The best and worst winning percentages are far more extreme than in baseball. And whereas any given baseball game is basically a 50-50 pick ’em, that’s not true of the other two sports.
Uh, if you really mean 16 seasons (2004-2019 inclusive), Bill DeWitt says hi, with four STL WS appearances in that time. Note that Boston also has four rather than three. Or were you not including the 2004 season? If so, drop those numbers to three each — but STL was still one of the most frequent WS teams. It is fair to say that in terms of population base, one of these things is not like the others.
St. Louis shows up as an outlier in almost any analysis like this. Another trivium connected to the question of tuning the draft for competitive balance: only two teams have never, in the history of the draft, had a #1 or #2 overall choice. One is Boston. The other is … guess who. (They did each get a #3 once.)
Extremely hard to compare sports because the path to win is different in each and so are the economics.
And only 10 made it last year. 🙂 🙂 🙂
Seriously, I have no idea what your point is. Obviously, fewer years means fewer teams.
But if you want….22 teams in the past 5 years. The only teams added to the non-playoff list are the Reds, the Tigers, the Angels, and the Phillies.
and that’s less than any of the other 3 major sports by a wide margin.
And look at the 7 teams you add in years 4 and 5. Pirates, Royals, Orioles, Mets, Giants, Rangers, Blue Jays. Between those 7 teams- only 1 finished over .500 and 4 of them had 90+ losses in 2019. Those 7 teams averaged going 70-92 last year. With 4 of the 7 changing managers.
I appreciate the conversation in this thread, but I see a major problem looming in the near future, if it isn’t already there. 10 years ago, the lower-revenue teams found a way to compete by the use of advanced analytics. But of course, the wealthier teams are going to figure that out and learn about what type of players you spend money on, and who you drop. Not to mention that those wealthier teams have the capital to stock themselves with the top executives and analysts, while poorer teams have to continuously look for new, lesser proven analysts in order to stay competitive.
Currently, the Dodgers, Astros, and Yankees not only have a lot of money to spend, but they also have a plethora of prospects in their farms. It’s going to be very difficult for smaller market teams like the A’s, Rays, Indians, Royals, Twins, Marlins, etc. to compete within their division knowing that there are higher market teams that can do all of the same things, but better.
Notice how teams like the Yankees, Red Sox, Dodgers, and maybe even the Nats can avoid having to go through long rebuilds just to remain competitive. Going forward, I’m not sure how many small-market teams can even stay competitive since all of their tricks are equally exploitable by the rest of the league.
You are using anecdotes to argue against analytical data?
The author’s point is that the last two years have been extraordinary. So the response to your objection would be: Just wait. You’re covering a period that the author described as perfectly fine competitive balance-wise., so it’s not surprising you came out with the data you did.
The author uses the term “competitive balance” to mean ‘homogeneous quality’, but that’s not how I’d use the term. I think it means either:
1) Level playing field: all teams have similar resources, e.g. the NFL’s salary cap. Clearly, this won’t be the case for MLB’s current revenue structure, with some teams having much larger revenues and payrolls than others. The payroll tax and Competitive Balance draft picks are intended to help this imbalance without eliminating it entirely.
2) Level outcomes: lots of different champions, turnover in the playoff field, no teams are rebuilding continuously. As other posters have mentioned, this is not currently a problem, not compared to history anyway.
What meaning does everyone else think when they hear the term “competitive balance”? I think looking at one year’s standard deviation of winning percentages is not it.
Great comment. I think it’s pretty clear that fans (among others) do not view a +.500 winning percentage as a satisfactory target. The standard in team sports is having a chance to compete for the championship and the threshold for that is the playoffs. Everything else we do in analysis (e.g. WAR) and narrative construction is more or less a proxy for this.
IMO
Sure this year had some really good teams and some really bad teams but I would hesitate to push the whole “unbalanced” narrative. With the extra wild card slot more teams are in the playoff hunt than ever before. Over half the teams in the National League could sniff the postseason until pretty late in the season.
And like others have said, almost every team in baseball made the postseason this decade.
Just scroll back to the standings from 2014 and 2015 and you’ll see some big differences in the standings compared to this year. It’s foolish to be short-sighted and draw big conclusions from one season.
This is a really great point and I think we often forget how quickly things can change.
Case in point:
On March 29, 2017, Fangraphs published an article titled “The Chicago Cubs: A Dynasty in the Making”.
Only 18 months later, they published another article, this one titled “The Cubs Aren’t a Dynasty and That’s Okay”.
That’s all it took for the Cubs to go from “A dynasty in the making” to “Not a dynasty”. 18 months.
This website simultaneously advocates that teams be realistic about being out of it and sell assets, and complains about how many bottom dwellers there are… Can’t have it both ways.
I didn’t read it as a complaint so much as a series of observations about the state of competitive balance.
Its pretty true. Alot of writers bemoan teams not holding onto players, not signing free agents and not trying to stay more competitive (even when they probably shouldnt) but then when a team like the Royals actually DO hang on to players and take a flyer on some free agents in an attempt to go for one last ride (when they probably shouldnt) alot of those same people respond by saying how dumb and out of touch etc etc the Royals are.
I would be interested in knowing just what the heck happened from the mid-to-late-50s???? A giant move up in non-competitiveness followed by a colossal collapse to competitiveness and, by extension, can whatever led to that happening also occur now?
Can’t say for sure, but I would guess the speed at which teams integrated probably played a pretty big role.
My guess is that the combo of the ‘bonus rule’ and the massive reduction in the number of minors teams during the 50’s was the cause. In 1949, there were 438 minors teams in 59 leagues. By 1962 it was down to 15 leagues.
This assumes that ‘competition’ is of the slightest interest to MLB owners. Rather ‘competition’ is merely the means to the more important end – profits and franchise value. That’s always been the case (for most owners most of the time) but the biggest impact of ‘analytics’ IMO has been to quantify the ways in which the MLB cartel can increase its franchise values without having to go through the zero-sum nature of team competition.
Before ‘analytics’ I suspect that most owners thought that fielding a good team – soon if not now – was the only means of getting to that end. And it’s true that attendance-related stuff depends on that since no one pays attention to games in order to ‘watch owners own’. They go to watch players play. Longer-term however that means the cartel has to share its economic rent with players. And what’s the value in that?
Once the business model moved towards more dependence on the cartel revenue (the media contracts, etc) rather than the team/game revenue, analytics can provide a nice distraction for tanking teams. A shiny object for fans who aren’t interested in tanking teams. Ooooh – look over there. Shiny happy prospects slowly percolating.
I don’t know whether the cartel business model can move towards some teams semi-permanently tanking but ‘developing farms’ while others ‘compete on the field’. But I do suspect that that is the actual ‘value’ of analytics to baseball. And that they are going to try it. And that that is in fact the major reason why MLB is now looking to obliterate much of the minors. If only half the league needs to be competitive on the field, then only half the current prospects are likely to be ‘valued’ as roster contributors on a winning team.
This narrative breaks down quickly when you look at the non-material differences in percentages of total revenues being paid to players over the last decade.
You got any actual data to back your point?
Sure, go look at the Ben Lindbergh piece from a year or two ago – the numbers were acknowledged and generally backed up by the MLBPA.
The problem with that article is the starting point he chose and his obsession about the particular percentage. He chose 2010 (roughly the start of the ‘coordinated tank’ of the Cubs/Astros – which more later) to refute the Deadspin ‘40%’. But the Deadspin article also showed a flat trend at 40% from 2010 or so to now. What the Deadspin also showed was the PREVIOUS decline from over 50% and the explanation for why. IOW – while Lindbergh obsessed on asserting that 50% now, he didn’t actually refute the Deadspin trend/explanation which is the important thing. In fact, he confirmed it later in the article but to him it was a decline from 60%. They agree on everything except the specific number/calculation. BFD. Talk about missing the forest for the trees.
MLB is a cartel – and importantly a cartel which is no longer incurring the sort of ‘cheating’ that usually undermines cartels. The ‘lesson’ of the ‘coordinated tank’ for MLB – going forward – is that MLB owners have now agreed among themselves that 25% of the teams can ‘coordinated tank’.
MLBPA will find what their self-centeredness for decades will mean to them. They won’t like that but screw them. It’s everyone else who either loves the sport or lives in a city that will now get the extortion screws from MLB who will pay for it all. Welcome to Cartel101.
I thought it was about the same going back decades?
Both the articles cited say that the player share of revs has dropped. Whether it’s from 60% to 50% or 50% to 40% (using different measures) doesn’t really matter. It’s dropped. Personally I suspect the latter is more accurate since it is more likely to include the revenue accounting games that owners can play (and I just doubt MLB was ever so weak as to have to give 60%) – but the former is prob the one that is contractually bargained.
Regardless, going forward the core issue is whether MLB has agreed that 25% of teams can ‘tank’ each year. And whether that agreement ‘sticks’. Cuz that will eliminate much of the money for FA contracts. The noncompetitive teams will just have pre-FA and arb players. And 25% of minors baseball will be eliminated – eliminating jobs for baseball players. And MLB and ‘favored’ minors teams will have far more leverage to threaten relocation and extort taxpayer subsidies for parks/upgrades/crony deals for owners – which will go to owners not players.
Meh. Wins are a fixed number every year and talent is not evenly distributed, nor is there enough talent on the FA market to come close to evenly distributing it, no matter how much money could be thrown at FAs.
Moreover, there is no evidence of an agreement among teams to limit competition or for 25% of them to participate in a coordinated tank job. You haven’t described anything more than parallel conduct in the face of the same market forces (which, again is no evidence of conspiracy), and using the pejorative word cartel doesn’t change that.
To shorten the rebuild cycles that partially cause this, how about expanding the Rule 5? Maybe eligibility is: any player 24 and over not on a 25 man roster and any player 21 and over not on a 40 man roster?
Pushes top prospects to rosters faster and opens a “draft” of sorts for MiLB players other teams could use.
I have tried to figure out whether this type of thing, either changing the eligibility criteria or shrinking the 40-man to a 35-man roster, would make a difference. And it’s really tough to come to a solution.
It definitely keeps teams from hoarding prospects, so it makes it harder for a team like the Rays and Padres to keep guys. That could really hurt a team that is trying to get better and trying to collect prospects, and so it could make the teams more capable of doing free agency have a greater competitive advantage. Could also make the teams worse by having prospects in the majors performing terribly, like Lewis Brinson on a massive scale.
It also means that teams like the Dodgers would have to choose between keeping their option-eligible bullpen depth and their prospects, which would force them to pick between borderline R5 guys and squeezing out a few extra wins in the regular seasons.
And on top of all that, it would make prospects less valuable, which would have a lot of unpredictable effects.
I’ve always thought this is a great idea, as well as shrinking the control roster from 40 to 25-38.
Also, I’d love to see something like a mini-expansion draft right before the Rule 5. Let each team protect 20 guys total, and then each MLB team gets to pick one player from the unprotected group (drafting in reverse order of record). After one round of this, go straight into the Rule 5. Further shortens rebuild cycles and prevents prospect hoarding.
Why would you want to push prospects to the Majors before they’re ready? This is already a big enough problem as it is with the tanking teams.
As the front offices of the big market teams become as sophisticated as the small market teams, in terms of analytics and such, it makes it more and more about team salaries as being the differentiators. It would be interesting to look at the differences in team salaries overlayed on these charts. My guess would be that this is becoming a higher correlation to team success over time.
Also – the small market teams, who have no ability to pay > $200 million in salaries, must bunch assets to arrive simultaneously so that they can have $200 million in player ability while only paying $120 million. This, I think, is why it looks like tanking. Not that they are hoarding money (although some certainly are), rather, they need to create their ‘window’ where they have enough surplus value in young players on cheap contracts, that they can approach the big guys.
Was reading the comments – why wouldn’t a salary floor work? Make the luxury tax stronger and in exchange, do the same thing at the bottom – < $100 million in team salary and you start forgoing your revenue share dollars.
There is certainly some truth to that but at the same time big teams have been as sophisticated in analytics for over a decade now and the Rays, Braves, Twins, and A’s all made the playoffs in this year. The year before the A’s, Braves, Cleveland and Brewers made it.
The sport with the best competitive balance by far is football. And the reason football is able to do this is because they uniquely have fewer regular season games th an there are teams. This means everybody’s schedule is different, and they can make schedules unbalanced. Which they have very enthusiastically (too much, according to some NFL fans). The worse you are, the easier your next year’s schedule looks like.
It would look strange, but nothing says baseball CAN’T do something like that. A team like the Padres, instead of playing the Dodgers 19 times, could play them 15 times and spread the other four around the other two last place NL teams. The interleague games could certainly have this feature. Certain teams get screwed, albeit in a relatively minor manner, by the opposite league team they are matched with every year (the Rockies get the Astros for some reason). Let the last place teams play all three last place teams in the other league in interleague games.
The data is clear that we are in an era of super teams, but I don’t think baseball has a competitive balance problem.
1) An era of multiple super teams > an era with a single super team (which is often the case in the NBA, and to a lesser extent with the Patriots in the NFL). All year long the narrative was that the Dodgers, Yankees, and Astros would be battling it out deep into October. That’s a full 10% of the league. As a fan, I like to watch elite teams. It’s more entertaining to watch great teams compete vs. each other than it is to watch a bunch of teams that are all more-or-less the same. If the price of greatness is that there are a few extremely bad teams every year, I think it’s worth it.
2) With the second wildcard and the inherent randomness of October, the majority of teams feel like they have a legitimate chance to win the World Series deep into the season.
3) The terrible teams haven’t been terrible for that long, with the possible exception of the Marlins, but even they were in the wild card chase in September 2017. If in 2-3 years’ time the Marlins, Orioles, Tigers, and Royals are still losing 100+, this would be a different story.
I think your 3rd point is interesting…… If what we had this season continues in 2-3 years- then would folks be talking different?
The problem is all the signs are indicating that it is going to continue.
I think I’m going to use that Competitive Balance in Baseball chart to show our business on how much of a differentiator data analytics can make.
(I think that’s the primary difference maker, even as other plausible reasons exist.)
It’s a minor quibble, but there were only 2 teams added in 1977 (the Blue Jays and Mariners). The only year that added 4 teams since the creation of the American League (not counting the quickly failed Federal League) was 1969.
Thanks. Fixed.
When you have 30 teams you are bound to have a wider range of team outcomes – i.e. more teams at both ends of the curve. And these days very few prospects go unnoticed on the international market or in the draft which makes it harder to have a stellar draft where you rack up multiple steals. So you sort of set yourself up for a lot of mediocre teams, a few juggernauts and several really bad teams. Toss in the undeniable fact that big market teams can afford to make a mistake or two in free agency with longer term contracts without destroying their team whereas smaller market teams have to be spot on if they wade into that market and it is a bit of a perfect storm. For instance, who is really going to give Rendon 7-8 years? Only a few teams should be willing to do this. If a smaller market team does it and he gets hurt or starts regressing earlier than they’d hoped they are sunk for years in terms of building depth on their roster. Meanwhile the Cubs can sign someone like Heyward to a contract that makes no sense and they can still go in and get a guy like Darvish without completely compromising depth. So the smaller market teams are are reluctant to go in on long term deals. It’s why if I’m a smaller market team with an open window I’m looking to trade for players with some control left to put me over the top vs. wading into a free agent market that crushes my team longer term if I’m wrong. And those trades can mortgage away a lot of the farm, which they can replenish and recover from more quickly than they can locking up 25-30M of payroll on one guy. But that can still be really painful.