Baseball’s Unusually Top-Heavy Landscape
This is another post about the standings and the projections. We’ll do other stuff soon. Just not yet. All right, so, these are our current projected standings for 2017. The top six teams, along with their projected win totals:
- Cubs, 95 wins
- Dodgers, 94
- Red Sox, 93
- Indians, 92
- Astros, 91
- Nationals, 91
One quality representative from every division. That’s a pretty damn even spread. I also recently opened the team projections up to community debate. Earlier today, I analyzed the results, and here’s the community’s top six teams:
- Cubs, 96 wins
- Dodgers, 94
- Red Sox, 93
- Indians, 93
- Nationals, 91
- Astros, 90
There are some slight single-game shifts in there, but the level of agreement is strong. The projections identify six obvious favorites, and you, as a group, expect similar results. There’s nothing particularly strange about baseball having a tier of elites, but this time around we’re talking about six teams projected to win at least 90 games. That’s uncommon!
It’s true that these numbers could shift downward before the start of the season if, say, important players get hurt. Never forget that sometimes spring training has a certain nefarious quality. On the other hand, these are the general projected records, and they don’t yet take strengths of schedule into account. Once they do, I’d expect upward shifts, since a really good team never has to play against itself. Setting this stuff aside, let’s just look at a plot, which I whipped up after making use of my team-projection spreadsheet that dates back to 2005. That’s 13 years of team projections. That’s 390 team projections in all. Here’s the year-to-year number of teams projected before the season to win at least 90 games:
This is the first season of those examined to have six teams that qualify. There have been five on two separate occasions — once in 2005, and once in 2010. Overall, we have 45 teams in 13 years projected for 90+, and this season accounts for 13% of them. And you can also see here a fairly dramatic increase from the relative low of 2014.
And, say, that cutoff at 90 is arbitrary. All that is is a pleasingly round number. Our current projections don’t just have six teams at at least 90 wins — they have six teams at at least 91 wins. Although there have been those 45 teams projected for 90+, the sample drops to 37 projected for 91+. Again, this time around, there are six teams that meet that cutoff. The previous high was four. So, although there are always differences between projections and reality, this is our best preseason snapshot of the landscape, and this year the leading group is crowded.
I looked at something related to this in December, when I noted that we might end up not having a single exciting division race. Not a whole lot has changed since then, in terms of shifts among favorites. Back then, I asked which divisions might be decided by fewer than five games. The AL West got the most votes from the community, but it still got just 27% support. You all see the whole landscape in a similar way. There are the best teams, and there are the teams that will hope to play against them after the one-game playoffs.
I should say, of the 39 teams so far who’ve been projected to win 90+, 22 have gone on to actually win 90+. Another nine have won at least 86, while four of the teams finished below .500. Unpredictable things happen every season. Some teams emerge, and some teams collapse. The best teams have averaged 92.8 projected wins, with 90.4 actual wins. That’s worse! But then, the best teams also have a median of 92 projected wins, and 92 actual wins. I don’t need to belabor this. Odds are, one of this year’s projected best teams will disappoint, but good luck identifying which.
What does it mean when you have so many good teams? There are only so many wins to go around, and when a small group of teams gathers a lot of them, those have to come at other teams’ expenses. So, related to all of this, there are also four teams projected to win 70 games or fewer. That ties the previously-observed high, back in 2008. With a good number of strong teams, and a good number of weak teams, that implies a fairly wide spread. Indeed, that’s what we’re looking at, as you can glean from this plot of preseason win-total standard deviations:
The win-total standard deviation right now is the highest it’s been since 2008. We’ve talked so much before about parity and competitive balance, and baseball has taken some steps forward in that regard, but look at how dramatically that line up there has increased over the last few seasons. Between 2013 and 2014, there was a massive dip. And, since then, the line has recovered, now 34% higher than it was three years ago. The actual results have basically mirrored this — the standings in 2014 had the lowest spread since 2007. The spread got wider in 2015, and wider still a season ago. And so we move forward with known haves and have-nots. The landscape won’t always look like this, but if we’re going to take the time to acknowledge when the standings appear tight, we should also acknowledge when they don’t.
I don’t know what the underlying cause is for this. If I had to guess, it would have something to do with the wild card. When the expanded wild card was newer, it felt like teams were emboldened to try to at least be somewhere around .500. You didn’t have to make your team great, because just getting into the postseason gave you a chance. Since then, at least anecdotally, I’ve felt a philosophical shift, with teams trying to get as good as they can. Maybe they feel like the playoffs aren’t a crapshoot. Maybe it’s more about trying to win the division and avoid the one-game playoff altogether. You’ve got good teams that have acted aggressively, and you’ve got rebuilding teams that acknowledged they couldn’t get good enough before. It’s a line of thought.
It could also be a league-wide coincidence. All I’m doing is speculating. But as things stand today, the league feels less uncertain than it has in quite a while. Whether it will actually play out that way, I don’t know, but if it doesn’t, we’ll have some wonderful stories to tell.
Jeff made Lookout Landing a thing, but he does not still write there about the Mariners. He does write here, sometimes about the Mariners, but usually not.
One interesting thing is that the “Super Six” all also have great farm systems, or at least did going into this off-season (Red Sox and Nats now somewhat less so). Teams aren’t selling their futures to get very good in the present, they’re kind of doing it all. Suspect this phenomenon is going to be around for a while, with the Indians being an exception because they can’t afford to keep the band together all that much longer.
Even with a middle of pack farm, the redsox are still absolutely loaded with young talent (lot of their top prospects have recently graduated) Betts, Bogaerts, Bradley, Devers, Groome, Travis, Benintendo, Swi, Erod, ect. I think I would rank that crop 2nd just behind the CHC.
Indians/Nats are the teams that aren’t really loaded with young talent as the dodgers, cubs, redsox, and Astros
I think, without checking, that these 6 teams correlate more closely with the largest metropolitan areas than to the quality of their farm systems.
“I think, without checking, that these 6 teams correlate more closely with the largest metropolitan areas than to the quality of their farm systems.”
He’s right you know. Cleveland? 12.6 million people. New York? Only 453,000.
This year I’ll be helping to keep the bottom heavy.
Interesting post! Wonder how those compare with actual season results.
I think most people on this site understand that projections compress the eventual outcome. Putting that another way, since 1996, the first full season with 3 divisions, at least one team has won at least 96 games and usually several have while very, very few teams are ever projected to win 96 games. Predicting which teams do it is entirely different ball game. What seems to be different this year is, as was pointed out in Jeff’s article, the separation between the favorite in each division and the rest of the teams appears wider than in previous years. The Indians look stronger than last year, and the Cubs actually under-performed their Pythagorean by four wins last year, despite winning 103 games, so 95 is actually a 12 game drop-off. Nothing is ever certain but these teams look like possibilities to be those 96+ teams.
Came to ask a similar question so I went over to Bref and looked.
Over the same time period where there were 39 projected 90 game winners, there were 89(!) actual 90 game winners with a low of 6 (several years) and a high of 11(in 2013).
AL west and NL west look interesting. But yeah, the other divisions… not so much.
(although I’m not completely sold on what Boston has done at 3B, C and 1B… I figure the rotation should make up for that… assuming health)
The postseason structure creates incentives that are reflected in team-building strategies. There is a huge reward for division champions, so one team in each division has tried to box the others out. For middle tier teams, there’s no point in selling the future for a shot at a one game playoff.
This is probably true. What I’m realizing is that it’s incredibly hard to articulate the really rather complex incentive system that’s developed in anything other than mathematical terms.
e.g.: You are the Giants. You are projected 1 St. Dev* worse than the Dodgers. You are .5 St. Dev Better than the Mets and Cardinals and 1 St. Dev better than the Pirates. You face a fork in the road. What do you do?
>>TAKE FORK
It’s quite clearly the case that winning the division is better, but the dynamics of the wild card race does complicate the ‘division or blow it the h*ck up’ dichotomy that, while not explicitly espoused by anyone, does seem to sometimes underly thought processes. If, in a silly case, you had a 0% chance to win the division, 50% to be the 1st WC, and 50% chance to be the 2nd WC, one’s incentive structure isn’t at all changed by the 2nd WC.
And then, between those extremes, we have FanGraphs writers writing tens of thousands of lovely words arguing for and against trades and signings.
*1 St. Dev = One Saint Dev, Patron Saint of Significance
Great patron saint joke.
“Odds are, one of this year’s projected best teams will disappoint, but good luck identifying which.”
When trying to anticipate an underachiever, I would first look for a manager with a very short track record, or an uneven one. That eliminates Maddon, Francona, and Baker. Then look for a division with more good teams than bad. The Atlantis casino has just two N.L. West over/unders above .500, and three under 80. So that eliminates the Dodgers.
This leaves just the Astros and Carmines. Boston is managed by John Farrell, whose win totals for his Red Sox career are 97, 71, 78, and 93. In 2014/15, the Sox combined Vegas over/under number was 174.5 wins, and they actually won a paltry 149 games.
So if one team is going to meaningfully underachieve, I’ll take the one in the tough division, with the manager who has already significantly underachieved twice in just four years with his organization.
I didn’t notice Betts, Price, Sale and Kimbrel on those teams. I might be tempted to look elsewhere.
This isn’t particularly responsive. All six of those teams have excellent players, as did the 2014 Red Sox.
Aren’t consistent managers only consistent until they aren’t?
The Nationals recently under performed in 2015 while having Harper go all Barry Bonds and stay healthy.
It really is a difficult thing to project who will significantly under perform as it could be due to cluster luck or injuries.
The whole league is just a big cluster luck
If there’s any evidence showing a correlation between team underachievement and the manager’s prior record, I’d like to see it.
Well, no managers meaningfully underachieve more than a couple of times. Instead they become ex-managers.
But if you want to know which teams *aren’t* going to substantially underachieve, I think I’d look to the long-time managers who’ve underachieved least frequently — not sure why this notion would be controversial in any way.
Does any of this analysis/projection take into account teams that are tanking to rebuild? (Such as the ChC 3-4 years ago, the ChW for this year at least) More teams tanking = more wins available for everyone else.
I think schedules are taken into account in playoff odds calculation, but not the projected standings referenced in this article.
Couldn’t one theoretically say that the recent spike in the standard deviation of projected wins has to do very strongly with the fact that we’re now seeing teams be more or less “really bad” for rebuilding purposes, combined with teams who have currently-open windows and/or lots of resources building behemoth rosters?
Thinking back even to something like, 2010, I can’t recall many teams intentionally gutting their major league franchise talent for the sake of bolstering the farm system. Sure, there have been feeder organizations like the Royals and Pirates that were, in the past, half-jokingly maligned for serving as an alternative Yankees farm system, but right now, you’ve got at least five teams (Padres, White Sox, Brewers, Phillies, Braves) being blatant rebuilders, and that combines with the usual hard-luck/poor circumstances teams like the Twins, Marlins, and Athletics to create a substantial separation from the viable contenders. In the past, just as far as Front Office strategies went, I can’t really recall the first group being as emphatically joined, though the second group has always been around. That may just be faulty recollection, but it seems like GMs are pursuing the cyclical rebuilding strategy more heavily now, so I don’t know if the “hollowing out of the middle” seen here is particularly unintuitive.
Yeah this phenomenon is clearly based of those top tier teams feasting on the tanking ones. I would like to see an article on the bottom heavy landscape as well.
Cubs and Astros got really strong through tanking when other teams were trying to play towards the middle. Boston and LAD had a good farm and combined that talent with a lot of money.As such, the majority of these teams were built when other teams were trying inefficiently to get wild cards, win weak divisions. Too many average teams, slightly above average teams going win now in the past have helped to build these teams. Tanking is the result of what happens when win now is in the past.
Sure trades like Sale help, but CWS got themselves in the hole before this season. Boston would be strong regardless.
To me, the projections look more middle-heavy than top-heavy:
— 10 teams projected from 79 to 83 wins (33% of all teams).
— 15 teams projected from 76 to 86 wins (50% of all teams).
How does that compare with actual MLB seasons?
— If that first projection came true, it would tie the highest share of teams in that narrow W% range (1973, 8 of 24 teams).
— The second projection has been matched 4 times (most recently in ’97) and surpassed just twice (1958, 10 of 16, and ’68, 11 of 20).
Also, just one team is projected for at least 94 losses. All but 2 MLB seasons had more teams below that W% (one each in 1958 and ’25). The vast majority of seasons had at least 3 teams below that W% (100 of 116 years since 1901).
Of course, projections are a different animal than actual records. But I think the second wild card is still a huge impetus for parity.
But, comparing projections to actual results, the projections will always be middle-heavy. Projections tell you the middle-range outcome for each team; but some teams will hit the top of their range, and some will hit the bottom, and that will tend to create more extreme outcomes.
For example, if the outcome of every game was a coin flip, then every team would properly be projected for 81 wins, but the actual seasons would see a spread.
Odds are that two of the four teams projected for 91-93 losses will lose 94, which will give you your three teams. But we don’t know which ones.
Great points, except your last. 3 teams losing 94+ would still be well under the median share of teams falling below that W%, which is 19%, or 5 to 6 teams out of 30.
Certainly, it’s no great stretch to imagine the bottom 5 or 6 teams in the projections all losing 94+. But that only underscores how much wiggle room there is in extrapolating a trend from a few years of projections.
As you said, projections will tend to be middle-heavy. So let’s take that range of 79-to-83 projected wins (which projects to have 1/3 of all teams), and compare it to a range of 77-to-85 real wins. It’s still rare to find 33% of teams within that W% range, occurring in 15 out of 116 seasons, most recently 2007.
Likewise, if we take the range of 76-to-86 projected wins (which projects to hold half the teams), and compare it to a range of 74-to-88 real wins, we find just 1 out of every 5 seasons with half the teams in that range of W%.
So I stand by my opinion.
Dodgers under seems likely. Rotation is “China-doll” fragile, Col & AZ are better than last season it would seem. A-Gon, Pederson, Grandal, Toles all take steps way back this year in my opinion. I don’t think Seager, Turner, and a great bullpen can carry this team.
Yes, that 12-deep rotation is really fragile and most of those stars are bound to be terrible.
This thread may have died, but here’s the point I was trying to make in previous comments, regarding Jeff’s speculation on a cause for the top-heaviness of this year’s projections.
As shown below, the first 5 years of the 2-WC era have seen a small decline by division winners, a large drop by wild cards, and small gains by both the middle and bottom 10 teams.
Average actual wins in the wild-card era, per 162 games:
– One WC era: Div. winners 95.1 … WCs 92.7 … Middle 10, 81.1 … Bottom 10, 68.2
– Two WC era: Div. winners 94.4 … WCs 90.4 … Middle 10, 81.6 … Bottom 10, 68.6
Now, last year’s division winners did have the highest average of this era, 95.4 wins — but, their figure was much higher in 2011 (last year of 1 WC) and in several other years of the 1-WC era.
If I’m reading Jeff right, he sees last year’s results and this year’s projections as the seed of a “philosophical shift [towards] teams trying to get as good as they can[,] trying to win the division and avoid the one-game playoff.”
But meanwhile, the most significant change of the 2-WC era (by far) is the 2.3-win drop by WC teams, down to 90.4 wins. And it’s not just the extra WC dragging that down; in 2 of the last 3 years, all 4 WCs won 89 or less.
So, Jeff may be right that good teams now see more incentive to get even better, leading to top-heavy projections. But the middling teams still have a huge incentive to vie for those very reachable WC berths.
Finally, to the notion that maybe the playoffs aren’t a crapshoot: Okay, last year saw a WS with 2 strong division winners, won by the team with the best record. But we also saw:
— Division-champ Texas swept by WC Toronto, despite home-field advantage and a huge edge in home/road records;
— Division-champ Nats fall to LA in the LDS, despite +7 pythag wins and home field for Game 5 with their CYA starting;
— Division-champ Boston swept by Cleveland, despite +7 pythag wins; and
— The Cubs came thisclose to losing the WS to a team they topped by 15 pythag wins.
The crapshoot seems alive and well.