JABO: 2015 Strengths of Schedule

Strength of schedule, usually, is more of a football concern. The schedules are a lot shorter, meaning there’s a more narrow distribution of opponents, and that can make for some significant differences. It’s a worthwhile consideration in the evaluation of any given team — losses are more forgivable if you’re facing juggernaut after juggernaut. There’s not much impressive about clobbering a pushover.

You see less discussion of strength of schedule in baseball. This is easy enough to explain — the schedule sometimes feels interminable, and so people naturally assume that, over six months, differences more or less even out. On the other hand, we know that schedules are unbalanced. We know that some divisions are stronger than others. What that means is that there will be differences in schedule strengths, and then considering playoff spots can be determined by one win, that makes this important. Granted, that makes everything important. In a tight race, every run and every win are critical, so that goes for any advantage or disadvantage.

With teams essentially set, and with schedules having been laid out ages ago, I decided now would be a good time to project 2015 schedule strengths. How big are the differences between the toughest schedule and the weakest? Even though this isn’t a thing that’ll make a whole world of difference, it could very well make some difference, so now it’s time to take a look at that.

The method is simple. At FanGraphs, we feature team projections, based on author-maintained depth charts and two different projection systems blended together. Every team has a projected total Wins Above Replacement (WAR) value, so all I did was grab the 30 schedules off MLB.com and calculate, for each team, the average single-game opponent WAR. The higher the average WAR, the tougher the schedule. This is, naturally, only as good as the projections, but then our only alternative is, I don’t know, guessing? This is like very educated guessing.

No adjustments have been made for home games or road games, since those even out. In the chart below, you’ll see American League teams on the left in blue, and National League teams on the right in green. It’s immediately apparent that all the NL teams are projected to have lower opponent WARs than the AL teams. This is because the AL is still considered the stronger league of the two.

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