JABO: The NL East Was the Worst Division In a Decade
Given the assorted other advances in the game, it’s a little weird we’re still talking about divisions. Divisions have been there all along, so it’s not like they’re some unusual concept, but a perfectly balanced version of baseball doesn’t have them. It’s because of the divisional structure that we had the Cubs and the Pirates forced into a wild-card showdown despite finishing second and third in the National League standings. There’s a good argument to be made that divisions should be completely abolished.
But, you know, that’s not on the horizon. Divisions are presumably here for a while. There are practical considerations that get in the way of idealized baseball. Our reality is one with divisions, and with unbalanced schedules. Sometimes that helps a team, and sometimes that hurts a team. The hope is that in the long run it all evens out.
As long as there are divisions, the makeup of the divisions is going to matter. And as long as there are divisions, they’ll be easy enough to analyze. For example, what follows is a plot of 2015 divisional strength. I thought about doing this in a more advanced way, by, say, folding in WAR or something, but I settled on comfortable simplicity. There are six divisions, yes? In the plot, each division’s overall winning percentage, and also each division’s winning percentage in games against opponents from outside the division. Within, the teams always go .500, by necessity, so that reduces the spread.
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.
The NY Mets gift baskets to the Phillies and Braves are on their way as they demolished these teams 25-13. 65-59 vs. the rest of the league. Thank you for the division.
Those lucky Royals strike again!
Winning the division is what baseball is all about–don’t reward third place teams.
Baseball was all about winning your league — there were no divisions. (Contrary to what the article claims, divisions have not been there “all along” — they only appeared in 1969)
I know the intent of this analysis was to focus on the terribleness of the NL East, but can you post the top 10 divisions as well? I’m curious as to whether it’s as dominated by the AL East as many announcers used to comment on.
Also… Is this analysis fair to compare across leagues? The AL was vastly stronger for a wide margin, but if an individual team gets only 15-20 games against the other league then there’s insufficient ability to measure if an AL division is stronger than an NL division.
Here is what I would like to see happen in MLB:
1. Make it a 155 game season
2. 32 teams total, 16 in each league (baseball back in Montreal, and one more expansion team.)
3. Play every one of the other 31 teams 5 times, so that you can go to your local park and see every team in MLB. Split the series 3 games in one park, 2 in another. No more complaining about an uneven or harder schedule.
4. Get rid of Divisions entirely. Top 5 teams from each league go to the playoffs. Pirates and no other team can bitch about unfairness anymore. The two teams with the worst records in each league play each other for the wild card series.
5. Every playoff series can now be 7 games, since the regular season is 7 games shorter. I am flexible on this, make it a 3 or 5 game series if you want for the wild card.
6. Add the DH to the NL, no pitchers bat anymore, all pitching stats become comparable. Do I even need to bring up pitcher’s hitting stats?
“No more complaining about an uneven or harder schedule.”
The teams playing an extra away game are definitely going to complain about your proposed schedule.
1 game, really? As opposed to the way it is now, where you can play some team in your division up to 19 times a year, and you could get 19 games with a below .500, basement dwelling team, or someone could get a division where every team within it are tough?
Wouldn’t a team like the Mariners, who already have a tough enough travel schedule as is, be even worse off by having to travel to that many more places that are far away from them? If so, then I suspect there will be some teams that would complain about such a schedule.
No, it wouldn’t be anymore travel when you are buttressing a two game series up against a three game series at home. You could do a 2, 3, 2 at home, all the series run together, plus there is the extra week due to less overall games.
Most years the Mariners and the Marlins don’t play each other. Now they do. That’s more travel. Boston and San Diego don’t play each other most years. Now they play each other every year. That’s more travel.
155 games means seven fewer stadium days full of paying fans. Not good for the owners. Strike one.
Playing every team every year necessitates more travel, and more importantly more travel across time zones, which arguably is the worst part of it. Not good for the players. Strike two.
Playing every team means more games out of the home audience timezones, and even today with the unbalanced schedule everybody on the east coast bitches about having to go to bed while their team on the west coast is still playing. Not good for the fans. Strike three. You’re out!
I guess my whole retort to Mariners/Marlins, or Red Sox/Padres, or the whole East coast teams playing West Coast teams late at night, is get over it! Really. No one had to build a stadium in Seattle. The Dodgers and Giants never had to leave New York, they chose that. As for the so called travel component in terms of frequent flyer miles from Seattle to wherever, well, they did it to themselves and its pure geography, nothing will change that, no matter what ya do. I get that its less games and less revenue, so owners would be grumpy, but these teams valuations are in the hundreds of millions, some in the billion dollar range.
You’re making the common mistake of forgetting that the MLB is a business first and a game second
Very good ideas. I would still like to see 162 games with the other 7 games against a rival, ex: Cubs vs. White Sox, Yankes vs. Mets, Dodgers vs. Angels, ect. That way the records for a season would be more comparable.
That 2002 AL Central wasn’t all that tough. With only 4 teams, 25% were guaranteed the playoffs, and another 25% had shot. In the end, 50% of the division went to the playoffs (and 25% won the World Series), and 25% wasn’t going anywhere anyway.
Really, it was only a tough division for the Mariners.
Look, I understand that everyone is a little peeved because of how good the NL Central was this year, but to call the 2015 NL East, the worst division of the last decade is completely inaccurate.
Let’s look at the 2008 NL West. Now this a truly horrific division.
LAD: 84-78
ARI: 82-80
COL: 74-88
SFG: 72-90
SDP: 63-99
The Dodgers won their division, made the playoffs and swept the 97 win Cubs in the NLDS, while the Mets, Astros, Cardinals and Marlins all missed out (despite having better records). The Mets won 5 more games and missed the playoffs!
In 2015, no non-playoff team finished with a better record than the Mets and only the Giants finished with a better record than the Nationals. At least the 5 best teams in league were in the playoffs. Can’t say that in 2008.
What happened this season with the Cardinals, Pirates and Cubs is clearly unfair, but having the best three teams in the league in the same division is a complete fluke and I would take a guess that is has never happened before and probably never will again. Or if it has happened, we can probably count on 1 hand the number of times.
You might want to look at the NL Central in 2006:
St. Louis Cardinals 83 78
Houston Astros 82 80
Cincinnati Reds 80 82
Milwaukee Brewers 75 87
Pittsburgh Pirates 67 95
Chicago Cubs 66 96
In fact, the entire NL was pretty horrid that year. Only one team (Atlanta) had more than 90 wins (the AL, on the other hand, had five). The Cardinals won the World Series that year despite having only the fifth best record in the NL.
As long as there are divisions, there will always be a chance that all the best teams in one league will appear in one division–or none of them. Look at the 1994 AL West, which had NO TEAM above .500 before the strike ended the season. Ideally, to get rid of this possibility, the leagues should eliminate divisions. The key would then be to replace the lost layers of playoff games. Here’s my suggestion:
1) Eliminate divisions (as noted).
2) Over the last sixteen games of the regular season, convert to a round-robin so that the top four teams in the AL play each other, and the top four in the NL play. This guarantees that the best teams in each league will square off to end the regular season.
3) Split the sixteen games into four-game series in the following manner:
1 plays 4, 2 plays 3
1 plays 3, 2 plays 4
1 plays 2 (at 2’s ballpark), 3 plays 4
1 plays 2 (at 1’s ballpark), 3 plays 4
After every four games, reseed the teams based on their records so that the final eight games will pair the top two teams in the league.
This format would guarantee sixty-four games of playoff-caliber baseball at the end of the season; we won’t have to sit through the slog of watching playoff contenders face doormats over what should be the most exciting part of the regular season. This would also be much better than the paltry twelve games of divisional and wild-card baseball we now get. If you want to talk about revenue, imagine the media packages that could be sold for this sixty-four-game format as well.
4) The rest of the teams will also be placed into a round-robin format to end the season: teams 5-8 and 9-12 from each league would play; teams 13-15 from both leagues would play each other.
5) Declare the winner of the regular season (the team with the best record in each league) the pennant winner–as it should be. Having the best record would mean something again.
6) First round of playoffs: pennant winner of AL faces team 2 from NL; pennant winner in NL plays team 2 from the AL. This format would guarantee the chance that the best two teams by winning percentage, regardless of league, might play for the World Series.