The Most Dominant First-Place Finishes Ever

The 2013 Atlanta Braves have the best record in baseball, at 77-49, and the most commanding lead of any team in the majors. Atlanta leads the second-place Washington Nationals by 15 games, and if both teams maintain their current winning percentages — .611 and .492, respectively — the Braves would finish 99-63 while the Nationals finished 80-82, winning the division by 19 games. That would actually be extraordinarily rare. Since 1901, only 14 teams have ever finished in first by as many as 19 games. Obviously, “on-pace-to” stats don’t mean a whole lot. But still: teams don’t usually finish this far ahead of their rivals. By my count, since 1901, the commonly accepted beginning of baseball’s modern era, there have been 2,342 team-seasons and 350 division-seasons. That is, in the 112 seasons between 1901 and 2012, 2,290 teams competed for first place, and 346 teams have finished first. (From 1901 to 1968 there was effectively one division per league; from 1969 to 1993 there were two divisions per league; and since 1994 there have been three divisions per league. But the bizarre 1981 strike season throws this out of whack, because that year was divided into two half-seasons with a postseason “division series.”Because of that, I’ve simply eliminated the 52 team-seasons and four division-seasons from that year.) Of those 346 first-place finishers, only 14 have won their division by 19 games or more. Only 27 have won it by the Braves’ current margin, 15 games. Here is the list of those 27 teams:

A couple of weeks ago, after playing around with a dataset I obtained from baseball-reference.com containing all of the division finishes in baseball history, I presented one possible measure of strength or weakness in a division. This is another look at the same dataset. Speaking of strength, an interesting thing to note is the winning percentages of each of these teams. Amazingly, the 2011 Detroit Tigers were able to finish 15 games ahead of their closest rivals because every other team in the division finished below .500, a group led by an 80-82 Indians team that finished in second place. The Braves’ current .611 winning percentage would tie them for 25th on the list. It’s hard to blow away the other teams in your division by this margin unless you win 100 games or everyone else in your division finishes with a losing record. Or both. Naturally, the correlation between winning percentage and the number of games by which a team wins a division is quite strong:

Extreme winning percentages are diminishing in frequency. This may be a sign of parity in the league. Here is a graph of the frequency of winning percentages over .650:

And under .350:

That isn’t necessarily presented in the best way, but you can still see: Teams that finished above .650 and under .350 are heavily clustered toward the beginning of the past century, and more spread out thereafter. Eighty percent of all teams that finished either .650 or under .350 did so before the beginning of divisional play in 1969. But teams with dominant finishes haven’t trailed off in quite the same way. Of the 27 teams above, there’s almost an even split: 10 between 1901 to 1968, eight between 1969 to 1993, and nine between 1994 to 2012. But that actually isn’t too surprising because there were three times as many first-place teams after 1994 as there were before 1968. As a matter of fact, this is almost exactly in line with each era’s overall share of the total number of division-seasons:

The Braves may not be a juggernaut in the strictest sense. We hardly ever see those any more — apart from teams like the 1998 Yanks. (It’s amazing that the 2001 Mariners won their division by only 14 games, considering  there wasn’t a single 100-game winner in 2012.) But in the context of their times and Atlanta’s division, they’re titans. Ot’s worth appreciating that. We rarely get to see a team leave its division rivals as thoroughly in the dust as the Braves have done this year.