What Do the Projections Say About the 2023 Schedule?

On Thursday, MLB announced the 2023 schedule, implementing the alterations originally announced when the current collective bargaining agreement was signed back in March. The existing format, under which the 2022 season is being played, has been largely stable since 2013, the season the Houston Astros moved to the American League. That change evened out all six divisions to five teams each, making for a tidy format in which every team played their divisional opponents 19 times and the rest of the teams in their league six or seven times, with 20 interleague games against a rotating division and officially designated MLB rivals.

Before 2001, MLB’s schedule tended to be a good deal more balanced. During the divisional era before interleague play, six-team divisions typically played 18 games against their divisional opponents and 12 against non-divisional opponents; seven-team divisions had a nearly even 13/12 split (the American League did 15 vs. 10 or 11 for a couple years after the 1977 expansion). In 2001, MLB went all-in on an unbalanced schedule, with the idea being that by having teams play their divisional rivals more often, you’d create greater tension in the divisional races and more intense regional rivalries. Whether this approach actually accomplished its goals is difficult to tell. I can’t think of any new rivalries that were created simply by playing more games and tend to believe that rivalries are born from teams playing more meaningful games against each other, not simply from seeing each other more often. Red Sox and Yankees fans don’t appear to have hated each other any more in 2010 than they did in 2000, and the endless Orioles-Rays series in the days before Tampa Bay was competitive made this O’s fan click over to other games, not foster a hatred for the Rays.

Be that as it may, from a philosophical standpoint, heavily unbalanced schedules make the most sense when winning divisional races is the sole or at least primary way of making the playoffs and much less so when more Wild Card spots exist. When you have a lot of Wild Card spots, you create a fundamental bit of unfairness when the divisions are of meaningfully differing strengths; teams in weak divisions are competing directly against teams in stronger divisions for those Wild Card spots, with the former generally having easier schedules.

With half the playoff spots now going to Wild Card teams, a shift to a more balanced schedule was needed and probably overdue. Of course, a perfectly even schedule is impossible due to the very nature of physical existence; the Dodgers get the benefit of never having to play the Dodgers, and this year’s Washington Nationals don’t enjoy easy series against themselves. But I think we should strive to make the schedules more equal, not less.

So how does the actual 2023 schedule change things? To get an idea, I went back to this year’s preseason rosters and projections, and compared 2022’s projected strength of schedule to what it would have been if we replaced this year’s schedule with 2023’s:

Looking at the strength of schedule, teams in the NL East get easier schedules in 2023, while teams in the AL and NL Central mostly got tougher ones. That shouldn’t be all that surprising, but the AL East teams not getting softer schedules might be, highlighting the less-talked-about issue of how interleague play is designed. AL East teams drew the NL Central as their primary opponent this year, canceling out some of the natural penalties inherent to the unbalanced intraleague schedule.

What kind of effect does this change in the schedule have on pennant races? I again went to the Opening Day projections and re-ran ZiPS with 2023’s schedule:

There are obviously some team projections that ZiPS really missed on entering the season, such as the Baltimore Orioles. But the general idea here isn’t necessarily to see which specific teams benefit, but rather to get an idea of how much a playoff picture can change simply as a result of the altered schedule.

Generally speaking, the changes are relatively small. We tend to overrate just how different in strength baseball teams are. ZiPS saw the strongest division entering the season as the NL East (.525) and the weakest as the AL Central (.480). But while it’s a small shift, moving a win in one direction or another can easily be three or four percentage points in playoff probability at the start of the season. Teams trade a lot of prospects in July just to boost their bottom line for the season by a win or two! In a very tight race, that change in the schedule could make all the difference.

MLB has made a lot of changes to the game in recent years, and not all of them have been to the sport’s benefit. But if you want to see teams play on a more even playing field, this change is a good one.