Thursday, September 04, 2003
Parity... Damned if you do, damned if you don't. It has been observed that the optimal solution to any problem is rarely at the extremes. A league where every team finished within a game or two of 81-81 would be just as boring as a league where you could pencil in the champions for the next eight years. The question comes down to what is an exciting middle ground?
I happen to think that dominant teams, so long as their dynasties are short-lived, are good for the game. This year's NL Wildcard race is said to be exciting because so many teams are involved. But you can't shake the feeling that it is a bunch of mediocre squads thrashing it out. Give me 1993 when the Braves and Giants went down to the wire. That was an epic struggle between two great teams, what a pennant race should be about. I'm not that jazzed about the current chase.
And that goes for the wildcard in general. This year the numbers conspire to put a bunch of .500 teams in the running, but any scientist will point out that the square root of 162 comes out just shy of 13, so a hypothetical 94-win (13+81) team is indistinguishable from .500 given the sample size involved. Looking at the history of the wildcard once they got back to 162 games, let's see how many teams broke the 94-win threshold:
2002 95 99 2001 93 102 2000 94 91 1999 97 94 1998 90 92 1997 92 96 1996 90 88
For the most part, the history of the wildcard has been about teams that were statistically indistinguishable from .500.
I've never thought that MLB had a big parity problem in the free agent era. In the NBA, the variation in winning percentage has roughly a 30% effect on winning percentage two years down the road. Some of that has to do with the smaller roster size and the salary cap. One or two bonehead moves and you can really sink a franchise. How large is that effect in baseball? About 6%. That's so small I really can't see it as a problem.
posted by David 9:04 AM
