TDA Bullpen - Our Writers' Blog

Thursday, March 31, 2005

Pre-Prediction Predictions

We're gearing up here at TDA to get our Umpteenth Annual Writers' Poll -- but the first one we've really organized -- for predictions for the year ahead. Now when we discuss predictions, we need to make some allowances for the relative proportions of art and science in prognosticating. Readers are perhaps familiar with the historical guide to successful weather prediction: if one simply predicts tomorrow's weather will be the same as today, one has as much of a chance as being accurate as the National Weather Service. Well, it turns out, that's not quite true, but it's close.

So, I thought it would be nice to take a quick look back at the playoff qualifiers for the last ten years for each league. We've had a stable playoff configuration for that period (the wild card era), and a relatively stable divisional lineup, with changes taking place for the 1998 season with the addition of Tampa Bay and Arizona and the transfer of Milwaukee from the AL to NL. This also takes us back rather neatly to the first post-strike year, so presumably this is now a representative sample of the competitive landscape in the 'new era' of revenue sharing.

Each team abbreviation represents one playoff appearance, in low-tech bar-graph format:


AL

NYY NYY NYY NYY NYY NYY NYY NYY NYY NYY (10)
CLE CLE CLE CLE CLE CLE (6)
BOS BOS BOS BOS BOS (5)
SEA SEA SEA SEA (4)
OAK OAK OAK OAK (4)
MIN MIN MIN (3)
TEX TEX TEX (3)
BAL BAL (2)
ANA ANA (2)
CHW (1)

NL

ATL ATL ATL ATL ATL ATL ATL ATL ATL ATL (10)
HOU HOU HOU HOU HOU (5)
STL STL STL STL STL (5)
SFG SFG SFG SFG (4)
LAD LAD LAD (3)
ARI ARI ARI (3)
NYM NYM (2)
SDP SDP (2)
CHC CHC (2)
FLA FLA (2)
CIN (1)
COL (1)



"Yesterday's weather", last year's qualifiers, to help break some ties: Boston, Anaheim, New York, Minnesota; Houston, Atlanta, St. Louis, LA (The Real Original LA).

So let's go ahead and use "The Weather Robot" as our predictor for the 2005 post-season:

AL

New York
Boston (wild card)
Cleveland
Oakland

NL

Atlanta
St. Louis
LA (the Real Original)
Houston (Wild Card)

We'll include the Weather Robot in our writer's poll.

A few incidental observations:

• In the AL, 10 of 14 teams have made the playoffs -- about three quarters. In the NL, 12 of 16 teams have made the playoffs, exactly 75%. Missing in the AL: Toronto (which of course won back to back World Series prior to this period), Tampa Bay, Detroit, Kansas City. Missing in the NL: Milwaukee, Pittsburgh (coming off back to back to back division titles just prior to the period), Philadelphia (1993 pennant winners), and the hapless Montreal-San Juan-Washington club (which was the best team in baseball in 1994). The Tigers and Royals last made the post-season in the mid-80s, Milwaukee in their only playoff year 1982 having made the World Series.
  
  What this ends up looking like in the bar chart is a pretty normal distribution. "Parity" in the sense the NFL used it during the days of Pete Rozelle foresaw a league where everybody had .500 records and there was, over time, an exactly equal distribution of playoff teams; but natural distributions usually don't work that way.
  
  While it's clear there have been a couple of teams left off the bandwagon after 1994 -- notably Toronto and Pittsburgh, which were both premiere franchises before the strike, and which have struggled in larger, tough divisions ever since -- hapless Detroit, Kansas City, and Milwaukee are just as bad as they ever were. We would give Tampa Bay a free pass, but for the fact the Diamondbacks are three-time playoff qualifiers since joining the league, and the Marlins and Rockies both made the playoffs within four years of being formed up.
  
  Hey, somebody's got to be an outlier.
  
  
• I honestly wouldn't've picked Cleveland as the second most-successful club in the AL of the past decade off the top of my head, but there it is.
  
  
• Every team in the AL West and NL West have qualified for the playoffs over the last decade. Of course, ini the oddly assymmetrical league configurations, these have beeen the smallest divisions as well. The moral of the story, I think, is that the size of the Central divisions, home to all but one of the non-qualifiers in the past decade, might be trimmed. If baseball went to two 15-team leagues with interleague being a continuous series of one match-up at a time, it could have six five-team divisions...
  
  
• There's never been a wild card qualifier from the AL Central. Otherwise, it's been a nice regular distribution among the other five divisions for wild card qualifiers.
  

Digression Coming Up...

Finally, for the sake of even numbers, let's stretch our bar graph back to 1992, skipping 1994, for a dozen years, and extend out some non-predictive speculation about divisional lineups:


AL

NYY NYY NYY NYY NYY NYY NYY NYY NYY NYY (10)
CLE CLE CLE CLE CLE CLE (6)
BOS BOS BOS BOS BOS (5)
OAK OAK OAK OAK OAK (5)
SEA SEA SEA SEA (4)
MIN MIN MIN (3)
TEX TEX TEX (3)
BAL BAL (2)
ANA ANA (2)
CHW CHW (2
TOR TOR (2)

NL

ATL ATL ATL ATL ATL ATL ATL ATL ATL ATL ATL ATL (12)
HOU HOU HOU HOU HOU (5)
STL STL STL STL STL (5)
SFG SFG SFG SFG (4)
LAD LAD LAD (3)
ARI ARI ARI (3)
NYM NYM (2)
SDP SDP (2)
CHC CHC (2)
FLA FLA (2)
CIN (1)
COL (1)
PHI (1)
PIT (1)


If you consider true parity would give each team an expected number of playoff appearances of 3 in the NL and a little less than three and a half in the AL, you've got six of 14 teams making "their share" or more of playoff appearances in the NL, and 7 of 14 in the AL, and 11 of 14 in the AL making at least one appearance and 14 of 16 in the NL.

The only true outliers on this graph are the Yankees and Braves, and even then they're not terribly unpredictable, given that there needs to be some kind of balance for the zeroes at the other end of the chart. I'd look at this chart and say, well, maybe baseball should expand to 32 teams, have a "play in" round for the wild card so we have 5 playoff teams in each league, and expand into the New York and Atlanta markets to remove whatever market advantages they have there. But that ignores the fact that if you combine the two New York teams, they come out with an average of 12 appearances in 12 years, and for that matter Atlanta is a big market but hardly the biggest (although now possibly the biggest unshared one -- Carolina looking better for a team).

If you did this somehow, there would be a little bit of market parity returned to the lowest clubs (mostly the non-qualifiers) on this list from breaking up the New York and Atlanta markets, but if you had 10 playoff teams and 32 teams each year, each team could expect about one more playoff appearance every 10-12 years under a "parity" situation. That should be enough to bring every team into playoff contention relatively regularly.

posted by The Crank 10:55 AM