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Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Balanced Playoff Hope
When it comes to division alignment, I’ve often proposed aligning based on market size. Put the Yanks, Mets, Redsox, Dodgers in one division, put the Pirates, Royals, DRays in another division, and so on.
Putting the Jays and Rays in the same division as Yanks, Sox, and Orioles hardly seems fair. Fans of those teams have such little hope. As I’ve shown elsewhere, just on market size alone, the Yanks are expected to win 99 games.
Of course, if you put the Yanks, Sox, and Mets in one division, it’s also not fair that each of those teams now has the same chance of being in the playoffs as the Pirates, Royals, and Rays. Ah, but they don’t!
Here are a few sample proposals that would handle this issue.
The first proposal:
- two teams from each of four divisions makes the playoffs
- the number of teams in each division are: 4,6,8,12 (total 30 teams)
Now, we see that the Yanks, Sox, Mets, and Dodgers each have a 50/50 shot of making the playoffs, while the Royals, Pirates, Rays et al have a 1 in 12 chance of making the playoffs. Where did I get these numbers?
I looked at all teams from 1988 to 2006, and figured out the team payroll for each team-season, as well as whether the team reached 88 wins or not. (On average, 8.5 teams reached the 88-win level, which is my stand-in for playoff-bound.) I then grouped all the teams by payroll, and sorted them. The Yanks, in that time period, spent 165% of league average on payroll, and had 0.71 “playoff-bound” teams. The Expos spent 62% of league average on payroll, and had 0.19 playoff-bound teams.
The top four teams in payroll (my stand-in for market size for the purpose of this illustration only), the Yanks, Sox, Braves, Dodgers, were playoff-bound a total of 2.24 times per season. That is, one-fourth of all playoff-bound teams from 1988-2006 were these four teams.
The bottom 11 teams in payroll were playoff-bound a total of 2.15 teams per season. That is, these 11 “small market” teams are just as likely, as a group, to make the playoffs as the 4 “large market” teams. Hence, the breakdown from my first proposal to have a different number of teams in each division to keep this large market / small market balance in check. That is, there should be no objection on realignment based on the market size, since I’m using that as the basis.
The second proposal:
- 3 of 6 teams from the First Division makes the playoffs
- 2 of 6 from the Second
- 2 of 10 from the Third
- 1 of 8 from the Fourth
Again, this is based on recent historical data. Of the top 6 teams in payroll, they averaged 3.0 playoff-bound appearances per year. The bottom 7 teams in payroll average 1.0 playoff-bound appearances per year.
The third proposal:
If geography/travel is a concern, then we could split based on have/havenots East/West.
So, a modification of the first proposal is to have 4 “haves East” and 6 “haves West”, along with 10 “havenots East” and 10 “havenots West”, and 2 teams from each division make the playoffs.
The reason for the East/West split in the Premier Division is because the East market is much larger than the West.
The fourth proposal:
If you want to go to six divisions instead of 4, and maybe also include some sort of the third proposal:
- one team from the four non-premier divisions make the playoffs, while two teams from the two premier divisions make the playoffs
- that leaves us with 4 “haves East” and 6 “haves West” in the premier division
- 5 “havenots East1”, 5 East2, 5 West1, 5 West2
Or you can try anything else, really.
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What does this give us? It gives all the teams the right amount of hope. The Rays and Jays et al now have the same fighting chance as other teams in their market size. Why do we want geography to dictate otherwise?
What will be the effect? If the Premier Clubs are all in the same division, it sets up its own universe of bargaining. Would the teams really try to one-up each other, if there was a guarantee that half of them won’t make the playoffs? I don’t know. I don’t know if the Premier teams would try to outspend each other silly, or try to take a more reasoned approach.