THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

I like #1 and #3 better than the current system. #2 is less appealing because it’s more arbitrary.

Andy: what do you think of the NCAA and World Cup of “alloting” certain number of teams per conference/region?

Just put them all in a room and let them hash out five divisions of six teams each. Cash payments and draft pick exchanges allowed.

Why not just have two divisions, the American League and the National League. 

You can schedule each team extra games against 2-3 rival teams.  Maybe you add a mechanism where teams that faced each other in the playoffs automatically get the rival treatment for the next season.  That’d be fun.

Fans would celebrate playoff berths the way they celebrate division titles now.  Where’s the problem?

I like the idea of relegation/promotion.  My own idea is 32 teams in 4 divisions: original NL, expansion NL, original AL and expansion AL.  Either two new teams in expansion AL or send the Brewers back and 1 new team for each league.

Totally agree on the cash payment idea.  Why not?

I was just reading how in college football, the visiting teams get paid alot of money to play one of the big teams. 

Imagine that the Royals, Pirates, Padres, Nationals, and Reds have to go to one of each of the five divisions.  The Yankees say “who wants to join us”.  Royals say “give us 10MM”.  Pirates say “we’ll take 9MM”.  Finally, the Reds end up accepting 5MM payment from the Yanks.  The Redsox, as tops of the next division go through the motions, and the National accept a 4MM payment from them.  And so on.

Or some other crazy scenarios.  It’s “revenue sharing” but based on negotiations and auctions.

Promotion/relegation would end the stadium subsidy gravy train, so that’s probably even less realistic than nuking the divisions every 4-8 years. From a business perspective, you want the most teams in the race as possible, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they just added more playoff teams eventually—if the other sports have 16....

Wow...someone likes the indecipherable NHL divisional alignment?

I’ve been following the NHL/Penguins since 1980 and I honestly couldn’t tell you who is in the Penguins division right now. But I could probably tell you the final Patrick division standings for every year from 1985 until the realignment.

Of course, baseball is a different animal. My druthers would be flat leagues (no divisions and no interleague play, please) with the top 3 teams making the playoffs (top team gets a first round bye.)

I’m getting Jim Mora deja vu.

Geography? 

Playoffs?!!

I’ll bet you many soccer fans can tell you every group Italy and Brazil have been in for the last 10 world cups.

I’m crazy for the idea.  You know how in hockey, they think that 8 teams intra-division is too much, and 6 is better (even though in MLB, with twice the number of games, they figure 18 intra-division is better)?  Well, that’s because in hockey, they get sick of seeing the same teams all the time.

However, imagine division realignment every 5 years.  You might have say the Bruins and Rangers in the same division, and you’d be happy for the 8 intra-division games because in 5 years, you may only see them twice because of realignment.

And, I would go with the “classic” names for divisions like the NHL used to have, and maybe change those every 5 years as well:
- Chadwick
- Cartwright
- Robinson
- Ruth
- Wagner

I love that the NHL awards are named after figures from their past.  MLB does this with the Hank Aaron award, and Cy Young, but not the MVP, which should naturally be named Babe Ruth award.

I like variety, with a nod to the past, not a stubborn marriage.

Divisions negotiated by teams would be interesting. I figure some teams would naturally want to play in the same division—Astros/Rangers, Padres/Dodgers/Angels, Rays/Marlins, Reds/Indians, Orioles/Nationals, Cardinals/Cubs. I have no idea whether the Red Sox and Yankees would want to play in the same division.

Even the idea of divisions doesn’t have to exist.  What if the Redsox/Yanks agree that they want to play 30 games against each other, knowing that it puts them at a disadvantage win%-wise, but increases the cash intake?

In soccer, you just have one huge league, not all these subdivisions within the same league.

So, the Royals/Pirates may end up playing each other a ton because they know they can play .500 against each other, and it won’t cost much to play each other.

If the Yanks want to play up on some crappy opponents, well, then they’ll have to pay for it.

And in the end, you can have the top 8 teams in this 30-team league making the playoffs.

If someone follows college football, maybe you can explain how it works there in terms of scheduling.

But Tom, do you like watching the last two to three weeks of the NBA season, where you get:

A. 25% of all games between two teams already comfortably slotted into their playoff seeds

B. 25% of all games between two teams, one of which is comfortably slotted, and the other of which is fighting for its playoff spot,

C. 25% of all games between two teams that are both out of the playoffs, and

D. 25% of all games between two teams fighting for their playoff spots.

Type A games are terrible, as the stars sit out and no one on the floor really cares.  Same for C. 

B games are controversial, as you get all sorts of complaining from third-party teams that so and so isn’t playing its stars, and they’re hurting our chances, blah blah blah.

D games are as good as playoff games.  Which is sort of good.

Baseball gets only a tiny bit of this, because so many teams are alive until so close to the end.  Basketball is suffering from this, big time, and so is hockey, to some extent.  Do you want baseball to inflict this on itself, just to remedy the very occasional three good teams in one division “problem”?

And I’m not just a knee-jerk don’t change a thing person.  I just grant the status quo the presumption of innocence.  Convince me!

#3 is a horrible idea unless you can figure out a way to build 40,000 seat stadiums for a bunch of tertiary cities, and then expect that to be cost effective when Reno can’t get more than 10,000 to any games. #3 would create even more disparity in the sport, because the same 7 or 8 teams would just rotate. Would the Yankees ever be relegated to a lower league? No. And why are teams like the Royals going to spend ANY money on players when they know they’ll be competing for the AAA championship if they don’t reach X number of wins? Hate this idea.

I don’t think the current setup works, either. I’m fine with AL/NL for historical purposes. I also understand playing more games against closer teams. It saves money and travel (tell the players in Seattle it makes no difference and they should fly to Tampa as often as they fly to Oakland). What I don’t get is “division champions.” If the AL Central winner has the 6th best record in the AL, why do they get to be in the playoffs? Why not just put the top 4 teams in?

If you are mixing up all the divisions every year, what are you going to do about the DH?  What happens if Jim Thome’s team goes from having to not having a DH?  Teams build their roster around the DH, so you would need to a method for solving this.  I am not saying it’s unsolvable, just that I haven’t seen it mentioned.

What I would like to see is the MLB broken up into geographical divisions, ie - (Angels, Dodgers, Giants, A’s all in same division) then at the end of the year have some sort of computer algorithm weighted with a writers or coaches poll determine the two top teams in all of baseball.

Those top two teams could play a seven game series in a neutral warm weather city.  There could even be a large parade the day before the series starts and people would fly in from all over the country to watch the series and participate in all the media hoopla.  All of the other +.500 teams could play their own 5 or 7 game meaningless series as a way to reward themselves for a pretty good season.  We could call it the Baseball Championship Series, or the BCS.  Thoughts?

vr, Xei

Promotion/Relegation would be very cool, though you would either have to figure out how to allow teams to still have below-MLB level talent that they are developing, or you would completely change the structure of baseball. 

One advantage would be that it makes almost all the games meaningful, since if your team isnt fighting for a playoff spot anymore, they are fighting to not be relegated.

"because so many teams are alive until so close to the end”

What is the “alive” threshhold?  According to coolstandings.com:
http://www.coolstandings.com/baseball_standings.asp?i=1

You have 3 teams with at least a 75% chance of making the post-season,
Another 4 with 50-74%
Another 6 with 25-49

14 of them with less than 5% chance of making the playoffs

However, the issue is not necessarily about alignment, but number of playoff teams.  I’m not suggesting that 16 or 8 or 4 is the optimum number.  So, your issue doesn’t apply to the alignment issue, does it?

I’m saying that the idea to align based on geography is stupid.  Or, if the alignment is based on cost-savings, it certainly doesn’t need to be the reason that you select a “geographical winner” to make the playoffs.  That’s what they are actually doing. 

“Hey, we’re the best team in the Great Lakes region!  Yay!  We make the playoffs!”

“But, aren’t we, like, the 10th best team in baseball?”

“So?”

I think we are arguing two separate issues.

"Teams build their roster around the DH, so you would need to a method for solving this.  I am not saying it’s unsolvable, just that I haven’t seen it mentioned. “

I figured regular readers of this blog already know my position here.  One DH rule for MLB, not two.  You make it “home manager discretion” as to when the DH rule is in effect.

JD, I have no idea why you think letting teams set their own divisions would have those results. I don’t see that at all. Financially strong teams could pay weak teams to play in their divisions, but that would increase the weak teams’ resources and assure them visits by popular teams, helping attendance. Mediocre teams could band together, essentially guaranteeing that one of them would get a playoff spot.

However, I like Tango’s set-your-own-schedule idea even better.

The Yankees would indeed be like Notre Dame:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NCAA_Division_I-FBS_independent_schools

Eventually what will happen is that proposal 2 will happen, as the big independents (Yanks, Redsox, Dodgers, Cubs) will form one collective, while the Royals, Pirates, Padres, etc would form another collective, etc.

There will be negotiations as to how much each division will pay out to the other divisions, as well as how teams can move/trade/sell each other between divisions.

There’s a whole host of possibilities that any of the options on the table can offer.  “Winner of geographical region” has got to be the worst one.

I vote one division for MLB if you want interleague play; one division per league otherwise.

What’s the point of divisions anyway?  I can see how it allows hope for more teams, under some circumstances, but what else is good about it?

If someone follows college football, maybe you can explain how it works there in terms of scheduling.

Most every team is in a conference, and is scheduled to play the other teams in the conference.  As the conferences vary by size, you don’t necessarily play every other team in your conference every year, though in some conferences (such as the Pac-10), you do.  The other two or three games of the season are scheduled by the schools.  A power conference school might schedule one game against an opponent from another power conference and two against lousy teams.  Obviously, things can vary there.

However, conference standings are based entirely on in-conference record only, and outside of the BCS, teams are seeded in bowls according to their rank in the conference standings.  Your out-of-conference record really only matters if you have a shot at a BCS championship.

This works fine for college football (I’m excluding any BCS/championship discussion here) because there are well over 100 teams and you can only play 11 or 12 opponents in a year.  This creates a lot of difficulty in ranking teams across conferences (and this rears its head in the BCS rankings).  This wouldn’t work as well for baseball or other professional sports, as there are only 30ish teams total.

There are many virtues to having geographically determined divisions in baseball.  For one, it both helps develop rivalries and feeds off pre-existent geographical rivalries, thus creating inherent interest even for the provincial.  For another, it allows fans of one team to easily follow the exploits of divisional rivals, as their games are frequently going on simultaneously.  This also allows fans of a team to have a functioning knowledge of players on other divisional teams.  People have geographical allegiances and interests, and for sports consortia to acknowledge and take advantage of that is natural and probably advisable.

That we might have a divisional winner make the playoffs with a worse record than a third-place team in another division is perhaps regrettable, but it is also rare, and the unbalanced schedule (which I do not like) actually means that it is difficult to actually compare the two teams, anyway (similar to the problem we have evaluating teams in college football).

I just did a quick review of the NL for the past 4 years, and each year, at least one team left out of the playoffs had a better record than the weakest division winner.  Last year 4 teams had more wins than the Dodgers but went home early… in 2007, there were 2 teams, in 2006 one team, in 2005 three teams.

This is just a tiny sampling, but the problem is bigger than I had realized.  You have a point, Tom, when you say the current system is not so great…

I’m amenable to changes, particularly if they allow the removal of the unbalanced schedule within and between leagues.  But generally I’m conservative, and prefer gradual, incremental changes to radical, TNT type changes.  For example, for me relegation is a non-starter, I’ll second the reasons given in #14.  And I don’t think the whole build your own schedule thing is viable, either, I’ll bet any of us could poke five or ten holes in that idea without breaking a sweat.  But, I’m not opposed to some sort of format change or realignment (although the DH issue needs resolution for some potential options, you are right about that)…

I think the bigger problem is that each team is able to protect its market. There should be a third team allowed to enter the New York market.

The geographical alignment would allow teams better rivalries. It would also allow the players to avoid more travel. Why shouldn’t both Florida or Texas teams be in the same division?

Tango,
There is a Babe Ruth Award given to the MVP of the World Series. It has since been surpassed in stature by the MLB version of the same award.

I like the idea of punting divisions all together and going with just two leagues, top four finishers make the playoffs. I also like to see any team but one of the “original 16” (BOS, NYY, CLE, DET, CWS, CIN, PIT, CHC, STL & PHI) move leagues every decade or so. Again, this could be accommodated through the type of process Tango and others outlined above for other forms of realignment. Some may shout “tradition”, but does anyone really care now (or even 10 years ago) that the Brewers switched leagues?

Why shouldn’t both Florida or Texas teams be in the same division?

One nice thing about living in a two-league city is being able to see any team you want in person.

I’m here to say that we should have more geographical alignment.  I’m also with Brent on putting another team in NYC.

Get rid of the AL/NL distinctions and figure out DH or no-DH once and for all.  With an extra team in NYC and one more in the eastern time zone, my quick count says that there would be 16 teams in the Eastern time zone.  If you ditch interleague play (and I’m mainly against it because it unbalances the schedules), then those teams could have every single game of the year in one time zone.  Then I think you could come pretty close to having a Central/Mountain-time-zone division and a Pacific-time-zone division.

Most fans are fans of their home team.  When an east coast team plays a west coast team, one team’s fans are on the losing end of that deal.  By keeping games closer to being in the same time zone (I would also suggest a schedule so that the PT teams play the PT teams more often than the CT/MT teams), your core customers have more of an opportunity to consume your product.

Yes, some out-of-town fans would get screwed on this, but from an overall standpoint, I think that the benefits would outweigh the costs.

You have to have massive unbalanced schedule in order to have geographical winners for the playoffs.  That is ub/27 would have to have say 3 games against half the western teams, and the rest against eastern teams in order to have east/west winners.  The NHL has something like that.

Its nice to say do relegation, but....

How would relegation really work? Would the top 4 AAA teams move to the majors and the bottom 4 major teams move to AAA? Would the old AAA team now have minor league affiliates? Would the RoyalNationals become a AAA team for someone else? If the RoyalNationals got demoted, they woule lose so much revenue (tv,attendance,marketing) they couldnt afford their cost structure.

A lot of teams couldnt build stadiums with the idea that half the time the team might be a AAA one.

I think the individual teams and baseball as a whole would benefit from compact divisions and more games with nearby teams. It’s hard for the Astros and Rangers or Twins and Brewers or Cardinals and Royals to build a rivalry playing six games a year. That’s a novelty, not a rivalry.

The genius of set-your-own-schedule is that it lets teams build their own rivalries. You don’t have to worry about separating Philadelphia and Pittsburgh or Detroit and Toronto. If you’re in Houston, you’d want to play the Rangers often, the Braves, the Cardinals. Kansas City is an easy flight. Tampa, Miami, Phoenix and Denver are not too far. But Arizona may want to play more games on the West Coast as opposed to playing the Astros 16 or 18 times a year.

With some reasonable minimums—must play at least 12 other teams, must play all teams every three seasons—it’s a very workable idea.

Agreed on the “set your own schedule” (SYOS).  The discussion as to minimums would also be interested.  I would definitely agree on the “all teams every three seasons”, or some variant. 

I’d probably just go on something like minimum 6 games for any team you play in a given season, and minimum 12 over any 3-year period for all 29 teams.  I’d bump the minimum number of teams to at least 15 for any one-season, and all 29 teams for any 3-year period.

I’d find it fascinating if the Yanks/Sox would prefer to fight it out in the regular season for 30 games head-to-head, knowing they’re “strength of schedule” is being set very high (but they get no relief from it), while the Royals/Nats might fight it out for 40 games head-to-head, knowing that that’s the best way to get a great W/L record.  (Obviously, teams are going to demand a maximum number of head-to-head games, say 30 for any one-year and maybe 72 for a 3-yr period).

I’m with Greg. I’m not opposed to change, but I don’t think any of the current ideas floating around are much better. College Football still has their conference system, the NHL system is as convoluted as anything.

Why not just reduce the amount of in division games, say be half, and use the remainder of the games to play more games against teams from other divisions? Why not let a good chunk of those games be interleague games? Say something like:

12 games against each opponent in your division
6 against every other team in your league
2 each of home/away games against 2 full other divisions in the opposite league?

So the Dodgers would play 12 games against their division (48 games)
6 games against the rest of the NL (66 games)
4 games against the AL East and AL Central (60 games)

which gets you to 154. I don’t know, you’d have to play around with the numbers, by why not just reduce the amount of in division games a lot, and make it so that everybody has to play everybody else more often? There will still be an imbalance, but not as much of one, and divisions don’t keep their dominance year in and year out. A few years ago the AL Central was the best division in baseball. In the early 2000’s, it was the AL West. The NL Central was ridiculous in the mid 2000’s.

The other issue is travel costs, if you make it so that the Yankees and LA Angels are in the same division or play each other a ton, they have to fly across country a lot. Baseball isn’t like football, or even basketball. They’re aren’t that many off days. A 2-3 (not sure how far exactly) hour plane flight from Chicago to Pittsburgh isn’t that hard to deal with. It’s in the same time zone. But if these players had to jet across the country to play teams, it could get ridiculous.

I think a lot of these schedule shifting plans would lead to scheduling nightmares.  That is a lot of games and travel plans and potential stadium conflicts and weather concerns to plan around on the fly every year.  I think you need to have an impartial plan to make that work out without there being a 15 game, 15000 mile, snowbound or sweltering road trip for some unlucky team each year.  In theory, it might be the best way to go.  Letting the free market decide is great, but there are artificial limitations in the market that add kinks.  I just don’t see it working out well for 162 games and 30 teams.

The easiest solution to getting teams involved and removing a lot of the geographic limitations is to get more teams into the playoffs.  Cut the schedule to 154 games, add 8 more playoff teams via wildcard and another round of playoffs.  Suddenly 25 teams are really in the race each September, and Toronto doesn’t waive Rios.  Almost no one is going through major, long term rebuilding, and those 5 teams that are out of it have a lot of competition for their players at the trade deadline.  Low revenue teams will be getting in the playoffs all the time, so everyone will tout the new found parity. 

I’m not really in favor of this plan, but it solves a lot of “problems”.  You might end up with the NBA problems from #13 above, but that would only really effect the last 10 games of the season, which already happens.  I’d add some aggressive home field advantage rewards to better teams to encourage everyone to play hard to the end.  But the point is that you don’t need to change the schedule or divisions or anything to eliminate the seemingly unfair geographic divisions.