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Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Is the interleague schedule unfair?
Joe Sheehan of BP seems to think it is (unfair that is). He says that the teams that play bad teams in the other league have an advantage over the teams that play good teams.
I say, “Yeah?” I also say, “Life ain’t always fair, Joe.”
Seriously, I just don’t see this as an issue. Unless everyone plays the same teams over the course of the year, some teams will have an easier schedule than others. Big deal. That can change of course from year to year, or every few years, or whenever.
He is really adamant about this being unfair. The funny thing is that I have never heard a team complain that they are playing tough teams in the other league and that their rivals aren’t . Maybe they are thinking that but they don’t want to sound like crybabies (which they would). I don’t know.
And does it really make all that much difference? One game in WE maybe between the teams that have the best and worst IL schedules? Remember that when you are considering strength of schedules (SOS), you must use opponents’ true WE and not their sample WE for that season. It is like a park adjustment, where you want to adjust a player’s stats for the “true” park factors for that year, not the sample PF’s for that year - sample PF’s can fluctuate wildly from year to year by chance alone. So if the Mets play IL teams that were a combined .550 and the Redbirds play IL teams that were a combined .450, it is more like the Mets IL SOS is .530 and the Redbirds’ is .470, or whatever it is after regressing the .550 and .450. For 18 games each, that is about a 1 win difference. That is just not a huge deal. And doesn’t the same thing happen in intra-league games? Teams from different divisions play different schedules, not to mention the fact that if you are a bad team, you get further penalized by having to play all the good teams!
Yup, life ain’t always fair.
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