How unfair is baseball?

Great Debates
1

With all the talk recently about competive balance, I did some poking around (instead of doing work) and compiled a bit of info about today’s baseball competitiveness.

Halfway through the season, I figure we have 13 teams that are fighting it out for 8 playoff positions. I chose teams that were within 5 games or so of a wildcard slot:
AL - Yankees, Red Sox, Twins, Mariners, Angels, A’s
NL - Braves, Expos, Cards, Reds, Dodgers, Diamondbacks, Giants

Of those 13 teams, 9 have salaries above the median ($62M), and 4 have salaries below the median. Of the 17 teams not fighting for playoff spots, 6 are above the median, and 11 are below. Yes, there is certainly a disparity, but I think it is debatable how unfair this difference is.

With respect to total market size, I went to Neilsen’s rating of TV markets. There are 14 teams that are based within the top 10 TV markets (in order):
Yankees, Mets, Dodgers, Angels (Anaheim is right outside of LA), Cubs, White Sox, Phillies, Giants, A’s (Neilsen groups SF and Oakland), Red Sox, Rangers, Orioles (they prevent a NoVA team, they get DC’s market), Braves, Tigers

Of those 14 teams, 7 are in a playoff chase, and 7 are not. This means that 6 teams in the playoff run are from “small” markets.

I submit that the competitive balance in baseball, overall, is not all that skewed. Small market teams can compete, the big market, high salary teams have an advantage, certainly, but I don’t think we should consider the league in crisis mode.
MLB Payrolls
Market Size

2

If you tried to correlate success on the field with 1) management skill and 2) luck, i.e. avoiding injuries, you will likely find out which teams are more successful than others.

3

I think you’re lumping together apples and oranges, putting the Detroit market (1.88M TV households) in the same basket as NYC (7.3M), while distinguishing between Detroit and the smallest ML market, Milwaukee (0.83M). Detroit’s a little over double the size of Milwaukee, but NYC’s nearly 4 times as big as Detroit. Unless your analysis deals with how much bigger the biggest markets are than even the markets just a few notches down, I think it’s missing something.

For instance, #1 NYC has more than twice as many TV households as #3 Chicago, and three times as many as #5 SF-Oakland; #2 L.A. has nearly twice as many as #4 Philadelphia. IOW, the very top of the scale is well ahead of even the rest of the top 10.

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What I found interesting was that Baltimore and Washington, together (3.15M TV households), have nearly as many TV households as Chicago (3.36M), and way more than SF-Oakland (2.43M). But for years, DC’s situation has been compared by MLB with SF-Oakland, which finds it a challenge to support two teams, rather than with Chicago, which seems to be able to support both the Cubs and White Sox with little difficulty.
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4

Look at it this way: when is the last time the Yankees couldn’t afford to get, or couldn’t afford to keep, a player they wanted. I can’t think of any one instance when this has happened. Talent rolls downhill and the Yankees are at the bottom of the hill scooping up whoever they want. The other teams continually lose players because they con’t afford them; the Yankees, never.

Of course the Yankees have excellent management, but that excellent management has the advantage of a bottomless font of monty that other teams don’t have. Its like playing Monopoly against someone who is an excellent player and who has free access to the Monopoly banker’s money.

5

I think baseball is terribly, terribly unfair to players without legs.

6

It’s true that the Yankees have a decided advantage, but they lost in the WS last year, were knocked out of the playoffs a few years before that, and almost lost a few other playoff series as well. They are currently the dominant team in MLB winning 4 of the last 6 WS, but I don’t think they can be considered much more dominant than the Lakers (3 titles in a row) or the Red Wings (3 of last 6 cups).

I don’t think the Yankees have proven themselves to be unbeatable, which is why I sort of scratch my head about all the “small teams can’t compete” talk.

7

The Yankees haven’t proven themselves unbeatable, but they’ve proven themselves very, very hard to beat.

Whether or not small teams can compete depends on your definition of competitiveness. If you’re asking, “can a small-market team win the World Series from time to time?” the answer is clearly Yes, because it just happened. If that suffices, then the debate’s over.

That would not be my standard, however. My question would be, “what’s a reasonable sort of disparity between the best of the large-market clubs, and your typical small-market club?” Should the Yankees be 30% more likely to gain the playoffs, or win the Series, than your typical small-market club? Or should they be three times as likely, or 30 times as likely, to do so?

I’d personally argue for the big-city clubs to have a bit of an edge. I think it’s not unreasonable for the Yankees to be a few times as likely to win the World Series as the D’backs, or the Mariners, or Twins, or Cardinals, or Reds, or Pirates, or Seligdaughters. But I’d hate to see the Yankees be more likely to win the championship as all of the poorest twenty teams put together.

Yet I think that’s roughly where the balance is, right now. And I’d say that’s too out of whack.