I was listening to sports radio last night and they wee talking about parity in various sports. This seems to be really important to people. They want to think that everyone has a reasonable chance to win year in and year out. Football has been making this argument for years. The NFL has the most parity among the major sports. Baseball has always gotten a kind a bad rap in this area. I thought to myself that baseball has had a lot of different winners in the last few years. Maybe marketing of teams and players has more to do with the idea of baseball being dominated by a few teams than reality. Here are the numbers for the past ten years.
Baseball has 30 teams – 24 have made the playoffs in the past ten years. The only teams not to make it to the playoffs are the Blue Jays, Orioles, Pirates, Royals, Reds and Nationals. The Blue Jays have been good but play in the same division as the Yankees and Red Sox. In any other division they probably would have made at least one playoff appearance. The rest of the teams are in various states of disarray.
Another interesting fact is that exactly half of the teams have made at least one World Series appearance over the last ten years. This is due in large part to the wild card system which I think has improved baseball.
Lastly 8 different teams have won the World Series in the past ten years. The only two repeats are the Yankees (99, 00) and the Red Sox (04, 07).
I think that this qualifies as parity to me. I need to go back and check against football to see how it compares.
1 Comment
June 22, 2009 at 8:23 pm
Wait, the pirates haven’t made the playoffs in 10 years??? Say it ain’t so!
Parity in sports is a really interesting topic – this article is a good read – mostly NFL related, but he has an MLB aside.
http://www.advancednflstats.com/2009/03/nfl-without-salary-cap-2.html
One of the most interesting things he says is that the NFL’s parity has a lot to do with the (relatively) few games played in a season, because it makes luck much more of a factor. Over many years, MLB has a fair bit of variance, as you pointed out, but if your team stank last year, you have a lot less to hope for during training camp. i.e., it’s a lot easier to be positive about the Texans’ chances than the ‘Stros right now…