Yankees versus Dodgers. It is a historic rivalry. By historic, I mean that it's more a thing that was than a thing that is. Because, let's face it, the historical angle on this matchup has grown stale. The last time these two flagship franchises met in the World Series was 1981. The good news is that you don't need to dwell on the history to get excited about this weekend's showdown at Dodger Stadium, though of course I'll do it anyway.
This will be the fifth time New York and Los Angeles have hooked up in an interleague series, with the previous four matchups amounting to 13 games, with the Dodgers holding a 7-6 edge. Here's the summary:
2004: Los Angeles won two of three at Dodger Stadium.
2010: New York won two of three at Dodger Stadium.
2013: The teams played two games each in both cities, splitting both series.
2016: The Dodgers won two of three at Yankee Stadium.
What do you remember about those series? Me, I have no specific memory of any of them, only that they happened. Nevertheless, it still feels special. I mean, despite how long it's been since the Yankees and Dodgers have met in a Fall Classic, it was once such a frequent pairing that there had to be young children who thought the teams met in October by default. The Yankees and Dodgers met in the Series six times in 10 years from 1947 to 1956. They've hooked up 11 times overall, including four since the Dodgers moved from Brooklyn to Chavez Ravine. But, again, it hasn't happened since the year Ronald Reagan was sworn in as our 40th president.
It's kind of amazing it hasn't happened in so long. Since 1981, the teams have combined for 10 pennants and six championships, though the Dodgers have accounted for just one of those titles. Eight times since then, both teams have been in the playoffs in the same season, including the past two. Yet the last World Series game between the Yankees and Dodgers was the last game Reggie Jackson played for New York. Jackson is now 73 years old.
While the competition will be fierce, this could be the year the drought ends and we finally "get" that 12th Yankees-Dodgers World Series matchup. (I put "get" in quotes because obviously not everyone is aching for another meeting of the two behemoths.) As things stand, the Yankees have a two-game edge over the Houston Astros for the best record in the American League. The Dodgers have owned the National League's best mark for most of the season and are eight games up on the Atlanta Braves. The Yankees and Dodgers may well enter the playoffs as the top seeds. That guarantees nothing, but it's better to have home field than not.
While the Dodgers and Yankees haven't met in October in nearly four decades, their respective dominance has never ebbed since their last Fall Classic, at least not for very long. Since 1981, the Yankees have averaged 91.3 wins per 162 games, easily outdistancing the second-place Boston Red Sox (87.4) in the AL. The Dodgers (86.3) are in a virtual heat with the Braves (also 86.3), just behind the St. Louis Cardinals (86.7) in the NL.
You get the same scenario if you drill down to the current decade, which, by the way, has only about six weeks of regular-season play left in it. Let's consider the following table:
The Yankees and Dodgers have enjoyed more regular-season success than any other team in their respective leagues during this decade. They've won the most games and made the most postseason appearances with six each, a number that will soon move to seven for both teams. But for all that winning, neither team has claimed one of the nine championships won so far in the 2010s. Obviously at least one of them will end the decade with a shutout no matter what happens from here on out in 2019.
Which team in the majors has the best claim to being called the "Team of the Decade"? Right now, it's impossible to declare an overall winner. If you're devout in the belief that each season is championship or bust, then you'd have to go with the three-time champion San Francisco Giants, who also own the most postseason wins this decade. But can they really be the face of the decade with a composite record not much better than .500? And a mark of just four playoff appearances, unless this year's team gets hot again?
At the same time, can we anoint the Yankees or the Dodgers without a single title between them? That doesn't seem right either. In fact, the right answer at the moment might well be the Cardinals. They are third in regular-season winning, are tied for second with five postseason appearances, rank second with 32 postseason wins, are one of six teams to own multiple pennants in the 2010s and they won it all back in 2011. It seems like the best across-the-board combination of factors.
There probably isn't a great objective way to tie all the criteria together into one metric, but there is a measure to consider: Championship Leverage Index. It was developed by Dan Hirsch, who maintains thebaseballgauge.com and also now works for Baseball Reference. CLI takes the methodology of win probability added and adds another element: how each play affects a team's chances of winning the title, whether it happens on Opening Day or in Game 7 in late October. Theoretically, if you look at the average CLI for each team for the decade, you would get a sense of how many big moments the fans of those teams have gotten to experience over the past 10 years.
Here's how those numbers came out:
Well, that's another point for the Redbirds, though you can tell at a glance that this method favors teams that not only have lasted deep into the playoffs, but have done so with a lot of close, dramatic outcomes. That is the one drawback of metrics based off of win probability methodology -- it tends to undersell dominance.
In any event, this does not seem like settled business. And it's not going to be settled over the weekend when the Dodgers and Yankees meet in what is sure to be billed as a possible World Series preview. In the end, we might not get a clear answer in this ephemeral question of Team of the Decade, but, then again, we might -- if the Yankees, Dodgers, Cardinals or Giants emerge to win it all.
If anything, when the Yankees and Dodgers are playing the next three nights, it will serve as a reminder that the stakes for the rest of the season might just be a little bit higher than the already lofty ambition of winning a championship. And if we do get a 12th Yankees-Dodgers World Series, it will be a boon to the baseball history buffs among us.
Extra innings
1. Here is what I don't understand about the Justin Verlander controversy. Why didn't he simply decline to answer the reporter's questions? It happens all the time when athletes are upset with a reporter or a media outlet.
The Astros' media relations staff is one of the best in baseball, and Verlander's demands put them in an impossible situation. Do they risk upsetting one of baseball's biggest stars and personalities by letting the reporter in? If they do, and Verlander refuses to address the media altogether, then no one would be able to do their job on a night when Verlander was clearly the big story based on what happened on the field. This is all on Verlander. By handling his beef the way he did, he has turned this all into much bigger deal than it should have been -- and put the reporter he was trying to shun in the spotlight. Is that what he wanted to do?
2. There was a lot of chatter in analytical circles this week about a blog post from MLB analyst Tom Tango. Using a thought experiment regarding the slash stats of two players of comparable production but different styles -- Don Mattingly and Darryl Strawberry -- Tango tried to put another nail in the coffin of batting average, writing, "And that's why the batting average is inconsequential. And that the vast majority of voters [in his poll] used the higher batting average as essentially the tie-breaker is why we should stop talking about batting average. It's a bias that clouds our view of players."
Others have made this point, but from a media standpoint, if you try to act like batting average doesn't exist, you are basically thumbing your nose at more than a century of history and a large swath of an MLB fan base that skews toward the middle-aged. One of the gifts of the sabermetric movement to those who write about the game is that we more than ever understand what old measures can and can't do. Batting average is one of those old tools with which you have to be careful. Most often, it'll be used descriptively in building a narrative because, by itself, we now know that it's not enough information with which to make evaluative judgments.
To reference Tango's example, it makes almost obvious sense that given two players with similar on-base and slugging percentages, the player with the lower batting average might well be the more productive. Because, by definition, more of his slugging percentage is based on power, rather than an accumulation of singles and doubles. In the cases of Mattingly and Strawberry, it's all a wash.
The same holds true at the team level -- as often as not, if you have teams with similar on-base and slugging percentages, the team with the lower batting average and, thus, the more isolated power, will score more runs over the course of the season. It's not a rout, but if you take two teams with roughly equal on-base and slugging percentages, the team with the lower batting average will outscore the comparable team about 53% of the time.
But that's not how I frame batting average, because batting average combines a couple of very useful skills: the ability to contact the ball and turn that contact into base hits. On-base percentage and slugging percentage both have batting average folded into their formulas, which is part of the reason stat-heads want to cut it out altogether. But what if you take average out of those formulas? What you're left with is isolated power and a form of what I'll call isolated patience -- basically walks and hit by pitches.
If you match teams with similar power and patience profiles, the difference between them is entirely explained by batting average -- and a higher average wins most of the time in terms of scoring runs over the course of a season. I did this calculation -- matching teams with similar isolated power and isolated patience profiles -- for all teams going back to 1920. The teams with the higher batting average in those comparisons scored more runs per game 83% of the time, with some teams overcoming the disadvantage because of baserunning and situational-hitting randomness.
I like writing about batting average. I don't use it in an evaluative way, but I do think I know more about a player and a team when I know the batting average than if I don't. I do think that when it's used logically and in context, it can be helpful in telling stories, especially when we're trying to fold a new narrative into the context of baseball's ongoing history. And besides, even if batting average were actually useless -- a lot of people still enjoy it. Isn't that enough?