Editor's note: From rising strikeout totals and unwritten-rules debates to connecting with a new generation of fans and a looming labor battle, baseball is at a crossroads. As MLB faces these challenges, we are embarking on a season-long look at The State of Baseball, examining the issues and storylines that will determine how the game looks in 2021 and far beyond.
This is it. The stretch run. The final month of the 2021 baseball season is at hand. It's all been building up to this.
The degree to which that string of promotional clichés grabs you might depend on which year you hail from. Let's say you're viewing this year's standings through a 1965 lens, or, really, any lens from 1901 to 1968. There are two leagues and no divisions or wild cards, so everything rides on finishing in first place. It's pennant or bust.
Through that lens, there are five teams angling for the two slots in the World Series. In the AL, the Tampa Bay Rays have a nice six-game lead over the Houston Astros. Everyone else is far enough back that if any of them were to catch the Rays, it would generate some "miracle" headlines.
The NL is tighter, with the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Francisco Giants locked in a neck-and-neck classic pennant duel on the 70th anniversary of their great race in 1951. But don't sleep on the Milwaukee Brewers, who hover just 3.5 back of Frisco. Everyone else? It's wait until next year.
The narrative changes when you shift the historical lens and match up 2021 results with the formats from baseball's history. Let's prorate the current standings for a full 162 games, assuming that the current winning percentages hold up through the completion of the regular-season schedule. Let's also assume that any team that's seven games or closer to a playoff slot in the prorated standings is considered a contender.
Given those assumptions and prorated 2021 standings, here's how many contenders we have in each format:
1. Two leagues, no divisions or wild cards (1901 to 1968): 5 contenders
2. Two leagues, four divisions, no wild cards (1969 to 1993): 8 contenders
3. Two leagues, six divisions, two wild cards (1994 to 2011): 16 contenders
4. Two leagues, six divisions, four wild cards (2012 to 2019, 2021): 16 contenders
5. Two leagues, six divisions, two top-seed byes, 12 wild cards (rumored proposal for expanding the playoffs): 19 contenders
6. Two leagues, six divisions, 12 first- and second-place finishers, four wild cards (2020): 19 contenders
In the real world, the only one of these scenarios that matters is No. 4. That's the current format, the one that's been in place each season since 2012, save for the ad hoc system we endured during the pandemic-shortened 2020 campaign.
Our question today: What are the pitfalls, and benefits, of changing that format, given the current level of top-to-bottom competitiveness across the game?
Turning the dials
With baseball's owners and players wading into talks for a new collective bargaining agreement, it might be the last year of the current format. Could we see the 2020 format made permanent? Could we see a postseason playoff expansion to 14 teams? Will the status quo prevail?
We don't know the answer to any of those questions. But with talks looming, this is really our last chance to consider what all of this looks like, at least from a competitive standpoint. Because what we do know is that more when it comes to the question of playoff format, competition tends to get nudged to the wayside by the question of revenue. For today, we'll set that factor aside.
As things stand this season, we have 16 of the 30 clubs who can be called contenders, at least on some level. This number is a product of two factors: the size of the playoff bracket, and the degree of stratification between baseball's 30 clubs. The latter factor doesn't necessarily work like you might intuit.
There are really two dials that baseball has to consider when selecting its best competitive format: the format itself and competitive balance (or parity, if you prefer that term). If we agree that the more contenders we have, the better it is for the sport overall, then those are the factors to consider.
You can increase the number of contenders by letting more teams in. That much is obvious. You can also accomplish the same thing by keeping the postseason somewhat exclusive, but ensuring that there is less separation between the teams during the season. This is what we refer to as parity. The flip side of parity is stratification.
Stratification scores
Let's return to our number of 2021 contenders: 16. Based on current win percentages, those teams would average about 92 wins. The range of wins is large, from 104 prorated wins for the Giants to 83 for the Phillies. The size of that range is because of the high level of stratification in baseball at the moment. The Phillies are still in contention because there are six divisions, and they happen to be in one that hasn't seen a high degree of separation.
This trend has been in place across MLB for several years now. When you think back to all the stories you've read about "super" teams and "tanking" teams, this is what we're talking about.
One way to measure the level of stratification in a league is to look at the standard deviation (the average distance between teams) of either winning percentage or something else. We'll be using something else -- specifically Pythagorean percentages, or the expected winning percentages of each team based on run differential. We're going to clean up the expression of this measurement, so that we get a three-digit stratification score. The higher the better. A perfectly balanced league would get a score of 1,000.
The stratification score for this season is 912. Last season's -- the weird season -- produced a score of 915. In 2019, it was 910. In 2018, it was 890, baseball's lowest since 884 in 1954. Things have gotten a little better over the last couple of years, but 912 is still lower than the score of any season between 1970 and 2017.
We're two years into a new decade, so let's consider the average stratification scores by decade, going back to the beginning of baseball's modern era:
1900s: 885
1910s: 896
1920s: 914
1930s: 909
1940s: 908
1950s: 913
1960s: 925
1970s: 927
1980s: 942
1990s: 939
2000s: 936
2010s: 926
2020s: 913
There's a lot of baseball history packed into that short list. After the initial sorting out by the creation of the American League in 1901, stratification was fairly constant from the 1920s through the so-called Golden Era of the 1950s, which was especially great for the New York Yankees.
Gradually, baseball edged towards a higher degree of top-to-bottom parity, through the birth of the amateur draft in the 1960s, the dawn of free agency in the 1970s -- which arguably led to the peak stratification scores of the 1980s -- and on to the expansion of the playoff field in the decades since.
The trend toward parity has been in reverse for some time and that reversal has really picked up steam over the last few years. When we first sounded this bell after the 2017 season, the overriding concern at the time was about the number of teams that had launched into a full rebuild.
It's been long enough now that most of those teams should have moved back towards winning mode, as has happened with the White Sox in the AL and the Padres in the NL. Yet, hoped-for historical regression has not yet taken root. Baseball remains uncomfortably unbalanced.
But is that bad? Is parity to some extent overrated?
Wannabe contenders
So we have a sport of big-time winners and big-time losers, at least right now. This season is representative of that trend, fitting 2021 squarely in the midst of an unbalanced era. What are the competitive ramifications of this?
In short, it's something that's in the eye of the beholder. It depends on what you value. Let's consider that by looking at some averages from the wild-card era. This chart reimagines the playoff races of each season since 1994, through the prism of playoff format:
The "new" columns tell us how many additional teams the format yields per season than the next-smallest format, and the average win totals of those "new" teams. It isolates the competitiveness of the teams introduced to the field of contenders by the simple expansion of the playoff field.
The pattern is intuitive. The more teams you let in, the more teams are deemed contenders. But the tradeoff is that the threshold for becoming a contender gets lower. This only becomes a problem at the margins.
For example, there haven't been that many new contenders created from the move to a second wild-card in each league, a change that took effect in 2013. Applying an eight-team playoff bracket to each season of the wild-card era yields an average of 14.3 contenders per season; if the 10-team structure had been in place the entire time, that number would be 15.6. The problem is that the average win total of the additional 1.3 teams is 81.2. And it gets worse as the theoretical size of the playoff bracket increases.
Now, let's consider our current 10-team format and apply it to the standings back through the modern era, and we'll include stratification scores this time:
This shows why parity might be overrated, or it might not be. Again, it depends on what you value.
During the heightened parity of the 1980s, when we had a four-division, no-wild-card format, we had a comparable number of contenders per season as we do now. But the average strength of those contenders was about 3.5 fewer Pythagorean wins than what we've had from contenders so far this decade.
The dynamic you see here stems from the number of very bad teams that invariably propagate during a low-parity era. Right now, we have really bad teams in baseball, teams like the Orioles, Pirates and Diamondbacks, whose triple-digit loss totals have the perverse effect of propping up the win totals of the contenders.
So what's better? A league with top-to-bottom parity, matched with a larger playoff format? Well, consider that if the 2020, 16-team format had been in place in 2017, we would have had 25 of the 30 teams deemed as a "contender." The list would have included teams that won as few as 74 games.
What about the old two-league format? If we still had that, 25 of the 30 teams this season would NOT be in contention as we enter the stretch run. That doesn't seem workable, either, no matter how much value you place on the regular season.
As always, the right settings for the parity and format dials lie somewhere between those two extremes. And if you decide that leaving them set right where they are now is the right answer, it would be hard to argue with you.
As the players and owners sift through the exhausting list of topics that are sure to capture our attention in the talks to come, let's hope when they visit this particular issue, one question dominates the discussion: Should contenders in baseball's future actually look like contenders?