As you might have heard, the merry band of ball players disguised as Chicago Cubs won for themselves a chance to go to the World Series this year as one of the two best teams in American professional baseball.
Except that the two best teams were already known back on Oct. 4. They’re the Royals and the Cardinals, which the Cubs eliminated from the playoffs. The Cardinals, like the Royals and unlike the Cubs, ended the 2015 season with the best won-loss record in their league, and there is no truer test of quality in sport than wins and losses over a season of 162 games played in all weathers in all sorts of parks against a wide caliber of opposition.
Of course, best in one of two leagues is not the best in baseball. From 1903 until 1969, determining the best was done by a seven-game playoff known as the World Series. What began as a money-spinning exhibition has been sanctified by tradition as a meaningful competitive test, but the World Series, indeed playoffs in general, are about as reliable a way of determining the best team as a courtship is of determining one’s best mate.
In the past four years, for example, only once – in 2013 – did a team that was the best in its league (the Red Sox) win a World Series. Last year the pennant winners were the Angels, with 98 wins and the Nationals with 96; the World Series was won by the Giants, who got into the playoffs as a wildcard with only 88 regular reason wins.
Today’s World Series – merely the final of four rounds of a potential 21-game playoff – is an exciting way to identify the luckiest team, or the team with best bullpen, or the team with the savviest tactician as manager. The San Francisco Giants won the World Series in 2010, 2012 and 2014, even though not even a Giants fan would claim that their team was the best in baseball or even in the National League those three years. The Giants did prove themselves to be the best playoff team in baseball, but playoff baseball is a different game.
But if a World Series playoff can’t determine which of the two league champions is the better team, neither can total wins in a season, at least not as long as there are two leagues with different rules and teams don’t play common opponents. Indeed, wins and losses in general are far from a foolproof measure of team quality. The strength of their opponents, home field advantages and plain luck are only a few of the factors that can skew the outcomes of individual games.
Admittedly, the exact nature and extent of the skew is endlessly arguable. Neil Greenburg in the Washington Post in July argued that the Cardinals at that point of the season had won six more games than their offensive numbers suggest they should have. They pulled off that feat because “their pitching staff and defense is allowing 2.97 runs per game when they are expected to be yielding 3.53 runs per game.” Greenburg offers this as if superior pitching and defense were a fault in the Cardinals’ game. That tells me that Greenburg shares the too-common bias that baseball is hitting and runs and not pitching and defense, but it doesn’t tell me much about the Cards.
Playoffs games are affected by these same skew factors, whose effects are magnified in a short series. Adjusting regular-season wins and losses statistically to determine how many games a team “should have” won is less biased than playoffs to determine fundamental quality. Crunching the numbers reveals that the best teams in each league this season were not the Cardinals and the Royals but Toronto, with 102 “wins” and Houston with 98.
One of which teams can’t be in the World Series, having been knocked out of the playoffs as I write, and one might not be. Of course, a World Series played by computers will not make for good TV, even if you put a Kardashian behind the plate to call balls and strikes. But a regular season whose only purpose would be to generate the data used to determine which team that actually lost should have won would still count for more than it does today.
Contact James Krohe Jr. at KroJnr@gmail.com.
This article appears in Oct 22-28, 2015.
