Parity in Professional Sports
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| Saturday, October 21, 2006 |
Dan Wetzel argues that, conventional wisdom to the contrary, Major League Baseball, despite wild disparities in team salary, has far more parity than the National Football League and National Basketball Association do with their salary caps and revenue sharing.
MLB will crown its seventh different World Series champion in seven years, either Detroit or St. Louis joining the Chicago White Sox, Boston Red Sox, Florida Marlins, (then) Anaheim Angels, Arizona Diamondbacks and Yankees as winners this decade. Even more telling, the Tigers are the 11th different team (out of a possible 14) to reach the World Series during that time.
In comparison, the NFL, with its hard salary cap and “any given Sunday” motto, has crowned just five different champions the past seven years and also seen 11 different teams reach the Super Bowl. The NBA, which also boasts the kind of salary cap seemingly everyone claims baseball desperately needs, has seen just four teams win the title in the past seven years. Just eight teams have reached the NBA Finals during that stretch.
Making the MLB numbers even more impressive is the fact that baseball invites just eight of its 30 teams (26.6 percent) to the postseason. The NFL lets in 12 of 32 (37.5 percent) and the NBA goes with 16 of 30 (53.3 percent), which increases the likelihood of upset-driven diversity in the late rounds.
There is little question that big-market teams with big payrolls have an advantage in fielding a championship-caliber club; obviously, the Yankees have a better chance than the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. But baseball is a different kind of game, and stockpiling talent isn’t enough – as the Yankees’ six-year World Series drought has proven.
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Baseball is a game where the highest-paid player, the Yankees’ Alex Rodriguez ($25 million in 2006), can bat .071 against the Tigers. It is a sport where even the best player only gets up every few innings and the top starting pitcher can only go every fourth day, at best. It is basketball where a player can have an effect at both ends of the court on every single play. It is football where a player can impact at least half of the action.
In baseball, you can’t win without a team – a deep, clutch, close-knit, total team. And you just can’t buy that.
From 1991 through 2005, the Atlanta Braves won their division every year (with an asterisk for the strike-shortened 1994 season, when they were trailing the Montreal Expos but MLB awarded the penants to the team that had won the previous year). They had three Hall of Fame candidates, Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and John Smoltz in their pitching rotation simultaneoulsy for most of that stretch. Yet, they won only a single World Series. By contrast, the 1992 expansion Florida Marlins never won a single division title, had losing seasons almost every year, and won two championships.
That’s not so much parity, though, but the nature of the game. In football and basketball, the better team almost always wins. In baseball, even the most dominant teams lose a third of their games. That’s because, as Wetzel notes, a single player can have a major impact every game.
By contrast, baseball is mostly about dominating starting pitching. Since a starter generally only pitches every fifth day, the dynamics are very different from one game to the next. The left hand/right hand thing matters a whole lot more with pitching and hitting, too. Hitters go through hot streaks and slumps in a way that quarterbacks and power forwards don’t.
This is a major reason why baseball experts agree that winning a World Series is partly about luck. A single football game is generally a pretty good test of which team is better, barring a freak injury to the quarterback. A best of seven series in basketball is virtually never won by the inferior team. That’s because a Joe Montana or a Michael Jordan aren’t sitting on the bench in the final minutes of a close game. Barring injury to Tom Brady, the New England Patriots would never start the quarterbacking equivalent of Oliver Perez in the AFC Championship game.
A great regular season baseball team is built around steady production on hitting and defense and a deep pitching rotation. In a 162 game grind, with maybe five or six days off a month, we get a pretty good idea who the best teams are in each league. In the playoffs, though, a team can ride two hot starting pitchers to a championship (see the Arizona Diamondbacks).
Regardless, however, “parity” isn’t so much a measure of which teams win the championship but which ones have a chance to compete. The only way the Kansas City Royals will ever go to another World Series under the current system is to either start spending a whole lot more money or have extraordinarily good luck in developing talent. By contrast, the New York Yankees can essentially buy themselves a ticket to the playoffs every year. That they’ve invested too much in aging superstars past their prime isn’t a testament to parity but bad management.
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I think that the parity you present doesn’t get to the crux of the matter. Sure, the title has been won by many different teams in recent history. However, if you look at it a little deeper, the Yankees have won or been to more than half of the last 10 series (6), and other than the Florida Marlins in 2003, every team since 1995 was in the upper echelon of team salaries. I’d have to research what the payrolls were, but we all know that the Marlins paid a handsome price for their ’97 title, and I’m pretty sure the payroll for the Arizona team of 2001 wasn’t modest either. When it comes down to it, other than the rare variation, money buys post-season births.
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