Major League Baseball has on the table a proposed rule change that would result in an increase in the number of playoff teams from eight to 10. This proposal is widely expected to pass without much issue and one additional team from each league could be in the postseason fray as early as next season. While the company line being toed by the league voice box is that such a change is being made to keep the season interesting later for a lot more teams, the reality is that it is simply a way for MLB to raise the bar relative to its television playoff contract, which will lead to a whole lot of extra money for the league and its teams.
Some may think I am being overly skeptical and simplistic and my dismissal of MLB's "good of the game" argument relative to this change; if that were the case, then it wouldn't be nearly as easy to dismiss the notion that such a change would in fact be a boon to any number of potential playoff contenders.
Consider these facts: as currently constructed, the league's playoff formula has left no fewer than nine American League and five National League teams in contention at the time this article is being written (for the purposes of this discussion, "in contention" will assume no more than 4.5 games out of any of the potential wild card spots). At this same time last season, the numbers were similar: seven American League squads and six National League teams.
Now, applying the logic that there are two additional wild card berths in both 2011 and 2010 (but using the same logic that 4.5 games back is the cut-off point) and you see that in 2011, only St. Louis (currently 5 games out of the proverbial No. 2 wild card slot) would consider themselves in the running for the wild card, and likewise, in 2010, zero additional teams from either league would have found themselves with a realistic shot at playoff participation. You'd expect that the highly paid think-tank that is Major League Baseball would have a firm grasp on this reality.
Surely I'm not telling them something they don't already know. It's not exactly higher math used to frame a very obvious reality that adding a single wild card spot would do very little to re-engage a number of the many teams that are woefully out of contention by mid-August each season.
Beyond the obvious apples-to-apples standings assessment that clearly shows that most teams out of contention in August will remain out of contention with extra playoff spots at stake, further research nets an even more startling realization: many teams have their postseason fate sealed as early as June each season. While traditionalists will maintain that part of the draw of baseball is its raw unpredictability — with the gauntlet that is six solid months of daily grind separating the wheat from the chaff — the numbers tell a vastly different story.
In the past 15 years, a mere 9% of teams with a losing record on June 1 wound up with 90 wins, which is typically a very safe bet for teams with playoff aspirations to shoot for. Citing a May 2011 Wall Street Journal article, "the average correlation between a team's win percentage on June 1 and its final winning percentage is 0.76." To break this correlation into layman's terms, a 1:1 (or 1.0) correlation suggests a direct relationship between June 1 winning percentage and a team's final winning percentage, which is to say that 100% of teams would have the same or better winning percentage at year's end as they do on June 1st.
So, by the current statistical measure, a whopping 76% of the teams to have won 90 games or more in the past 15 years were on pace to reach that number by June 1st. I've included a bit more detail on this statistical correlation from that Wall Street Journal article below, but before we get to that, a few more tidbits on which to postulate.
To say this statistical assessment belies a long-standing belief that baseball is a marathon rather than a sprint is an understatement at best. The marketing machine that puts fan's fannies in the seats of stadiums across the MLB landscape would sell you a very different story, to be sure. Local sports talk shows, newspapers, online advertisements, and even mainstream media outlets like ESPN and CBS Sports all seem to be in on MLB's gig; the selling of hope to the masses is a very popular strategy, even if the facts clearly show that all hope is realistically lost by the time Memorial Day Weekend hits. Heck, even the teams themselves do their part in shielding the collective MLB fan base from the truth with their constant "we are just taking it one day at a time" refrains.
Sure, there are always going to be statistical outliers. This season, for example, the Milwaukee Brewers were 19-21 on May 15th. Over the next few weeks, they won 11 of their 16 games to land themselves a .536 winning percentage on that June 1st date. On August 14th, however, the Brew Crew were 70-51, a .579 winning percentage. This is clearly a bold trend upwards for a team that, by the statistical measure discussed above, was on the proverbial bubble. But even this apparent outlier was relatively easy to predict had the full spectrum of numbers been reviewed in early June.
When the Brewers found themselves under .500 in mid-May, they had played about the same number of games both home and away, winning 68% of the time at home and only 29% of the time on the road. By June 1, those numbers had begun trending more favorably, winning 3 out of every 4 games at home and about 1 out of every 3 road games. Even with that small sample set (between May 15 and June 1), even the most novice mathematician could easily recognize a positive trend that, while showing net improvement, did not necessarily belie the deeper reality that Milwaukee is a much better team at home than they are on the road.
Such a realization should lead one to believe that the statistical trend is one that can be trusted, so projecting the June 1 winning percentages outward to season's end wouldn't be a huge leap of faith. Doing just that, one could surmise that the Brewers would be on pace to win 88 games this season. One final review of the numbers, based on August 14th standings, shows that the Brewers have indeed kept up their 75% winning pace at home and have further improved on their road win percentage (now at 41%), which would project to 6 additional wins. All things said, there current standing is a pretty clear representation of where we thought they would be had we performed an empirical review in early June.
While this may seem like a bunch of mathematical mumbo-jumbo, the basis for this argument is simple and clear and quite undeniable. In most cases, even when there is seemingly an outlier in play, one can assess the month of May to determine any one baseball team's trend and apply that trend to a thorough statistical analysis of the standings in early June and voila! Any fan should be able to pretty comfortably predict their team's shot at the postseason.
So, the next time you are wondering when you should start chanting the ever popular phrase "wait till next year," break out a calculator and a Saturday morning edition of the USA Today and crunch the numbers. You may wind up knowing a whole lot more than you think you do about your team and their chances in a given season.
Now, for your reading pleasure, here is another excerpt from the May 20, 2011 Wall Street Journal article written by Matthew Futterman regarding the importance of that afore-mentioned 0.76 statistical correlation:
"How high is a 0.76 correlation? Statisticians consider 0.7 a "significant" correlation and 0.8 a "strong" one. These are on a scale where 1.0 represents a direct statistical relationship and 0 represents no relation at all. Ben Alamar, the founder of the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, said football stat-heads are thrilled when they find a correlation of 0.4. in predicting whether certain plays lead to extra yardage. The system of college admission in the U.S. is largely based on SAT scores. The College Board's 2008 analysis of the relationship between SAT scores and first-year college performance found a correlation of 0.53. In terms of sports, the June 1 winning percentage correlation in baseball is higher than the correlation of winning percentages of NFL teams at a comparable point in the season (five games). Also, despite just a 16-game schedule, 12.6% of NFL teams under .500 at that point ended up making the playoffs, which is higher than the rate for baseball. A comparison with hockey and basketball teams isn't applicable because more than half of those make the playoffs."
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