Oh yeah, and the Lions started playing. Then stopped. Too bad the season has 13 more games. At least Millen is gone. I wonder how long it will be before a Lions GM will draft a WR in the first round for fear of ridicule. 5 years? 10 years? Wake me up when they win a game.
So my friend Andy brought up a good point about sports a few weeks ago, and I am just now getting around to writing about it. Basically, the question is:
Why is there seemingly so much parity in baseball - a sport with no salary cap - while capped sports have great disparities in records?
So, from the surface, you might say, there is no parity in baseball at all! The Yankees, Red Sox, Cubs, Mets - they all always win, always go to the playoffs...and the Pirates and Royals will always suck. To see the parity, you have to realize that the worst team this year - Seattle (and they were AWful) - won 37.7% of their games. (The Angels had the best record and won 61.7% of the time.) During the season, it is notable for a team to sweep another team in a three game series. Usually the better team wins 2 out of the 3 games. That means the top teams will win around 67% of the time, and the absolute worst 33% of the time. That sounds pretty bad, till you look at football (Miami last year - 6.25% - and New England - 100%), basketball (Miami - 18.5% [bad year for that city] - and Boston - 80.5%), and hockey (Tampa Bay and L.A. - 43.3% - and Detroit - 71.1%). And these are not outliers - the most wins in baseball history is 116, 71.6%, which just barely approaches what those other sports see every year. So why is it, when you have the big, bad, all powerful, all spending teams in baseball and you have an even playing field, salary capped, parity filled group of leagues, the capped teams are more disparate in their records? A couple ideas...
- The season is just waaaaaaaaaaay too long to be successful at that high rate
That is probably the best reason, but I'll lead with it anyway. Even looking at 3 game subsets of the season, one team doesn't always sweep those subsets. 2-1 is still a series win, but keep doing that, and all you'll get is the best record in the league - just not domination Patriots style. Playing together with the long season is the way players are rested in baseball. On day games following night games (probably happens once a week or so), you'll notice the starting catcher sitting out and maybe one or two other regulars on the bench, just to give them a break. Also in play is the amount of travel. Baseball teams will go on the road for weeks at a time as a regular occurrence, and play for 2 weeks straight at times. Unless you're the San Antonio Spurs trying to avoid the annual rodeo in your arena or the Boston Bruins avoiding the circus, basketball and hockey teams play maybe 3 or 4 straight road games at a time. Football teams might play 2-3 straight road games, but they're at home for the week in between, so that hardly counts. Finally, with a season twice as long as basketball and hockey, the sample size is just too large to have any one team win almost all their games or any team lose theirs.
- But what about the money? Wouldn't an uncapped team salary lead to some team being really dominant?
The Yankees tried that, and others (Red Sox, Mets, Tigers) have thrown money at players to get a winner, but that doesn't always work. In fact, since the Yankees have started to just pay dumb amounts of money for their players, they haven't won a World Series. Sure they made the playoffs all the time (before this year - side note, the fact that the Yankees missed the playoffs should be enough for any atheist to admit there is a God) but they haven't won the whole thing since 2000. That is a nice problem to have, true, but it remains that the Marlins have won since then. Money doesn't buy baseball championships. And those other leagues...I can't speak as much for hockey since their cap is new and I still don't really get it all the way, but football and basketball have weird cap situations. Basketball is not a hard cap, so teams can spend as much as they want, but they have to pay a dollar-for-dollar penalty for going over. Teams with lots of extra money lying around - like the Knicks - can spend over the cap, pay the fee, and still...suck. And teams that are below the cap can win big. My theory with basketball is that, since they have so few players (12/team), the mistakes are magnified and the good decisions have a bigger impact. Overpaying for a guy will really hurt your team because a lot of money is tied up in 1/12th of your team. So the value of scouting, drafting well, and picking the right people to keep on your team is very high. One good thing is that the NBA has a solid draft slotting system for payment, so the #1 pick gets $X and that is all - there is no negotiating. That is different from football, where draft picks money is sky high. A guy gets $30 million guaranteed before he's ever played in the NFL? Good for him, but come on, that is just bad business. And the NFL salary cap is inflexible compared to the NBA. Sure, you can pro-rate the bonus over 6 years and only take a $5 million/year hit on the cap, and do some other creative things with roster bonuses vs performance clauses, etc, but the number at the end of the year has to be under the cap or else. The better teams - the New Englands, the Denvers - have great salary cap guys that know how to work the system. They also value those cheap players at the end of the draft and don't overspend on those highly slotted rookies that are unproven. Since teams CAN pay big bucks, they do. Michael Vick has millions from his signing bonus, and that seems like a waste right now. Don't even mention all those Detroit draft busts...that goes without saying. In baseball things are changing a little with regard to the draft. It used to be some players were avoided because they would cost a lot, but then teams willing to pay (Detroit) would get them later in the draft and pay more, but get a better player than the ones that should have been available at that draft spot. That is a smart move because you can pay that young guy very little compared to the veterans and even get something in a trade later on. But other teams are catching on, and the KC's and Pittsburgh's of the world will now sign the best player. Anyway, point being, salary cap is not the end-all, be-all of success.
- The number of important movable parts is too high on a baseball team
This might be as important as the length of the season. Baseball teams have 9-10 (with the DH) players in any given game at any given time that all need to contribute in order to be successful. The other sports can have 1-2 dominant players at key positions and be hugely successful. QB + RB. Goalie + Center. Michael Jordan + anyone else. Baseball is the opposite - you can hide maybe 1-2 scrubs in your daily lineup, but everyone else better be Major League quality if you want to win. Good example: Angel Berroa. He won Rookie of the Year for the Royals when they were almost good a couple years ago, but he faultered in games that mattered and pretty soon got demoted to AAA. This year he's traded to the Dodgers and they are in the playoffs right now. Berroa hasn't changed - hits every once in a while, pretty decent fielder - but the Dodgers have enough other good-to-great players that they can take the hit of having Berroa play and still be successful. The Royals couldn't overcome that. How does a team go from too many scrubs to becoming successful? Luck. Overpaying (the right) free agents. More luck. Minor leaguers coming up and succeeding at the same time. And a little more luck.
This is all a long answer to get to the point that I don't know exactly for sure. The long season is an easy enough answer to explain it all away, but I hope I have added enough other insight to some other key points that this exercise wasn't a complete waste of time.
1 comment:
FIRST! (always wanted to do that)
Excellent post. I think you're right about the larger N's in baseball being the reason for more average winning percentages. That is, the season has way more games than any other sport and the number of players on the team is larger. These high N values mean you have to average over more games and more players' ability levels and you're less likely to get extreme values as a result.
I will suggest two more reasons why baseball teams rarely win a huge number of games. One is the importance of pitching. Almost every team has one great pitcher who wins a clear majority of their games. (The Tigers were supposed to have a few of those this year, but ended up having just Gallaraga (who?) instead.) Since a dominant pitcher can shut down a good hitting team and since that pitcher starts 20% of your games, that kind of puts a floor and ceiling on your winning percentage. You're unlikely to win over 80% of your games (since 20% will be against another team's stud pitcher) and you're unlikely to lose the 20% of the games when your own ace is on the mound.
The other reason I have is more questionable. It's that baseball is harder than other sports. The central moment of the game, pitching and hitting, is much more difficult than shooting a 3 or throwing a touchdown pass. Players in all sports go into slumps and hot streaks, but I would guess no basketball player ever had a month where he shot under 10% from the field. Or a quarterback who made few completions for 5 games in a row. How about a goalie who had a save percentage of about 50 for a month? But a cold streak this frigid is common in baseball. How does this make baseball more equitable? I think it makes the difference between a superstar and a scrub a lot less. Replacing a star like A-Rod for a below-average hitter like Inge at 3rd will hurt your team's offense, but it's not like replacing Jordan with, say, Carlos Arroyo (best I could think of). The difficulty of hitting and pitching in baseball puts a premium on the mental side of the game. You can't push through a slump with brute force the way you certainly can in football or hockey and probably basketball too to some degree. The nature of the game gives you time to think and worry and psyche yourself out. It also requires complete focus for short instants. The difficult mental side of the game means even your A-Rods, Vladimir Guerreros, etc. are going to slump sometimes. (Or get thrown out going first to third like last night? Did you see that? Holy cow Vlad looked slow.) Whoever heard of a running back slumping? So, to wrap this up, this means that you can pay 20x more for an A-Rod, but he's not nearly 20x better than an Inge. And that makes a team's overall salary less correlated with winning percentage.
It's hard to be concise when you only have this little window to type in. I can't see how much I've rambled already without scrolling up.
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