The Balance of Power in Baseball: Has Anything Changed?

Recent years have seen owners of small-market franchises and many fans alike lament the domination of the sport by franchises with money. While there is no denying the easily observable fact that the greater a team’s payroll, the greater its chance of playing in the postseason, the fact is that this domination of baseball by a relatively few teams is not a new phenomenon.

Concentration of power vs. random distribution

Since the 1994-95 work stoppage, concern about the dominance of big market teams has increased. Five seasons have elapsed since the ignominy of a cancelled World Series. In these five seasons, 1995-1999, eighteen of the thirty franchises have qualified for the postseason, eleven have played in a League Championship Series, and five have played in the World Series. By themselves, these numbers tell us little. What should they be compared to? How many teams should we expect to play at each of these levels in a given five-season period?

One way of answering these questions is by asking another question. If reaching the postseason were truly random, how many different teams would play in the postseason? A simple model of a random distribution can be constructed. Results are shown in Table 1.

 

Table 1. Comparison of Baseball with Models

	1995-99	Random	Dependent
Postseason	18	23.4	22.1
LCS	11	15.3	14.7
World Series	5	8.7	8.5

 

As you can see, if success is randomly distributed among teams, twenty-three would have made the postseason, fifteen would have made the LCS, and roughly nine would have made the World Series. The difference between the random model and reality becomes greater at the higher levels of postseason accomplishment. This may lead us to believe that there has indeed been a concentration of power in baseball, and that the concentration is significant.

In reality, a comparison with a random model is not fair. Teams that make the playoffs one year have a greater chance of making them the following year because, unless they are owned by Wayne Huizenga, they keep many of their players. Table 1 also shows the result of what I call a “dependent model.” This model assumes that a team that has made the postseason the previous year has a 50 percent greater chance of making it the following year than a team that did not make the playoffs.

Even this model, however, indicates a significant level of concentration of power in baseball. The dependent model predicts twenty-two teams making the postseason, nearly fifteen making the LCS, and between eight and nine making the World Series. Compared to these values, baseball power has been considerably concentrated over the past few years. The small-market owners appear to have a case.

Comparison with other sports

Comparing with predictions from a model is one thing. Comparing with actual data is another. After seeing the results described above, I decided it would be interesting to compare baseball with the concentration of success in other sports. Table 2 summarizes the number of teams to make the rounds of eight, four, and two in each of the four major North American team sports over the 1995~99 seasons.

 

Table 2. Comparison of Baseball with Other Sports

	Baseball	Football	Basketball	Hockey
Round of 8	18	21	15	17
Round of 4	11	13	11	10
Final	5	8	6	8

 

The major sports fall into two categories. Baseball and basketball have had considerable concentration of success over the past five years. In football and hockey, success has been spread around much more. Maybe football and hockey teams are on a more even footing because these sports have harder salary caps than baseball and basketball. Or maybe it’s just the dominance of Michael Jordan in basketball and the very well run Braves and Yankees franchises in baseball.

Comparison with baseball history

How does the concentration of power over the past five years in baseball compare with history? Comparisons with history are difficult. We would expect dominance by one or few teams to be less likely now than it was in the past, when there were fewer teams competing. Furthermore, the modern playoff system puts more teams into the postseason now and muddies the water a bit.

Since 1995 was the first year that eight teams were allowed into baseball’s postseason, I limited my comparisons to include only the the LCS and the World Series. For the LCS, I looked at every five-year period between 1969 and 1999 to determine the average number of teams reaching baseball’s final four over any five-year period. Over this thirty-year period, an average of twelve teams have reached the League Championship Series every five years. The total for 1995-99 is therefore only one below average, and well within statistical variation.

The greatest period of LCS parity was 1980-1984, when seventeen teams reached the postseason. The fewest number of teams to reach the LCS over a five-year period was nine, occurring a number of times in the early-mid seventies. Divisions dominated by the Reds, A’s, Orioles, and Pirates gave the fans of comparatively few teams a chance to enjoy postseason baseball.

Looking at the World Series, we see that since 1903, an average of 6.2 teams have participated in the Fall Classic over any five-year period. The participation of five teams over the past five years is lower than average but well within statistical variation. The greatest number of teams playing in the World Series over a five-year period is nine, both 1944-48 and throughout most of the 1980s (that same era of parity we noticed earlier). The fewest was four, which occurred six times, most frequently during the domination of baseball by New York (Yankees, Giants, and Dodgers) in the 1950s.

Conclusion

A concentration of power does exist in major league baseball, particularly when the sport is compared with football or hockey. On the other hand, this concentration is not significantly different from that experienced throughout the twentieth century. Baseball has always been a sport of dynasties and dominant teams.

STUART SHAPIRO has a Ph.D. in public policy from the Kennedy School of Government, and currently works as a policy analyst in Washington, DC.