Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2536: Wrong Division

Starting point is 00:00:01 Does baseball look the same to you as it does to me? When we look at baseball, how much do we see? Well, the curveballs bend and the home runs fly. More to the game that meets the eye to get the stats compiled and the stories filed. Fans on the internet might get riled, but we can break it down on effectively wild. Hello and welcome to episode 25, 36 of Effectively Wild,

Starting point is 00:00:35 a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of Fangraphs, and I am joined by Ben Lindberg of the ringer, Ben, how are you? Doing okay. Lucas Spence, huh? How about that guy? Lucas Spence. Who knew?

Starting point is 00:00:49 Astros fans, maybe were aware of Lucas Spence, but he kind of announced himself to the rest of the baseball following world with his performance on Thursday. This is what I like about this time of year. and obviously the postseason too, but also crunch time here on the verge of the postseason, is that you can be a hero, even if you're Lucas Spence, even if you are undrafted, unprospect ranked,

Starting point is 00:01:15 at least top 100 style ranked Lucas Spence, who is only there because of various other injuries and things having to happen for him, even to be playing in a crucial game for the Houston Astros, who need everything. every win to try to squeak into the playoffs. And what does he do in his 16th career major league game, having not distinguished himself at all in the first 15, but hit three home runs and power the Astros to a win that they

Starting point is 00:01:50 really needed? It was not Yordaun's day. It was Lucas Spence's day. And he will always be remembered and beloved by Astrospence. no matter what happens. I mean, especially if that power display propels them into the playoffs, then he has achieved folk hero status with that performance alone. But boy, just what a legendary game from an unlikely source of power and heroics.

Starting point is 00:02:20 Lucas Spence, kudos to you. Just never know what you're going to see at the ballpark. It is so true. And, you know, obviously the games are not actually more important. important now. It's just that we know how important they are. Exactly. Yeah, that's right. And so, you know, by championship probability added or leverage index or all of that, yes, absolutely. But we could probably go back to the beginning of the season and come up with some other game that ultimately has the same sway in the standings. It's just that we were not all focused on that game.

Starting point is 00:02:56 And so here he is when we know exactly how much it matters. And, And he joins Joshua Baez of the Cardinals earlier this season and Sebi Zavala of the White Sox five years ago as the only players to hit their first three career homers in the same game. And what better time to do it. And they were like crucial homers too. I mean, they don't win that game without him most likely. That's pretty great. You know, we're all just waiting to see like, oh, can Yordon carry them in?

Starting point is 00:03:29 and Jordan just put this team on his shoulders and win a triple crown and win an MVP. No. He could just, you know, seed the spotlight to Lucas Spence for a night. Why not? And now as we enter play on Friday, the Astros and Rangers sit knotted and all knotted up, although there are tie-breaking situations that we might have to take into account later. But, yeah, like, it's a crucial win for them. and the wild card route is closed to one of these two teams,

Starting point is 00:04:01 so they will have to win it through the division. AL West or bust. And so we're all hyper-fixated on two pretty lousy teams when you get right down to it. So lousy, yeah. The record, if anything, oversells how good they are and how much they deserve to be playoff teams. And yet, when it gets down to this point, I think it really is more about just the suspense and the stakes and the proximity

Starting point is 00:04:25 and the closeness of the race. race. I mean, I'm conscious of the fact that these are not super teams we're watching, but I'm still pretty invested in this because everything else is seeding. And, you know, seeding matters and winning the Central and getting a buy. That matters a lot. So it's not just academic. It's not a formality, whether you win a wild card or win the Central. But it's a little less important than whether you win or you go home. So Lucas Spence steps up. It's a, a seven to five game and he drove in five of them, right? Because he he hit the three run shot in the second and then the second homer broke a four four tie and then the last one was just tacking on.

Starting point is 00:05:10 That was just an insurance run, but only a one run lead at that point. So crucial, a huge game. Just adjusted to expectations and prior performance to that point and postseason stakes. It's not as if he had been like raking in the minors. And it was just like, oh, just let him get up there. You know, he had some pop, certainly, but he was not exactly a candidate to hit three home runs. It's not like he was leading AAA in long balls or something like that. He, you know, had decent pop. But, again, very unlikely.

Starting point is 00:05:44 But that's what makes it so special. So it is a fun time of year. I have, however, seen some complaints about playoff formats. Complaints are pervasive right now. I should say and tease. We will have an interview. A little later on this episode, we will be talking to Sam Nichols, who goes by Sporty Dolphin online and has created an excellent baseball stat site.

Starting point is 00:06:10 For both MLB and the WPBL, we will primarily be talking about his WPPL site. But sportydolphin.com. We'll talk to him about how he got into the WPBL, how he programmed this site, how the league run environment being so different and also the sample being so small, complicated that task and how the community has rallied around. I still hope and am attempting to secure conversations with a player or two at some point. That would be nice. But this is a really fun chat and I have a few stat less in store as well.

Starting point is 00:06:46 But just wanted to address this because maybe on our first pod next week we can do a little playoff preview. But this is just sort of big picture. Everyone has gotten their takes out about the playoff format and what's wrong with it and how it could be better. And I've read a few of these pieces by writers I enjoy and like and in some cases know personally. So Mark Normandon wrote a piece for baseball prospectus. Headline, wild idea, playoff seating should reflect team quality. Bold, controversial, brave. Neil Payne at Neil Substack.

Starting point is 00:07:23 had a post headline, does baseball still need divisions to matter this much? And Mike Exceza at CBS Sports had a post why the current MLB playoff seating doesn't make sense and how to fix it. And I'm sure there are other similar takes out there. But the gist of it, they all sort of boil down to the same, I think, fairly valid point. And I don't want to fall into the trap of overindexing on this specific season. We've talked about that, how you can't just swing wildly and have a different playoff format and playoff field every year. And sometimes the standings just shake out a certain way. And that's just how the cookie crumbles.

Starting point is 00:08:05 And things don't work out perfectly, fairly and deservedly for everyone, arguably. But there do seem to be some overarching issues with the playoff format that maybe lend themselves to a little less than perfect. fairness, perhaps. And maybe I can sort of summarize and synthesize here. I'll just, I'll crib from Mike's piece at CBS Sports here. So basically, he notes, the raise, Red Sox, and Yankees will go through each other in the Wildcard series in ALDS, while one of the Astros Guardians are Rangers, and this was before the Blue Jays got eliminated.

Starting point is 00:08:47 And the Astros, if they make it, is guaranteed a spot in the ALCS. Yes, the Red Sox haven't locked up the number five seed yet. They should tank the rest of their games and fall into the number six seas. The number six seed has a much more favorable path. That's true. That's always a fun conversation. It's like your incentives at the end of the season, if you're in and then you're surveying your opponents. And you're saying, which of these teams do I actually want to play?

Starting point is 00:09:12 Maybe it would behoove me to have a worse seed. And then there's the question of if, say, the guardians in the White Sox go into some, Sunday and the AL Central is still hanging in the balance, do they pull out all the stops and try to win that one, knowing that they could perhaps hamstring themselves in the wildcard series if they really go for it and don't get that by? So there are a lot of interesting strategic considerations. But Mike notes from 2023 to 25, only twice did the worst division winner have a better record than the top wildcard team. and on two occasions the second wildcard team had a better record than the worst division winner. That will likely be the case again this season with the Yankees, Red Sox, and whatever happens with the AL Central and AL West races, it's a good year to be a mediocre team in the American League.

Starting point is 00:10:04 So that's what it basically boils down to is that there are better teams in the AL East that will not get buys, probably, and not to bring up any, you know, dumping on the AL Central, AL East supremacy kind of conversations here, but there's something to it, right? So, you know, these teams are playing for a buy and there are arguably better teams that cannot get a buy because they can't win the division. And as Mike notes, your rejoinder to that could just be, well, if you don't like it, win your division. but that's maybe not entirely in your control, or that's a tougher assignment for some teams than others. So the idea is, can there be a fair way to organize all of this that rewards the best teams,

Starting point is 00:10:55 whether you do away with divisions entirely or you just maybe diminish the importance of divisions, deprioritize divisions? So it's all about reseeding, either before the playoff start or after the wildcard series, do you think that things could be better? Big picture, not just this season, but more broadly. Sure.

Starting point is 00:11:19 I am open to the notion. I'm not motivated by the particular results of this year to do it, as we have discussed, and as you noted, I think that we, as a collective, tend to be a little too reactionary when it comes to proposing new formats as a result of, like, the person. particulars of any given year. I think these things tend to shake out and course correct as they need to. And I think that, you know, and I'm sure I'm about to get in the habit of saying really nasty things in general about Major League Baseball over the coming months. So I'll say something here that is positive, which is that I think that the league does a pretty good job of like being open to change as these things go. But no need to to look at one year and and sort of chicken little it

Starting point is 00:12:08 as it were having said that though i think that the notion of of reseeding either you know sort of stacking the the seeds based on pure record and sort of ignoring division entirely or doing it after the wild card round i'm open to that i could see the merits of that i don't tend to think it matters like that much because i think you know good teams get bounced all the time time for reasons that don't have anything to do with their seating and bad teams advance. And these things are, I think, mostly driven by sort of the randomness of October. But I think the idea of looking at each league and saying, well, just stack them by their record.

Starting point is 00:12:55 Like, yeah, that seems good. That seems right to me. I like divisions as a way of organizing the leagues. Yeah. And I don't know that if we were starting Major League Baseball from scratch today, that that would necessarily be something I cared about, but because we have the history of the league, even with teams having moved divisions and leagues and what have you, I think that it lends itself to rivalry that does sort of imbue narrative weight to games and series that I like. But I also

Starting point is 00:13:26 think that, you know, the way that things are organized now, you can end up with a sort of, not necessarily incentive, but a resting of on one's laurel. potentially, right, that you can sort of float through to future rounds in a way that isn't really commensurate with team quality necessarily. So I like the idea of receding. I think that makes a lot of sense, not because of 2026, but just because I think anything that we can do to inspire teams to view themselves within a broader competitive context and one that requires them to win as many games as possible is just good for baseball. So I'm all for that. I think that makes good sense.

Starting point is 00:14:10 Yeah, I think so. And again, cribbing from Mark here, he notes that whichever team doesn't win the Central will take on the AL-West's winner, which will also potentially be the first ever sub-500 division leader in the wild card round, and then the Central's winner and Rays will await the victors of those series. This isn't how it goes every year, but this was always the concern with postseason expansion and the three wild-card setup, and it's also not new. It's just a more extreme example of how goofy it can be.

Starting point is 00:14:38 The 2025 Red Sox won a wildcard and had a better record than the 2025 AL Central champs, Cleveland. The 2024 Orioles had a better record than the A.L. West champions and were one game behind the A.L. Central winners and third in the league and wins. But for seating purposes were fourth. In 2023, the third wildcard in the A.L. was the Blue Jays. Who, with 89 wins, outpaced the A.L. Central's winner, the twins by a pair of victories, but had to play two road games in the wildcard series against Minnesota and lost because of the division winners. inherent advantage. This is, I'm noticing a theme here. There's a lot of AL East team had to settle for worse positioning than AL Central despite being better than AL Central team.

Starting point is 00:15:20 So this is some sort of special dispensation for AL Central teams to give them a boost or something. I mean, if you think that there is some advantage to spreading the love a little bit in the playoffs and spreading it geographically, spreading it in terms of teams and actually helping, I don't know, competitive balance or trying to ensure that more teams get a shot or something. But then you are kind of acknowledging that you are cooking the books in favor of a weaker division, basically.

Starting point is 00:15:52 Anyway, Mark says there's always something, basically, and that something could be solved by just scrapping the rewards for division winners, no more automatic home field advantage, no more automatically being seated higher than a team with a better record, even if, say, A division winner has a negative run differential and sub-500 records, both of which seem like the outcome the AL West is going to give us this season.

Starting point is 00:16:13 Let division winners still exist. If the fourth place club in the AL East has a better record than the AL West's best, so be it, which again might happen this year, et cetera, et cetera. But letting the Rangers get some kind of reward beyond a postseason birth isn't the way simply seed the postseason teams by record and be done with it. The top two teams in each league still get a buy into the division series, but they don't have to be division winners for that to happen. If the second best record in the league belongs to a wildcar team, then enjoy the break.

Starting point is 00:16:41 Yep. I don't have a problem with that. I don't think it's not super radical. Now, I guess you could say slippery slope. If we do away with this award for winning a division, then why have divisions at all? Are we just going to go back to divisionless baseball? Which there's an argument for, I suppose. And we are probably going to get some kind of real.

Starting point is 00:17:04 alignment, if and when there's expansion, and that will be an opportunity to strip things down to the studs and build it up back the way that MLB wants to see it, or hopefully the fans want to see it without maybe being tied to tradition. There is also something nice about tradition. So I don't know. I'm kind of, I'm torn. I'm not necessarily anti-division, but I think I do like this middle ground of we don't have to do away with divisions, but we are giving them a little too much importance in this era where divisions don't really mean what they used to mean because you just have constant interleague play and you have more balanced schedules. And so your record in the division is not having as much of an impact on your record and your

Starting point is 00:17:53 playoff position. So then why still give it this primacy when it comes to determining the field and the buys? Right. it also seems like an important corrective to, you know, as Mark notes, we're never getting rid of the expanded fields, right? Like there's no way that the league is going to allow for that. I don't know. The players necessarily want it to go back to what it was either, right?

Starting point is 00:18:19 So like that that isn't strictly a league problem. But I think that, you know, this allows you to say, okay, you're going to have a bigger field. And with that comes the potential for teams that are less good. getting in there. So guard yourself structurally against those teams having too much of an advantage. And I realize that, you know, the worst division winner has to play in the wild card. So it's not like it doesn't matter what you're seated as now, right? Like within the division winners, that still matters. But it maybe doesn't matter enough. So I think that if you have a really

Starting point is 00:18:58 good record and you just happen to play in a rockam-sockham division, you should still be rewarded for being a better caliber of team potentially than the worst division winner. Now, it's not a perfect foil, right? Because you might be the best team in a crummy division and play against really lousy teams and still rack up a big win total, right? That potential exists. It's maybe mitigated somewhat by the fact that you play fewer games in division than you. You're a really lousy teams in division than you used to. You have more interleague play. So there are other structural safeguards, but like

Starting point is 00:19:33 you might just be a team that has a really good record because everyone you play against the most is really crummy. Well, okay, fine. But in general, I think that if you reseed, you're going to take care of the worst parts of this, which is what we may well end up

Starting point is 00:19:49 with here, right? Where you have just like a real, I'm going to swear, a real shi-ass ass A.L. Westwooder. And then like, you know, what are you going to do? You really, you don't, you don't feel like you should get to host a wild card series. Come on. If you asked, they're not going to say it because they're like, well, we rallied a bite, but, like, if you were to ask anyone in either of those Texas clubhouses, like, hey, do you think you should get to host a wildcard series?

Starting point is 00:20:21 And you gave them, like, true serum that worked, they'd be like, no. Like, of course not. Like, we're a bad baseball team. We don't know why we're here either, you know? Yeah. Home field advantage hasn't actually helped that much, or I guess it's impossible to say whether it has helped or not, but it has not been decisive.

Starting point is 00:20:40 Joe Sheen had this note, home field advantage hasn't meant all that much. Teams with it are seven and nine in the first round since 2022, and it's a weak factor in baseball as a whole. So, yeah, I do think competitively speaking, it's not that big a deal, but it is a big deal when it comes. to your fans feeling like you actually made the playoffs.

Starting point is 00:21:00 Right. And at least some of them had the opportunity to see a home game and, you know, see the team play in October or at least late September before it gets eliminated. So on that level, it matters. Right. It matters a lot for the fans. You know, I agree with you that particularly in a three game series, is it going to be decisive? Does it matter that much? I mean, probably not.

Starting point is 00:21:24 but your fans get to see your guys at home and are guaranteed a home series, that matters. It isn't necessarily true for other teams. Yeah, yeah. And to hammer home that this isn't just a single year issue, Neil crunched the numbers as is his way, and he found, well, he writes, it has also long been pointed out by stathead types

Starting point is 00:21:48 that if you're going to award wildcard births, the best of those teams will usually be better than the worst division winners. This is because the wildcard pool is a larger group of teams, the entire league, in fact, save for the division winners, while the pool for a division is much smaller, and the worst winner math is further selecting for the weakest champion produced by one of three isolated groups.

Starting point is 00:22:09 We can see this effect in action if we look at how often the highest ranked wildcard team is superior by record or especially by ELO rating to the lowest ranked division champ. And he finds that since 1995, the best wildcard team has the better record than the worst division winner 55% of the time, with another 10% of league years settling as ties. Beyond that, the best wildcard team by Elo ends the regular season rated higher than the worst division winner more than 83% of the time.

Starting point is 00:22:41 In other words, this is a system custom built to create weird logical mismatches between seating and team quality. So MLB is aware of that and has chosen. in that and has persisted. And so I think some of the criticism that comes its way is justified. And I did recall that Rob Manfred had at least acknowledged the possibility that they might change something. This was a few years ago.

Starting point is 00:23:08 This was the 2023 postseason, which was one of the ones that got everyone up in arms because worst teams eliminated better teams. I mean, worse regular season teams eliminated, better regular season teams. I think, Khrusha should have pitch better. What can I say? In short series. He just was really bad. So what do you want for me?

Starting point is 00:23:28 There was enough discontent and backlash that October that Manfred did say, and I'm quoting from an evandrelic athletic piece here, it will at least motivate a conversation about whether we have it right. This was Manfred speaking prior to game one of that world series. I'm sure that conversation will take place in the postseason. Enough has been written. said that we have to think about it and talk about it. My own view on this is that our teams play really hard all year long to get into the playoffs, but one of the greatest things about the

Starting point is 00:24:00 playoffs in baseball is anybody can win. And, you know, it's about the competition that takes place in the postseason. I don't think what happened this year is all that out of line with history. So even confronted with the prospect of a Rangers Diamondbacks ratings debacle, I guess he was sticking to his guns that he didn't mind the format. So, I don't know if those conversations took place. I don't really remember a follow-up about that, but that seems to have died on the vine. And then, well, everyone just got mad about the Dodgers,

Starting point is 00:24:34 mostly after that. So Warren is mad about the playoff format as about other institutional issues with the sport. So I don't know. If we get some seemingly superior regular season teams eliminated again this year because of, or in part, perhaps, because of seating and buys and such, then I would expect this refrain to continue. I guess it's just like,

Starting point is 00:25:01 is there a constituency on the other side of the issue? Aside from AL Central fans, I guess. Like, what's the argument other than just maybe a greater variety of teams or something, but in terms of just fairness or, you know, based on the regular season mapping onto the postseason seeding. I want to clarify. I'm not making this argument.

Starting point is 00:25:29 I'm on the right side of this issue. I do love it when the commissioner is clearly like, those dumb writers writing their dumb word. I've got to talk about their dumb word. I hate doing that. Then he goes through the PR training and it comes out with a statement that you just read instead. These dumb dumb writers, I hate these dumb writers. maybe the concern would be that we would just end up with too much like Yankees Red Sox more often than not, right?

Starting point is 00:25:57 Like maybe that would be the concern that particularly on the AL side where the concentration of really good teams does seem to very consistently reside in the East that you would just end up with two AL East heavy field advancing. But to that I would say, well, then the other team should play better. You know what I mean? Like if you know that that's what the seating arrangement is going to be, hopefully that is providing an incentive for you to want to win more games and not be satisfied with, you know, a mid to high 80s win total, right? That you really want to push in and try to secure that top spot because, you know, you can't count on the division sparing you from having to go on the road in the first round. So, you know, I view that as one of the upsides of it, which, you know, I view that as one of the upsides of it, which, is that it does introduce this new incentive into the structure. But that might be the thing that annoys people.

Starting point is 00:26:53 It's like, oh, my God, we just got done having to watch these ALEs teams on Sunday night baseball all the time. And now you're telling me that they're automatically pushed through to the division room. Like, that might be the argument, I guess. Okay. Okay. Well, I will hear arguments then to the contrary, whether it's that one or another one.

Starting point is 00:27:13 But in principle, I think I do like the idea of. reseeding or deprioritizing division somewhat just because we already have, really, except for this relic of division still being super important. And it just feels a little disproportionate or anachronistic or something. That'll do it for the free preview of today's Effectively Wild. Thank you for listening. If you'd like to listen on and hear whatever wisdom and wit await, we would love to have you. You can visit patreon.com slash Effectively Wild to access the rest of episode and plenty of other exclusive content weekly subscriber only episodes monthly bonus shows our discord group our live streams either way we will be back with another episode soon which will

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Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2536: Wrong Division

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