Viaducts | Baseball prospectus

Translated by Carlos Marcano

For a moment we could imagine that this year would be different. It’s been a very good season for the central divisions, in terms of visibility and star power. Pull Skubal It seems overwhelmingly likely that he will win his second trophy Cy Jong in a row in the American League. In the first half, Pete Crow Armstrong It looked like he could be the 2025 key player for the entire League. In the second, the Brewers got hot (and stayed hot longer) than any other team in all of baseball during the year. The relevance was tantalizingly close to the ten teams that make up baseball’s “minimized zone.” But again, he avoided them.

One consequence of our hopelessly championship-obsessed sports culture is that if you don’t win the World Series, you’re treated like some kind of failure. If you don’t even appear in the Series, forget success or failure: you barely existed that year. If you don’t make it to the League Championship Series (when all games are played at least in the late afternoon or evening and the national television audience starts to find you), you don’t really leave an impression. You and I, dear reader, know better than to approach the daily spring and summer game this way, judging by a few exhibition games scattered throughout the fall, but we are a terrible minority. debt Michael Jordanor Tom Brady, or the guys yelling on TV, but somehow this is the world we live in.

In this world, core differences have become wildly irrelevant to the national conversation about baseball. That’s because all ten of those teams have gone home before the World Series nine years in a row. There has been some small but significant progress lately, with the Brewers reaching the NLCS this year and the Guardians reaching the ALCS last year, but neither team performed particularly strongly in those series. Before them, the 2019 Cardinals were the last team from any of the Central groups to advance to the LCS round. Also They had a terrible performance and were decisively defeated by the Nationals. In 2022 and 2023 combined, only one Central team (the 2023 Twins) reached the Division Series. As the name of that round implies, an entire division shouldn’t actually be eliminated by the time it starts, but that has been our reality.

There is no doubt that these dynamics are fueling the conversation (often oversimplified or distorted, but certainly relevant) about the state of the economy and the looming labor dispute. There are many fans who feel that the Brewers, Cardinals and Royals really can’t keep up with the aggressive spending of the Dodgers, Mets, Yankees and Phillies. However, there are almost as many people who believe that the Pirates, Twins, White Sox and Cubs (each in their own way) exemplify the real problems with the sport’s competitive balance: that some owners are not investing as much in their payrolls as they can and should. As is often the case, both sides are partly right and partly (and stubbornly) wrong.

Playing post-season matches (especially at home) has become an important source of additional income, especially if a series exceeds the minimum number of matches. The Dodgers have played just one game above the minimum through three rounds, but since hosting six of the 10 games they’ve played (which includes six games with parking, concessions and merchandise sales), they’re already perhaps $20 million better off. Reaching the postseason gives a team more liquidity heading into the offseason. Raise your income floor for the next season. Playing well into October could be worth up to $100 million, if a team plays a handful of games above the minimum in the late rounds (that is, the games above the minimum for which owners earn and distribute the majority of box office revenue) and achieves something that resonates with its fan base in a lasting way.

The new postseason format does not explicitly favor teams in the Eastern and Western divisions, but in the early years we saw significant carryover of the influence of the old format, which did not provide the same added value to finishing with one of the top two records in the league as the new one. That (in addition to the inherent revenue differences based on market size) led to more postseason berths for teams in the Eastern and Western divisions, and deeper advancement for those teams. A feedback loop began. The rich have gotten richer, while the poor have gotten poorer.

The actual transfer of wealth created by a few extra postseason games (and a few million extra playoff dollars) flowing to the shores has relatively little impact, but because fans (at all levels of seriousness, but especially that free-spending casual fan, whose demand for the product is more elastic than most) give so much weight to the postseason, a snowball effect occurs. There is a real difference in earning (and therefore spending) power between the play-off ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’, but that means there is a huge opportunity for a core team if it can break through and become a regular in the second half of October too. It’s not an excuse not to spend; There should be an incentive to spend money more aggressively than anyone else in the power plants.

In the meantime, however, there is a sense of fundamental inequality and imbalance between the contenders on each coast (plus Texas) and those in the middle of the country, a feeling that isn’t entirely fair to the latter group of teams, nor to their fans. To too many baseball fans and football pundits voicing their opinions on ESPN, it will seem as if the Brewers’ breakout season was just a matter of taking advantage of weak competition; that Skubal won’t really play with the bigs until he’s traded to the Mets or Dodgers; and that the season of the revival of Byron Buxton It didn’t matter. We’ll continue to have crazy debates about whether José Ramírez is underrated, because for an unfortunate number of observers, Ramírez’s 190 postseason appearances don’t count.

The World Series was born as an exhibition to increase distribution. It made sense for it to develop into a decisive match for an important championship in the coming decades. Now, though, it’s the final stage of a four-tiered tournament tied to the end of a regular season that lasts nearly eight times longer than the maximum length of a team’s playoffs. It has never made more sense to make the Series the alpha and the omega, but that is what it has become. For two entire divisions excluded from that showcase for nine consecutive years, that’s more than bad news: it’s an existential crisis.