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March 9, 2010

Prospectus Hit and Run

NL Central Competitive Ecology

by Jay Jaffe

The great Red Smith wasn't a fan of baseball's six division/two Wild Card format. Though he died 12 years before the plan came to fruition, he saw it coming as early as 1978, when he wrote that, "[T]he powers, principalities, and archangels of the game are considering a plan to restructure the major leagues so that almost every team can be a winner, or look like one."

One wonders what Smith might have made of the six-deep NL Central, where three teams—the Brewers, Pirates and Reds—have combined to make just two postseason appearances since 1992, and just one since 1995. The division has been the game's weakest over the past three years; its teams' cumulative winning percentage of .490 is in a virtual tie for last with their AL Central counterparts, but their .480 Hit List Factor is 10 points lower. For the timespan in question, they're the game's basement dwellers, and at the rate some of these teams are going, it might take even more restructuring for them to climb above ground again.

How much the Central's lowly standing has to do with being the game's only six-team division is open for debate, particularly when one of its six franchises (the Pirates, yeearrgh) has failed to produce a winning team since 1992, a string of futility unmatched in professional sports. Excise the Pirates' 197-288 record from 2007 through 2009 and the division comes in with a respectable .507 winning percentage over the past three years, but that still includes those five teams' records (a combined 145-92, a .611 winning percentage) against the hapless Bucs. Do away with that as well and you're left with a .495 winning percentage—enough to climb past the AL Central and the NL East in the three-year standings, but hardly an assertion of dominance.

As with the AL Central, money only goes so far in explaining the division's lowly rank. The grim economy of the past two years has hit the midwest disproportionately hard, and it doesn't help that the Pirates and Brewers operate in two of the majors' smallest markets, with both the Cardinals and the Reds in the lower third as well according to Nate Silver's attendance market model. But what really hampers the division is its poor internal talent development. No division receives less from their low-salaried and largely homegrown resources in terms of either actual WARP or as a percentage of total WARP, thus leading to a higher cost per marginal win ($2.6 million) than any division but the AL East over the past three years.

Again with the boilerplate, for those who were seated during intermission... This series builds on the recent work of colleagues Shawn Hoffman, Matt Swartz and Jeff Euston as well as older work by Keith Woolner, Doug Pappas, Nate Silver, and Neil deMause. Please see Keith's introduction to the concept of competitive ecology, the late, great Doug's introduction to Marginal Payroll Dollars per Marginal Win, Neil's application of Nate's marginal-dollars-per-additional-win curve, Matt Swartz's work on service-time contracts and wins, and Jeff's fantastic Cot's Baseball Contracts.