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November 1, 2007

Prospectus Hit and Run

Dis and Data

by Jay Jaffe

First things first: the World Series. As if it weren't totally apparent by the Red Sox's four-game sweep, the best team won, not just the best team in the series but the best team in baseball, as measured in a few different ways. The Red Sox outscored their opponents by 210 runs in the regular season, 19 more than the Yankees did theirs, and over 100 ahead of everybody else. They projected to win a major league-best 103.1 games by their third-order Pythagorean winning percentage, 7.6 more than any other team, and topped the season-ending Hit List, which they'd led since early May.

Surprisingly—or perhaps not, if you bear Billy Beane's most famous quotation in mind—a team in the Red Sox's position converts their regular season superiority into a World Championship less often than you think, and you can blame those nefarious short playoff series. Since division play began in 1969 (but excluding the 1994 strike year), the team with the best run differential has won just nine out of 37 times:

1970 Orioles
1975 Reds
1981 Dodgers
1984 Tigers
1986 Mets
1989 A's
1998 Yankees
2002 Angels
2007 Red Sox

All of those teams led the majors in third-order wins as well, and wound up topping their respective retroactively compiled year-end Hit Lists. The 1978 Yankees met those latter two criteria, but finished third in run differential, a single run behind the Dodgers and Brewers. Rightfully, they belong with the above nine, bringing our "the best team won" total to 10 out of 37 times.

By comparison, before division play, back in the days when pitchers went nine innings and a pennant race meant a pennant race, the Hit List leader won the World Series 40 out of 65 times (remember, the Series started in 1903 but didn't happen in 1904). The run differential leader won it 44 times, as did the third-order wins leader, though those latter two lists aren't identical.

Subdividing the division era into the two-tiered and three-tiered playoffs, and ditching 1981 for its historically anomalous postseason format, we find that the Hit List leader won six out of 23 times (26.1 percent) in the two-tiered era, and three out of 13 times (23.1 percent) in the three-tiered era. Going by run differentials excludes the 1978 Yankees, trimming the two-tiered total to five out of 23. Going by third-order wins takes us in the other direction by adding the 1983 Orioles to this very short list; they finished second on that year's Hit List, .003 behind the White Sox in Hit List factor, and only three runs behind the Winning Uglies in run differential.