Baseball with Matt is back.
And so is baseball parity.
Has anyone noticed that our league’s standings, with about three weeks left in the season, are unfathomably close? As of the morning of Saturday, September 7, 2024, the Brewers lead Major League Baseball in run differential at +134. Just last year, on the same date, four teams had higher run differentials, and three of those four had a run differential of at least +160. In 2024, the Phillies are leading the league in win-loss record, but are only on pace for 98 wins, which would mark the first time since 2014 that MLB won’t have a 100-win team in a season. The 2014 World Series featured two Wild Card teams, the Giants and Royals. The 2024 playoff teams are only separated by nine games. Do you see where I’m going here?
Parity has become an interesting talking point in the American sports zeitgeist, thanks to expanded playoffs. Why add more teams to a postseason when they’re just going to lose in the first round? The NBA has only seen two eighth seeds reach the NBA Finals since their playoffs expanded (not including the play-in round), while the NFL has only had three sixth seeds win the Super Bowl. The NHL, because of the nature of how the game is played and managed, has seen a lot more wacky finishes to its Stanley Cup playoffs in years past. And then there’s baseball, the American sport with the smallest playoff pool with enough playoff upsets to be captivating but not unfair. In 2022, the first year each league expanded to six playoff teams, the sixth-seed Phillies won the NL pennant. Last year, the Rangers and Diamondbacks faced off in another all-Wild Card World Series. So, it seems as if the expanded playoffs are doing their job, including teams that otherwise wouldn’t have had the chance to compete for the Commissioner’s Trophy while still giving the top seeds (i.e. the 2022 Astros) a rightful chance at the top prize.
It's looking like this year will be like the previous two years in terms of Wild Card madness, with an extra layer of whimsy to go along with it. And by whimsy, I mean carnage, because with the number of unknowns on each playoff team, we could see a vicious bloodbath come October. Each league is a total toss-up in terms of predicting the pennant winners. In the AL, the Orioles and Yankees seem like the top two teams, but a surprisingly strong AL Central and a resurgent Astros could throw a wrench into either the O’s or Yanks plans. In the NL, the division-winners are locked up, but each are trailed by some bloodthirsty Wild Card teams with potent weapons on either side of home plate.
All of this is to say that this season is not like the early part of the post-Cubs championship era. Gone is the dominance of the division winners, like the Yankees, Guardians/Twins, and Astros in the AL and the Braves, Brewers/Cardinals, and Dodgers of the NL. Every team has holes, and if not for a couple of lucky breaks, the league could be even closer than it is right now. It’s an anomaly of a season so far, and it’s sure to be a crazy September and October. Halloween is looking extra spooky this year, folks. Buckle up.
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