Strawmen Even in Baseball Writing

Jayson Stark is a pretty good baseball writer for ESPN, prolific and with a good understanding of the game.  That is, of course, with one exception that gets trotted out every year at this time and unfortunately displays his inability to avoid "going all strawman" on his readership.

You can see the 2015 version here; and I can save you the time by telling you that it his annual rationalization that baseball has better parity than the NFL (and therefore does not require a salary cap such as exists in the NFL).  Unfortunately, he does what good writers making a case or a point should never, ever do -- he pre-defines his parameters, using those which would help to make his case.

In Stark's case, he uses a comparison of how frequently top teams make the Super Bowl (or win it) against Major League Baseball teams' propensity to make or win the World Series, neither of which involve sample sizes worthy of being used in any argument.  So let's begin ripping his article apart step by step.

Let's start with the NFL.  Stark is thrilled about the Patriots and Seahawks being in the Super Bowl because, in his words, "... they’re making this way too easy for me to expose the fiction that permeates the popular wisdom about these two sports."  That "fiction", of course, in his view, is about parity in the NFL, and that the parity is based on equivalent team salary structures (which MLB does not have, given the huge disparity between the Yankees/Dodgers and everyone else, and the number of small-market teams barely sniffing the playoffs every ten years or so).

Here's the strawman part of Stark's case -- parity is about opportunity, not about result.  Let me say that clearly: The NFL has parity, in that each team has the opportunity to build a successful franchise and a semi-dynastic, successful team, because its resources are the same as each other team.  It is a pure meritocracy.

Stark's mistake is in looking at the result, which is that the NFL is indeed dominated by a subset of its teams, without celebrating the reason for that: In the NFL, unlike MLB, sustained success is, as it should be, a function of the quality of the organization, not the ability to outbid the other teams for the best players.  I feel like Jayson Stark needs to read that sentence 50 times.  If he did, he would finally get it -- the NFL has actually succeeded at parity, where Baseball has not (and I'm a much bigger baseball fan than pro football), because sustained excellence in the NFL, measured in wins per season over years, comes from good drafting, good salary management, good trading, good field leadership -- all the things that you want to be the reasons for success!

The Patriots and Seahawks organizations, like those of consistently successful teams such as the Broncos, Packers and a few others, do all those things well -- better than their rivals -- with stable, high-quality ownership and management.  Their down years are the exception.  The Raiders, Jets, Redskins, Browns and a few others have been bottom-feeders for the same reason in reverse, while improved organizations (the Lions for one) show improvement reliably on the field.  In baseball, only a few organizations are so competent (Oakland) as to overcome their relative poverty, and only a few (Mets, Phillies) so incompetent as to negate their high payrolls.

That is what you want as the factors of success or failure, not revenues.  If the consistently winning teams in the NFL are the best organizations, then bang, you have what you want, don't mess with it.

Baseball is not like that, almost at all, but Stark uses all the wrong metrics.  If you were to sit down with no data in front of you, and ask yourself what criteria you would use to decide whether there was parity in MLB, you sure wouldn't look at World Series winners any more than you'd assess parity in the NFL primarily on Super Bowls.  The playoffs, once you get there, are a crapshoot and far too small a sample size to evaluate.

No, you would look at a solid statistical analysis of wins and losses over a long period -- 15 years or so -- for a correlation with team salaries.  You could look at team revenues, but they're the cause of the salary disparity; the disparity is actually the effect which affects the salaries and thus the composition of the team on the field, so you need to look at salaries.  In fact, I would probably look at won-loss data only from April to August, because the pennant race shapes September and there are a lot of artificial losing streaks and skewed win-loss records in September from late call-ups by teams out of the race.

Surprisingly, I don't know the answer to that correlation, because I haven't done it.  But more importantly, Jayson Stark didn't do it either and, unlike me, he was paid to write that article!  His criteria for parity are, in fact, laughable, cherry-picked for his thesis.  For example, here are all of them:

- Only two MLB teams have repeated as World Series winners in 30 years
- Only the Yankees' six WS appearances 1996-2003 constitute a streak of that kind in 50 years
- All but 6 MLB teams have made the WS in the past 30 years and 17 have won one
- 30 of the 45 MLB playoff teams the past six years had not made the playoffs the previous year
- It was 2005 the last time a majority of playoff teams repeated from the previous year
- In the last ten years, 27 of 30 MLB teams have made the playoffs
- Five of nine teams with the highest 2014 payrolls missed the playoffs; three finished last
- Of the teams with the 12 highest Opening Day payrolls, only one of them won a 2014 playoff series

Take a look at that, because that is the totality of Stark's argument as far as MLB is concerned, and none of those factors is a useful measurement of the actual influence of payroll disparity in baseball; you would not use any of them unless you had pre-decided your conclusion and looked for statistics to support it.

In other words, first, he mistakenly defines "parity" in terms of outcome (in other words, that disparity should not happen at all, and all teams should win or lose equally over time, which is not "parity").  Second, he goes searching for data to support his thesis, rather than first figuring out the data to analyze and only then making his inferences.

I challenge Stark to do that analysis of 15 years of won-loss records from April through August and correlate the data against team payrolls (dollars, not rankings).  I have no idea what answer will come out (although I strongly suspect that the Yankees' lead in payroll in all years but 2014 will correlate with lots more wins than the average opponent, and that Oakland will be the outlier in the data).

But if it comes out that there's not much correlation, I'll be the first one to say "Mr. Stark, I was wrong."  I just don't expect I'll have to.

Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton