Major League Baseball's Parity Problem

by Chris Gilligan • October 18, 2021

A few years ago, before trash can sign-stealing, sticky stuff, and pandemic-shortened seasons, one of Major League Baseball’s hottest topics was the threat of tanking — that teams may be incentivized to endure seasons of well-below-average performance in order to secure high draft picks, and that, in turn, their fans would be subject to these periods of less-than-competitive baseball.

Of course, the more some teams are losing, the more others are winning. From 2017-21, 13 teams reached 100 wins, after just five had reached that mark in the previous 11 seasons. 11 teams lost 100 or more games in just the last three full seasons.

So how pronounced is the disparity? To illustrate the spread, I used Baseball-Reference.com standings records to look at the daily standings for each year since the 1994 strike, visualizing the standard deviation in team wins as teams became more disparate throughout the seasons. I found that the last two full seasons represented the highest team win disparities since the 1994 strike, with the 2019 season marking a record disparity in that time (16.6 wins). After a period of relative parity from the mid-2000s through the mid 2010s, the league-wide disparity increased each year from 2014-19.

What does this type of disparity actually look like in the standings? In 2019, for instance, the average non-first place team finished a staggering 24.8 games out of first place, up dramatically from 15.0 just four years prior in 2015. At the July 31st trade deadline in 2019, just two of baseball’s six divisions were led by any less than 6.5 games. By comparison, at the 2014 deadline, baseball’s largest division lead was 4.0 games.

For a league that wants its fans to buy tickets and tune in nearly daily for six months, an increase in disparity is a daunting sign that more of MLB's nearly 2,500 games of the regular season might be played non-competitively, between teams whose postseason fates are already clear. In the visual above, it is both the deepness of the reds reflected at the end of recent years that should be concerning, and also the yellows and oranges we are starting to see earlier in the summer. The earlier the league spreads out, the earlier we can expect the interest from certain teams' fans to wane.