New home-field rules? Come on, baseball, you can do better
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Until 2003, the leagues alternated the advantage, which is fair enough if you believe random is a marker of best practice. Then came the infamous 2002 All-Star Game tie and, in what may been a teensy-weensy bit of overreaction, baseball decided to give the home-field edge in the Series to the league that won the All-Star Game. That edict was miraculously followed all the way through the 2016 season and postseason, though the All-Star Game itself continued to be run as if it were actually what it is: an exhibition.
Finally, that era is done. One of the less controversial aspects of the new collective bargaining agreement is the one that detached World Series home-field advantage from the All-Star Game. A few people grumbled over the return of sanity, but only a few. Home field matters, though it may not be for precisely the reasons you might think, and it shouldn't be determined by an everybody-gets-to-play game featuring 196 or so of the biggest stars in baseball.
Going to overall record was a logical next step, one that on the surface few will argue over. It's an incremental, easy step to take, one that you'd expect after something as extreme as the All-Star Game tie-in. But it's not completely a problem solver, and chances are we'll have a few chances to rue the occasional unfairness inherent in the new rule over the next five years.
Last season, by won-loss record, the Chicago Cubs were 8 1/2 games better than every other team in the majors. By Pythagorean record -- the projected won-loss record based on run differential -- the Cubs were 9 1/2 games ahead of the field, suggesting their mark was no fluke. Chicago was like Secretariat in 1973 or Usain Bolt any number of times. No matter what adjustments you want to make for context, the Cubs lapped the field. That sort of clarity is unusual.
If the Cubs had been a bit less dominant, their best-in-the-majors record would have been a less convincing argument for World Series home field. Take a look at this table of 2016 relative power rankings sorted by strength of schedule. Notice how almost all the American League teams are at the top and all the National League teams at the bottom.
In interleague play last season, AL teams whomped their NL brethren to the tune of 165 to 135, a 55 percent clip. That almost entirely explains the spread in strength of schedule. Now, let's look at the composite records by division, with the records of the first-place teams and all interleague games removed:
AL East -- .502
AL West -- .481
NL Central -- .480
NL West -- .477
NL East -- .473
AL Central -- .466
That's a really big spread. In a season with the sort of disparity between the leagues that we've had in recent years, you may get a league champion with an artificially exaggerated record, which may or may not be exacerbated by the interleague disparity between divisions. Is it really fair to declare that one team has the "best" record when it's only a handful of games ahead of another team that played a mostly different, and possible superior, group of opponents?
The new rule for awarding World Series home field is an improvement, but it's not ideal. In five years, when the CBA is next up for renegotiation, we can do better. What are our options?
1. Team interleague record: Probably not. For one thing, it's a small sample size -- teams play just 20 interleague games apiece. And many years, the World Series combatants won't have played any common interleague opponents.
2. League interleague record: There's more competitive integrity to this idea than using the All-Star game. At least within each interleague matchup, you know both teams are actually playing to win. But how much impact should a Rays-Marlins regular-season series have on a Cubs-Indians World Series? It's awkward. And, besides, it's also a reaction to a trend. There is no obvious structural reason why the AL should be better than the NL, or vice versa. Theoretically, they should be well-balanced.
3. League interleague adjustment: This is a more sophisticated approach. You use the teams' overall record, but you adjust it for how the leagues fare against each other in interleague play. In a season like 2016, when the results so heavily leaned toward the AL, the adjustment would be quite large. Not enough to make up the Cubs' 8 1/2 game edge on the Rangers, but enough to flip things in other years. This adjustment should be simple enough to be displayed on the daily standings just to keep things as transparent as possible.
4. Record against other playoff teams: Maybe we want to award home field on the basis of performance against playoff-worthy teams. Two problems make this a likely nonstarter: small sample sizes and timing. We don't know the playoff teams until the end of the season, and that makes it hard to track this race in the daily standings. At the same time, it might add some luster to a late-season matchup between likely playoff teams when one of them has already clinched a seed, but not World Series home field.
5. Colley Matrix method:?You're judged by how your opponents did against their opponents. Or something like that. Simple in theory, but really complicated in execution. Alas, that latter point is probably the deal killer. Again, we want this to be something people can follow and comprehend from basic standings.
6. Record against .500 teams: In terms of clarity and large-enough-sample size, this is a good option. There are a lot of years when teams rack up lofty records by beating up on bottom-feeders. An example: The 2015 Mets went to the World Series despite going 28-38 against teams over .500. Of the 40 teams to play in the World Series over the last 20 years, 13 have finished under .500 against winning teams. Theoretically, this occurs because of randomness and the strength of schedule factors we want to iron out.
Most years, the teams with the best records against .500 teams are not coincidentally the teams with the best records overall, but not always. Last season, the Cubs had a robust .586 winning percentage against other winning teams, but that was just the second-best mark in baseball. Texas was .648 against .500 teams last season. We didn't say this was a metric that predicted postseason success. But it does eliminate team performance against the chattel that occupies teams' schedules to disparate degrees.
If you used this last option as the home-field decider, here is how the last 20 years would have looked:
First, you can see that using the All-Star winner awarded the home field to the wrong team too often, but it could have been worse. Also, most seasons, you get the same answer whether you're looking at overall record or just record versus .500 teams. But when there is a difference, the middle column seems to be an improvement. You smooth out some of the scheduling disparities without using something as cumbersome as a strength-of-schedule adjustment, or some other formula that would confuse a lot of people when they stare at the standings on their tablets or in their newspapers.
In any event, baseball deserves credit for making progress on this issue, which may seem minor until Game 1 of the last series of the season, when all of a sudden it seems really important. We've got five years to toss around ideas, because while progress is good, more progress is even better.
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