American League Schedule

One of baseball’s great conceits is that everyone has an equal chance in March. This basic idea drives an entire subset of the games internal mythologies. From metaphor heavy verse regarding the rebirth of spring to pseudo-philosophical ruminations about the passing of seasons to labor-war machinations dressed up as "competitive balance" one is hard-pressed to find a more deeply imbedded or highly treasured notion within the game. The basic notion that everyone has an equal chance at the pennant, should only the kids come through, or the veterans squeeze out one more good year, or Lady Luck smile kindly on but a couple of pivotal bounces, is the very heart of the game, in fact. It is this notion, this hope, which drives hot stove leagues, sports-talk radio and debate friendly websites with well-designed news links. It is this hope that interrupts the deep hibernations brought on by the NBA Playoffs and brings us all crawling back into the terrible sunlight every spring.

"It burns us. It burnsssss!"

Um, where was I? Oh yeah, fairness, equality, the idea that every team starts off in the same starting blocks come March 31. Competitive balance and the like, complete with attendant heralds and coronets. The problem is this though. It’s all a crock of foul smelling goat cheese. The idea that every team starts out on even footing is just a bunch of neo-Romantic idealistic nonsense, really, and has been since at least 1994. There is very little chance that your favorite team really has an absolutely equal chance at the pennant as does one or two of its competitors. In fact, you probably root for one of the many teams that start the season a couple or three games back.

It all comes down to scheduling and math. There are 14 teams in the American league. There are 16 teams in the National League. Each of these teams plays an unbalanced schedule within its own league, and then just for fun and an extra million or two in gate, they play a few series with teams in the other league. All of this sounds fine and good in the marketing meetings, but when you start hacking out the actual game schedules you run into a few nasty surprises. Like six teams in the NL Central and five in the other two divisions. And that funky four-team mini-division they have out in the AL West. And how to match up interleague games and still get those cash-cow gate receipts from the New York - New York series every year. Somewhere, a poorly paid MLB intern still has a headache from this mess.

College football has a series of computers designed to calculate the effect of schedule strength. The NFL intentionally buttercups the weaker teams’ upcoming schedules in order to make the league look more balanced. MLB, on the other hand, just throws teams out there and hopes fans won’t notice.

But you do notice. Because you’re a smart monkey, and you’re quick with the math, and you realize that no matter how hard you try, you can’t make a five team division "match up" with a four team division, no how, no way. It’s called unbalanced for a reason, after all, and now you’re all obsessed with exactly how unbalanced it is. Is it just a wee bit unbalanced, like your uncle Cleve and his ant farm collections, or is it bi-polar unbalanced, like Dave Nieporent on a politics kick? These questions plague you at night; they haunt you in your sleep. You wake up in the pre-dawn chill in cold sweats, terrified and alone and thinking of irrational numbers as they relate to Brewers-Twins midsummer series.

No one should ever wake up thinking about the Brewers.

What I did to avoid the nightmares is this. I copied every team’s schedule from the web and dumped them into Excel. I then went through and assigned every team a value, which I named the S/ Value. The S/ Value is a modifier based on how likely that team is to compete for a World Series title in 2003. This modifier is a very complex measure arrived at by an incredibly complicated set of sabremetric analysis tools that you, as a lay reader, would never understand. Basically, I went through the list of major league teams and said "Ladies and gentlemen, your world champion _____________" out loud. If that sounded reasonable to my wife and me, I gave that team a 3. If it sounded vaguely reasonable to me, "because with the Wild Card it doesn’t take the ’27 Yankees", but the wife muted Buffy and looked at me funny, I gave it a 2. If neither she nor I could come up scenario short of "what if all the other teams got the Plague", I gave them a 1. In the instance that I couldn’t even get "Ladies and gentlemen, your world champion Tampa Bay Devil Rays" out without both she and I guffawing, I gave the team a 0. It’s all very complicated and scientific.

This gave me a very crude tool by which to measure schedule strength. If a team had to play the Yankees 19 times, their S/ score is 57. If they have to play the Brewers 19 times, it’s 19, etc., et al. The following is the list of teams, sorted by S/ values. Yes, you may quibble with the details, but if anyone seriously suggests that the Royals have a shot at the World Series next year, I’m going to invade a sovereign nation just because I can.

After I had assigned a value to each team, I went through and lined up each division against itself. My premise here is that each team really only competes against their inter-divisional rivals. While they play non-divisional opponents all the time, they only compete with teams in their own division. This is because all any given team needs to do to get into the post-season (and thus have a reasonable chance at the World Series) is to win their division. Yes, they can get in via the wild card (and I’ll run that analysis after I finish writing this one up), but the easiest and surest route to the playoffs is by winning the division. Accordingly, I removed all divisional games from any given schedule. Tampa Bay doesn’t get extra sympathy points for having to play the Red Sox and Yankees. That’s their job, and it’s silly to penalize a team for not "playing itself." I then went through and found any opponents common to all teams in the division and removed those. If everyone gets to beat all holy hell out of the Brewers, there’s no need to account for those games. What I was left with is the portion of a team’s schedule that is unique to them (within their divisions). All that was left at that point was to assign points, do the math and parse the results.

I’ll start with the AL West, because that’s where the current World Series champions live. The results:

In the AL West, Seattle has a pretty clear advantage. Due to "floating" interleague opponents, the division squares off against the NL East this year. This creates one of those 4/5 scenarios that drove the nightmares that started all of this, and the schedule makers have had to pull, push and conjole to fill out the rest of slate. Because other teams are still playing interleague games, each AL West team gets a home-and-home vs. their "natural rivals." (That was last year’s marketing gimmick, if you recall. As we go through the rest of the divisions, you’ll see it’s not quite dead yet, but it’s not very healthy either.) These six games give Seattle an obvious advantage over the rest of the division. They get to play the Padres six times while Oakland, Anaheim and Texas have to play teams with mostly major league rosters. To further open the gap, Seattle gets the easier of the two "fill out the rest of the schedule" options as well, drawing two fill-in games vs. the Chi Sox and Detroit, respectively. While the Sox are a pretty good contender, Detroit is as patsy as they come. Meanwhile Anaheim and Texas get two vs. the Epsteinized Bo Sox and a not-that-bad Blue Jays squad. Oakland, while getting the two Tigers-funded byes, pays for it by slugging it out six times with Mr. Bonds and the defending NL Champions Giants.

In the end it might not matter, of course. On any given day, any given baseball team can beat any other baseball team, regardless of overall "paper quality". Oakland could sweep the Giants and the Padres could take 5 out 6 from the M’s. But I wouldn’t bank on those two things happening, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the exact opposite occurred. Going in it certainly looks like Seattle has a one or two game edge out of the blocks, thanks to a forgiving schedule and a "natural rival" stuck in a seemingly perpetual rebuilding phase. If the M’s squeak out the divisional pennant this year, take a look back and see how the interleague games washed out. I’d bet money to odds that they will gain anywhere from 2-4 games in the standings on the difference of interleague schedule alone.

In the meantime, Texas will not be re-asserting itself this season, even if it does improve dramatically. Six games against a strong Astros club and three more against the perennial Braves doesn’t bode well for the Rangers’ rebound chances.

Taking our little toy over to the AL Central, we find the following:

Every source I’ve looked at reduces the AL Central down to a two-team race. Detroit and Kansas City are about as likely to win the pennant as I am, by myself, from my couch. Cleveland lost its third All-Star in as many seasons, and as promising as Travis Hafner looks, he