Last week, at the Sports Economist blog, Brian Goff agreed and disagreed with Posnanski’s analysis. His agreement was that Posnanski got it right in terms of understanding why MLB did what it did with the expanded playoffs. His disagreement was that, while Posnanski thinks it’s a bad thing for the fans, Goff thinks it’s a *good* thing.
Why? Because Yankee-haters get a lot of satisfaction out of seeing the Yankees lose. And so MLB’s strategy is win-win. Yankee fans get to see their team in contention every year, which creates a lot more revenue for the league and utility for fans (since the Yankees have the largest fan base in MLB). And then, Yankee-haters get to see their least-favorite team defeated two years out of three, which makes *them* feel good and open their wallets. MLB deliberately designed the system this way to squeeze more money out of its fans.
That may be true, but I’m not so sure the strategy is still in baseball’s long-term interest. The sports economists I’ve read note that fans spend more money when their team is successful, and, from that, they conclude that it maximizes profit for the league to ensure the cities with the most fans win the most often.
I’m not convinced. That may work in the short run, when the fans still have memories of when payrolls were more even, and playoff berths were earned more by other means than money. But what happens longer term, when the Yankees make the playoffs for 28 of the next 30 years, and it becomes more and more obvious that the Pirates and Royals will seldom (if ever) be able to compete? And what happens when even Yankees fans start to get uncomfortable noticing that there’s a lot less to be proud of when your management is just buying all the best players, and a playoff berth is just being purchased every year?
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**Pittsburgh's got the Steelers and the Penguins to console them
***And Kaycee's got Arthur Bryant's. Next question.
They do the "sucks to be you" dance?
Seriously, I can't imagine a New Yorker being ashamed of something like that. Just does not compute.
Still, MLB has had a much more diverse representation in almost every variation of postseason success than all the other major sports over the last decade.
Seriously, I can't imagine a Yankee Fan being ashamed of something like that. Just does not compute.
Fixed, you nothing about NYers in general
If any other NY franchise did it, I doubt New Yorkers would be ashamed about that, either. Shame just isn't a part of the breed.
Joe D. was much better than Yaz, but I like the analogy so I'm sticking with it.
Joe D. was much better than Yaz,
Glad you got around to that little detail....
Most of that is because of the highly variable nature of the sport itself, rather than because of parity in the league. In football or basketball, the better team will win most of the time. In baseball, quality only makes itself clear in the standings over the course of a long season. You put eight good teams in the playoffs, and any one of those teams has as good a chance as any other, even if it's obvious that some of those teams are better than others.
That being said, the Yankees aren't preventing the Pirates or the Royals from being champions by any stretch of the imagination.
Nice job, Phil, now get that BTN published!! :)
Yaz is actually slightly ahead by WAR, a margin of about 5. But there are a couple issues there - war credit, for one, which would probably give DiMaggio at least 15 WAR and likely more. Then there's defensive value. AROM's pre-Retrosheet system gives the Clipper a +49 for his career, with a peak value of +11 (and one of the two +11 seasons was spent in corner spots more than in center). His reputation would suggest that's a bit low.
Seeing as how the Yankees' two big additions this year (with apologies to Nick Johson and Randy Winn) came through trades (Granderson and Vásquez), I wonder how fans are supposed to feel about trade-obtained players.
I expect that this will be misread as a fanboy defense of the Yankees growing their own talent, but I'm going to say it anyway. I reject the premise. The Yankees have bought a lot of talent since 1994, but 15 playoff appearances, 7 pennants and 5 world series victories in 16 years owe an awful lot to the good fortune of having Jeter, Pettitte, Posada, Rivera and Williams all come up through the system in the same time frame, and in the case of four of the five, have exceptional longevity as well as exceptional ability. The likelihood of repeating that is extremely low, and the assumption that anyone (including the Yankees) can buy an entire championship caliber team (as opposed to just half of one) year-in and year-out for three decades strains credulity.
Considering that both players were treated by their former teams as salary dumps, Yankee fans should feel bad.
Of course, from my point of view, no matter what happens, Yankee fans should feel bad.
Plus, it now looks obviously that the Tigers could have afforded Granderson since they chose to sign Valverde (and got Scherzer in the deal as well). They CHOSE to trade him, there was no being forced.
Yaz is actually slightly ahead by WAR, a margin of about 5. But there are a couple issues there - war credit, for one, which would probably give DiMaggio at least 15 WAR and likely more. Then there's defensive value. AROM's pre-Retrosheet system gives the Clipper a +49 for his career, with a peak value of +11 (and one of the two +11 seasons was spent in corner spots more than in center). His reputation would suggest that's a bit low.
Not to beat a crippled horse, but beyond the fact that Dimaggio missed 3 prime years, Yaz accumulated those extra 5 WAR in 10 more seasons, and even when he wasn't playing 1B or DH, he was covering the smallest outfield territory in the Majors, while Dimaggio was covering the biggest.
Pretty much, yeah.
Pretty much. The Yankees got a heck of a lot of value out of those players (excepting Williams) in 2009, but I'd be surprised if any of them but Jeter are still even playing in 2012, let alone producing at an all-star level. Throw in an aging A-Rod, and how are the Yankees going to replace that production in 3 or 4 years? Most of the games best young superstars (guys who are on HOF career trajectories) are locked up. Their best and only blue chip hitting prospect doesn't have a position and can't be moved to 1B.
Pettitte is more or less a LAIM at this point of his career and can be replaced on the yearly FA market, but Jeter was a legit MVP candidate in 2009. MVP quality SSs aren't exactly easy to come by. Neither are catchers who can put up a career 124 OPS+. Closers can always be bought, but a closer as good as Mariano? Unless the Yankees are able to develop/steal some young talent, I see them heading back to the 1980s treadmill of being a good but not great team, filled with expensive FA talent, but with too many holes to fill exclusively with top FAs.
Montero/Cano/Hughes/Chamberlain isn't a bad young core, assuming 3/4 can live up to the hype. After Montero, though, the position player pipeline presents problems -- it's Romine (who hasn't played above A+), and lots of guys at the lower levels. There may be a Jeter/Posada/Williams type down there, but more likely it's the same as the rest of the league -- lots of nobodies and future roleplayers.
I'm not saying they are at the same level, but isn't that how the core of the current Phillies team is made up? (Howard, Utley, Rollins and Hammels basically coming up within the same time frame, and being close to each other age wise)
Who's ######' with my meds?
I thought the difference between EPL and MLB is that Englands' much more compact and you don't necessarily have to rrot for the home team as much as you do in baseball.
What's wrong with your faaaaaaace?!??!!?
"Take me out to the ball game" is a suggestion, not a commandment.
Yes, but the difference is that the Yankees guys are still performing well into their mid to late 30s. If that Phillies core is still leading them to pennants in 5-6 years, that's a more relevant comparison.
Once you get THAT out of the way, you have two more thressholds to reach before reacing the level of Bernie-Mariano-Jeter-Pettitte-Posada, which is: (a) A team being able to AFFORD / keep all of its home-grown core; and,
(b) All of that home-grown core producing well into their mid-to-late 30s.
To me, (a) seems the most complicated issue here (since it's difficult for teams to keep all their players - even Pettitte jumped ship and went to Houston for 3 years).
I'm not sure, talent-wise, how far off that Phillies group is from the Yankees group. I'll stipulate that it's clear that they are not as good, but if someone wants to argue for any gap greater than "a hair's breadth", they're going to have to prove it.
Ahh.. "The obligatory "Yankees are going to be in big trouble because their: players are aging, they have too much money tied up in big contracts so they're heading back to a 1980s tailspin argument." How adorable.
Same theory has been proffered since 1996. This isn't the Orioles.
And the Yankees have been getting outstanding performances from the same core of players pretty much since 1996. Sooner rather than later, Jeter/Posada/Mariano/Pettitte are going to start sucking and/or getting hurt. Where are their replacements going to come from?
HRamirez/Montero/Joba/Hughes. Three are already in-house, and the fourth can inevitably be purchased from the Marlins when the time is right - either in prospects, or through taking on an extra terrible contract (much like the Red Sox got Beckett at least partially because they were willing to eat Lowell's contract).
Wherever they want them to come from.
Seriously, I just don't buy the comparisons to the 80s and early 90s, i.e. that without a homegrown core they can't afford to assemble a 95 win team through FA and trades. Sure, their payroll has always been near the top of the league, but their potential today is much greater. If they needed a $300M payroll to project to 95 wins, they would have a $300M payroll. Because they're smarter than they were in the 80s, they don't need that, which is great for them (more profit) and good for their fans (easier guilt-dodging when only outspending the Red Sox by $30M).
League Average Innings Muncher?
I'm not saying they are at the same level, but isn't that how the core of the current Phillies team is made up? (Howard, Utley, Rollins and Hammels basically coming up within the same time frame, and being close to each other age wise)
And nobody is talking about the Phillies making the playoffs for 28 out of the next 30 seasons, AFAIK. Because even if we stipulate that they are just as good as the Yankees currently aging core, and even if they go on to match Jeter et al in longevity, none of those guys will still be playing fifteen years from now, and it cannot be assumed that the Phillies (or any other team) will be able to replace them with another core like that without missing a beat.
Montero/Cano/Hughes/Chamberlain isn't a bad young core, assuming 3/4 can live up to the hype.
Yes, these are very talented young players, and if they realize their potential the Yankees will certainly be in a financial position to keep them together for a long time. But my point was that even if they develop into MVP/CYA caliber players, it would be foolish to assume that all of them will still be MVP/CYA caliber players a decade and a half from now. And then you need to develop at least one more core like that to approach the three more decades of playoff berths that was thrown out.
Well, no one could be an exact duplicate of Mariano Rivera, but I'm pretty sure the Yankees could forge a closer out of Hughes/Joba/Robertson/Melancon.
Posada? If the comps for Montero as having a Piazza/Cabrera type bat are advertised, the Yankees will put him at catcher and let the chips fall where they may. Other than that, it's the deepest position in the farm system with Romine,Sanchez and Murphy in the pipline as well.
I'm sorry, I don't think it's going to be difficult to replace Andy Pettitte. I really don't. Top flight pitchers are always available on the free agent market, and believe it or not, some of them are better than Andy Pettitte.
That leaves Jeter. Obviously, they don't have a replacement now in the farm system to replace one of the top 5 hitting shortstops of all time. Who knows what the free agent market will hold in coming years...Hanley Ramirez? Reyes?
My larger point is, it's positively silly to say any large market team is screwed, esepcially the Yankees, when there are so may variables in the free agent market.
Who knows where up and coming young players will end up. Ramirez, Justin Upton, Prince Fielder, Colby Rasmus,(will resigning Pujols preclude them from signing him to a big deal) Jay Bruce, not to mention pitchers Lincecum, Greinke etc?
Something opens up, it always does.
But that good fortune wouldn't be the Yankees' if they didn't have the money to pony up for all of those guys once they reached free agency. The Yankees are paying Jeter, Pettitte, Posada, and Rivera ~$63 million this year. That's the size of some teams' entire payrolls.
Montero/Hughes/Joba are all still essentially prospects. I suppose you could argue that Hughes/Joba are established set-up relievers, but you're still betting on the come with them.
I'm not seeing the Hanley thing... he's signed to a reasonable contract, the Marlins don't HAVE any truly terrible contracts, and there are plenty of other teams with better prospects to throw at the Marlins. I think you're ascribing mind control powers to Cashman that he doesn't really have. The Abreu/Swisher pickup scenarios don't really apply to Hanley.
Yes, and if they'd won those four games instead of losing them, no true Astros fan would have shown up for the victory parade around the Astrodome. Lisa would have been sitting on the roof with her binoculars, taking pictures of all those less than purehearted souls, for inclusion in her Book of Chastisements.
The Yankees aren't "screwed," but I take exception to the notion that their success is inevitable and will continue indefinitely due to their economic advantages. Some of their young players can develop into stars, they may wind up making some really shrewd trades, or they could just get lucky and have old, high $$$ guys stay healthy and productive into a ripe old age, kind of like 2009. But I don't see long term success solely through FA purchases as a realistic possibility. Players as good as Jeter and Mariano just don't show up as FAs often enough, at least not when they're in the prime of their careers.
No one is saying the Yankees would be screwed though, are they? People are talking about the Yankees having a few "down" years, where they win maybe 85 games instead of 95-100...at least that's what I'd be thinking. Yes, it's totally unreasonable to think that the Yankees are going to crater a la 1989-91 in the next few years, but it's also totally unreasonable to think that they will make the playoffs every year for the next 15-20.
Do Yankee fans really think their team is going to win 95-100 games in perpetuity? Really?
edit: suppose I owe a coke to The Good Face.
It's a good point in the article. In fact, down here in Houston, everybody's pretty disgusted about the way the Stros got to the World Series by signing two former Yankees as free agents. No one takes any pride in the season and no true fans even watched the series.
Yes, and if they'd won those four games instead of losing them, no true Astros fan would have shown up for the victory parade around the Astrodome. Lisa would have been sitting on the roof with her binoculars, taking pictures of all those less than purehearted souls, for inclusion in her Book of Chastisements.
- sigh
hard to believe that was only 4 years ago.
and a victory parade around the astrodome would have been teh KEWL. but no, it woulda hadta go thru downtown
andy,
yewston has a 60 something mile diameter. we ain't talkin no one horse town yew know. so ah cain't see either the Dome or downtown from our house
No, but you also might note that since 1995 the Yanks have won fewer than 95 games 5 times, and made the playoffs in 4 of those years anyway**. Other teams have a much smaller margin for error if they want to reach that level, and other than the Red Sox and the Angels, none of them have been able to sustain their success for more than 2 or 3 years in a row. The point is that you can't beat something with nothing.
**in 1995 their .549 WP projects to 89 wins over 162 games.
12.2, 10.1, 9.1, 6.2, 5.0, 4.6, 4.6, 4.5, 4.1, 4.1
Joe D
9.4, 8.9, 8.9, 7.4, 7.3, 6.8, 5.9, 5.8, 5.6, 5.0
Yaz had the best seasons and lasted a lot longer, but DiMaggio had more great seasons even before considering his lost prime years, age 28-30.
European football seems to be doing alright. And there they literally do just buy the players.
Even if we accept this as a limitation (which I don't, entirely, I think they could trade for those sorts of players if they wanted to badly enough through chained, multi-team salary eating), there is another way to reach 95 wins consistently. Without multiple HOF'ers in their primes they just need to fill all their holes with well above average players.
Say Jeter fell into an alternate universe last November. Just sign Scutaro and offset the loss by sticking Holilday in left field, move Granderson to center. Maybe when Gardener gives him a day off you can even tolerate Bay's poor range in right and free up the DH slot for a day for one of the other old guys. No problem.
hard to believe that was only 4 years ago.
and a victory parade around the astrodome would have been teh KEWL. but no, it woulda hadta go thru downtown
Oops, I just assumed that the Astrodome was by definition the axis mundi of Howston. I was misinformed.
andy,
yewston has a 60 something mile diameter. we ain't talkin no one horse town yew know. so ah cain't see either the Dome or downtown from our house
Lisa, why would you think I was talking about the roof of your house? With your blog credentials you surely could have gotten some sort of a seat on top of the Dome.
And you would've loved it, cuz not only could you see the parade, but you might could see all the way out into Barry's Boodoir by the Bay----they makes some powerful binoculars these days.
12.2, 10.1, 9.1, 6.2, 5.0, 4.6, 4.6, 4.5, 4.1, 4.1
Joe D
9.4, 8.9, 8.9, 7.4, 7.3, 6.8, 5.9, 5.8, 5.6, 5.0
Yaz had the best seasons and lasted a lot longer, but DiMaggio had more great seasons even before considering his lost prime years, age 28-30.
Even without the WAR wars, I'm more than willing to admit that Yaz's 1967 season was more magical than anything that Dimaggio was able to produce, considering the context of that pennant race. Forget the numbers, the only season quite like that since WWII was Boudreau in 1948.
as for barry,
well, i would prefer to, um, interview him, um, in depth. barry he always was on his best behaviour with us females - well, female baseball people i mean. what man can resist a girl smiling sweetly at him and asking him, so, would you please tell me about positioning yourself in the field to catch fly balls? or even better, do plan to steal home even once before you, uh, hang em up?
well, i would prefer to, um, interview him, um, in depth. barry he always was on his best behaviour with us females - well, female baseball people i mean. what man can resist a girl smiling sweetly at him and asking him, so, would you please tell me about positioning yourself in the field to catch fly balls? or even better, do plan to steal home even once before you, uh, hang em up?
Yeah, that kind of sounds like a variant of my game plan when I run into the girl in that Santa Catalina video on the Jeopardy thread.
No, and I certainly am not saying that. But the notion that they will have trouble filling holes by either trade or the free agent market supposedly because there's a lot of players already locked up - I think is really jumping the gun.
In the 29 year period from 1936 - 1964 (inclusive) the Yankees made the World Series 22 times.
While the New York Yankees were winning their fifth straight American League pennant in 1964, the New York Mets were going 53-109 and finishing dead last (10th place) in the National League for the third straight season.
1964 Major League Baseball Attendance Figures (Courtesy Baseball-Reference.com)
New York Yankees: 1,305,638
New York Mets: 1,732,597
DB
But, yes, I think Bill James, among many others, are on record as holding that the dominance of the Yankees from the '20's to the mid '60's was not good for baseball generally or the American League specifically. It's easy to see why. The lack of parity (which extended to the WS, albeit with lesser effect) depresses interest and that results in a reduction in attendance. Novelty acts like the Mets at that time are sometimes exceptions in the short run.
Jose Reyes' contract expire next year though he has another option. considering the state of the Mes.. err Mets, it wouldn't be crazy if they just buyout the contract while their FO is still in shambles .
Those aren't the point though. the thing is, the Yankees were winning in the 70s too despite having no real home core on par with their other era of dominance (Munson/White/Guidry are obviously nice players, but their other era of dominance basically had mulitple inner circle hall o famers on top of several other supporting casts who would have HOF careers). it is obviously more likely to win with a inner circle HOF core but it isn't impossible to do without one.
In the end though, I think what would be better if we switch to a more NFL like set up, 2 division per league, 4 wild card. 4 round playoffs (the division winners skip a round). this way, we would have less problems like the current ALE where one of the 3 best teams in the AL is likely to go home without going to the playoffs. where the Blue Jays managed to go through 16 years without a playoff berth despite putting up a good number of solid teams. it give more teams the chance to make it (but not to the same absurd degree of the NBA / NHL where almost everyone makes it)
This, and probably adding two more teams to the AL (one in NY and another somewhere else) would make it a more balanced system.
It might make people watch less regular season baseball in New York and Los Angeles and Chicago, where the teams would almost always make it to a slightly extended playoffs, but it wouldn't affect it anywhere else.
Also, I think the nature of the sports matter, in the NBA a better team is simply better. the odds of the 1st seed getting knock out by the 8th is miniscule, where as in the MLB the chances of the 100 win teams getting knocked out by a high 80ish win wild card team is very substantial.
the NBA playoff is boring both in the sense that the first few rounds are highly predictable. and that a lot of less than qualified teams make it. in this purposed set up the chances of a sub .500 team making it seems to be nearly impossible. and in the context of a short series anything can happen in baseball.
Even though I started rooting for the Yankees in 1950 when I was six, and followed them religiously from when I was eight, I wouldn't disagree with that. It wasn't actually all that bad during Stengel's first four years, when the Yanks were pre-season underdogs and won four pennants by a total of eleven games, but after that they only had two real pennant races (1955 and 1964) after mid-September between 1953 and the end of the dynasty, and only one year (1959) where they weren't in contention. But the big problem there was that the entire AL pretty much just decided not to compete for black players; the Yankees wouldn't have won nearly as many of those pennants if they'd been in the NL.
You could easily see the effect of this imbalance on AL attendance, which dropped below the NL's in 1956 and kept dropping steadily after that. The two California teams were part of that, but more so was the perennial hopelessness of the AL's bottom four or five teams. As bad as it is today, it's only a relatively few teams that seem to never have any realistic postseason hopes, and as good as the Yanks have been, it's not as if they're even in the World Series every year. This really isn't like the original 1921-64 dynasty at all, and nothing like the late 30's or late 50's, when you pretty much had a one team league.
In the 29 year period from 1936 - 1964 (inclusive) the Yankees made the World Series 22 times.
While the New York Yankees were winning their fifth straight American League pennant in 1964, the New York Mets were going 53-109 and finishing dead last (10th place) in the National League for the third straight season.
1964 Major League Baseball Attendance Figures (Courtesy Baseball-Reference.com)
New York Yankees: 1,305,638
New York Mets: 1,732,597
The reason for those numbers: Shea Stadium, which opened in 1964.
In 1963, the just-as-bad Mets drew 1,080,108 while the just-as-good Yankees drew 1,308,920. From 1963-1964, the Yankees' average attendance was down 37 people per home game, while the Mets' shot up more than 8,050 per home game.
In 1962, the Yankees outdrew the first-year Mets 1,493,574 to 922,530.
I don't know about that last element of your statement. The Yankees could just as well have dominated the National League as it did the American, and then the impression would have been that the National League was inferior to the American. After all, it dominated the National League teams in the World Series for pretty much forty years. All highly speculative, of course, but why shouldn't the Yankees have done in National League regular season play, had it been in that league, as it did in the World Series? The point,though, is the Yankees winning all the time just got tiresome finally, and that was reflected in attendance figures. The Mets drew for the same reason the Saints have--there's always a niche for the perverse. The Saints fans and the Saints team have had this sado-masochistic kinky thing going for over forty years. If the Cubs every win it all, they'll probably immediately start losing fans. Some women want to marry the pretty-boy killer; some fans get off cheering and jeering the hapless. Or maybe there is something in all of us that enables us to get in that mode if circumstances feed and foster it.
People said this about the Red Sox, too. See how that played out.
I don't know about that last element of your statement. The Yankees could just as well have dominated the National League as it did the American, and then the impression would have been that the National League was inferior to the American. After all, it dominated the National League teams in the World Series for pretty much forty years.
Up through 1953 that's true. But from 1955 through 1964 they lost 5 out of 9 Series, and with the exception of 1961 (when they won in 5) and 1963 (when they got swept) all of them went to 7 games. I'm not saying that the Yankees wouldn't have won a few NL pennants during that period**, but the competition in the NL would have been far tougher for them then it was in the AL once the Red Sox and the Tigers started slipping down the ladder the way they did in the early 50's, and then when the Indians followed suit after 1955. The only two AL teams who beat them in the period I'm talking about (the 54 Indians and 59 White Sox) were basically humiliated in the Series, the latter by a team that won 88 games.
Again, none of that applies to the period up through (roughly) the early 50's, when the effects of NL-only integration hadn't really taken hold.
**1956 and 1961 in particular, and possibly a few others, but don't let their regular season records fool you into thinking that their success could have been automatically transferred into a far superior league.
*It seems to me that the phenomenon can only manifest in a situation with a different sort of segregation -- that of AL from NL. If there had been some form of direct competition between NL and AL teams at mid-century, the AL teams would have been much quicker to integrate, both because they would have been repeatedly drubbed by teams that lacked the obvious financial advantages of the Yankees, and because they would have regularly witnessed the functioning of teams with several black players. As it is I find it a little surprising that more AL teams didn't start integrating earlier in response to the Yankees' dominance; my guess would be that a lot of teams had available the crutch of the Yankees' financial advantages as a way of excusing their own relative incompetence, and didn't bother to look much deeper than that for a long time. Was there an AL team that aggressively integrated in the immediate post-Robinson (or post-Doby, if you will) era? I know the Red Sox & Yankees were both serious heel-draggers, and it ended up costing both teams in the long run. My guess would be that a heavily integrated AL team -- especially one in an area with a large black population, like Kansas City, Chicago or Washington -- could well have popped the Yankees' bubble, while spending less money. Of course, the A's status as Yankees AAAA squad in that period is notorious; still I wonder what was going on elsewhere in the AL. The Braves and Dodgers were dominating the NL with stars like Aaron & Robinson. Was there anything more nefarious than inertia and individual prejudice happening in the AL? Evidence of, for lack of a better word, collusion, an attempt to make the AL a "white man's league"? Or were they just universally dumb?
Well, it was and wasn't a myth. It wasn't a myth in the sense that this was certainly the prevailing opinion at the time, and still is today. But of course it really is a myth, for the very reason you cite. Switch the Pirates to the AL and the Yanks to the NL, and the Pirates would have had an easier time duplicating their success.
The myth rested on two pillars, one particularly flukish and one historical. The flukish one was the three Yankee blowouts that caused that famous 55-27 runs advantage. The historical one was, of course, the memory of all those great Yankees teams of the past, now fortified with Roger Maris and just coming off of a 15 game winning streak to close the regular season. But in cold fact, the Pirates won only two fewer games than the Yankees that year, playing in a much stronger league, and the Yankees had no dependable starters beyond Whitey Ford.
*It seems to me that the phenomenon can only manifest in a situation with a different sort of segregation -- that of AL from NL. If there had been some form of direct competition between NL and AL teams at mid-century, the AL teams would have been much quicker to integrate, both because they would have been repeatedly drubbed by teams that lacked the obvious financial advantages of the Yankees, and because they would have regularly witnessed the functioning of teams with several black players. As it is I find it a little surprising that more AL teams didn't start integrating earlier in response to the Yankees' dominance; my guess would be that a lot of teams had available the crutch of the Yankees' financial advantages as a way of excusing their own relative incompetence, and didn't bother to look much deeper than that for a long time. Was there an AL team that aggressively integrated in the immediate post-Robinson (or post-Doby, if you will) era? I know the Red Sox & Yankees were both serious heel-draggers, and it ended up costing both teams in the long run. My guess would be that a heavily integrated AL team -- especially one in an area with a large black population, like Kansas City, Chicago or Washington -- could well have popped the Yankees' bubble, while spending less money. Of course, the A's status as Yankees AAAA squad in that period is notorious; still I wonder what was going on elsewhere in the AL. The Braves and Dodgers were dominating the NL with stars like Aaron & Robinson. Was there anything more nefarious than inertia and individual prejudice happening in the AL? Evidence of, for lack of a better word, collusion, an attempt to make the AL a "white man's league"? Or were they just universally dumb?
To the extent that any AL teams tried to integrate "aggressively" in the 50's, it was the Indians and the White Sox, the two teams that gave the Yankees their toughest battles. And OTOH the two perennial AL contenders of the 40's that were the most notoriously resistant to integration---the Red Sox and the Tigers---didn't seriously compete for a single pennant after 1950.
As to the "whys", it's obviously not just one factor, but knowing the makeup of the ownership in those days, it's hard not to see a combination of racism, complacency and sheer stupidity being the Big Three. I've been following baseball pretty closely for nearly 60 years, and if I had to describe the American League of the 50's in a word, I'd have to say that is was the most stagnant Major League I've ever seen.** It kind of just sat there in a trance, completely oblivious while the world passed it by.
**meaning in my lifetime. I'm sure you could say the same thing about the AL during the late 30's, but that was much more of a temporary phenomenon. The stagnation I'm talking about didn't really begin to lift until about 1960, when the Orioles and the Senators began to rise from the ashes, and didn't really disappear until the Oakland A's finally threw off the 40 year slumber of the post-Grove Athletics. By the late 1960's the AL was still an inferior league, but the underlying problem had been addressed.
Well, I don't think people said that about the Red Sox like they do about the Cubs. It was a minority opinion and it doesn't withstand much scrutiny. There seems to me a qualitative difference between the two brands of fandom. The Red Sox were competitive, and had a history of being competitive, for a long time before they finally won it all. The Red Sox fans didn't ever delight in losing like Cub fans--it wasn't a point of pride with them to stick by their team when it was awful, at least not indefinitely, unlike with the Cubs. And when the Sox were losers for over an extended period, they lost a lot of their fan base. They weren't airhead groupies. Cub fans are just losers, and they like it that way, and when they finally win, being a Cub fan will lose its cache. The hardcore Red Sox fan says \"#### that." It's straight up fandom. It's not recherche.
Second, theoretically at least, I can see how being slow to integrate might have helped maybe in making good teams. The Yankees were the white champions. That could have served as lure to white players. After all, if there was a racial bias, and to the extent there is one, it could have served to draw players with a racial bias--and which racial pool was larger? It's all very highly speculative, anyway, but the Yankees were more successful, league-wise and World Series-wise, before they integrated. [cue Srul and brainless hydrophobic spluttering of outrage]
Our assessment of the nature of the two respective fandoms and of the quality of the relevant opinion as it applies to the two groups wrt to the opinion at issue differs greatly, shall we say, and leave it at that?
You're conflating one indisputable point---that the Pirates were indeed lucky to win that World Series (I'm still grabbing my own neck whenever I think of Virdon's grounder)---with the issue of overall team strength, as evidenced in the regular season.** Whitey Ford can only pitch so many games, and if you think that the NL wasn't a far superior overall league that year, you don't need professional help---you just need a time machine that would let you take your ExtraInnings subscription along with you.
Second, theoretically at least, I can see how being slow to integrate might have helped maybe. The Yankees were the white champions. That could have served as lure to white players. After all, if there was a racial bias, and to the extent there is one, it could have served to draw players with a racial bias--and which racial pool was larger? It's all very highly speculative, anyway, but the Yankees were more successful, league-wise and World Series-wise, before they integrated. [cue Srul and stereotypical spluttering of outrage]
Fine, Morty, but my point wasn't about the period before the Yankees began to integrate. They were 16 and 4 in World Series appearances up through 1953, when they had the combination of Reynolds-Raschi-Lopat and Death Valley to help them beat the Dodgers. I'm not questioning the overall superiority of those Yankee teams to anything that the National League came up with; AFAIC that 1949-53 run is baseball's most significant and underrated accomplishment.
But after the early 50's the effects of integration really set in, and the gap between the two leagues began to show up in many ways: All-Star games; Spring training results; any World Series that the Yankees didn't play in; etc. And from that point on, from 1955 to 1964, the Yankees were held to a draw by the NL: the Yanks were 4 and 5 in 9 World Series, and 28 and 30 in games. They were still a very good team, but hardly as dominant as they'd been prior to that period.
And as to your point (if you can call it that) about luring white players because of their racism: What white players are you talking about? That's not "speculative," that's just grasping for straws. If that theory had any validity, the Red Sox plus Tom Yawkey's bankroll would have left even the Yankees in the dust, rather than wallowing in mediocrity for 15 years, as the Red Sox did between 1952 and 1966.
**The Yanks' Pythag was all of 89-65 in an inferior league; the Pirates was 92-62 in a superior one. A few blowouts don't negate that.
In this matter, sure.
You're dead wrong about the Pirates and Yankees, though. You'll find that great teams do occasionally get blown out. The 1998 Yankees, probably the greatest team of the last -- what? 30? 40? -- years, got blown out by a goodish Rangers team and an exceedingly lame Mariners team that year; they got roundly thumped, by a combined score of 10-2, in games 2 and 3 of the ALCS. That's not 2-to-1, it's 5-to-1. The 116-win Mariners of 2001 were blown out in consecutive games by the Blue Jays and Red Sox, both middling AL East also-rans that season; they were blown out badly by the Rangers as well. It happens, even to great teams, that they get blown out by far inferior teams, sometimes repeatedly in short periods.
The run differential of one WS is no proof at all of actual superiority. Over the marathon of a MLB season, the Pirates led a superior league in runs scored, and tied for the lead in runs allowed; the Yankees, by comparison led their league in runs scored, but finished third in runs allowed. I think there's no question that Yankees pitching that year was suspect, and that they were at best a second-place team if playing in the NL, and may well have finished behind the Braves, as well.
And head-to-head dominance means little -- the Red Sox and Yankees managed to alternately dominate each other this last season, for example.
I'm not comparing the 2000 Yankees to their 1998 counterparts, but they DID win the World Series and DID go 11 and 5 in the postseason. That in itself is no small accomplishment.
And yet between September 15th and the end of the regular season--in a space of 15 games--the Yankees were on the short end of these scores:
11 to 1
15 to 4
16 to 3
15 to 4 (again)
11 to 1
11 to 3
13 to 2
9 to 1
Total runs in those 8 games: 19 scored; 102 allowed. And yet the Yanks still won the World Series. You can't read that much into a short series of games, especially when there's nothing at stake.
Also you seem to take it as something that goes without saying (or explaining) that the Pirates were playing in this vastly superior league? Are you sure this is so? How do you tell?
I may have missed it, but I didn't see the term "vastly" or any of its variants used in the previous posts that stated the National League was superior to the American League in that time frame. Again, maybe I missed it, but it seems to me that the edge need not be vast to establish the point that the champion of the superior league should not be considered the underdog in a competition with the champion of the inferior league.
As to how to make the determination which league is the superior and which is the inferior, I would first ask what evidence you would accept that one league is superior to another in any year without head-to-head competition? That is, how would you determine which was superior, the American or National League in 1960? Or, say, 1917? Or 1936? Or any other pre-inter-league play season? Because it would be pointless to give a lengthy post stating this or that as evidence unless it can be agreed upon beforehand what measuring stick you'll accept as a determining factor.
DB
I will fight you, Ryan Jones. I will fight you so hard.
Mine was, though. Why do you want to start with before and after 1953? Baseball was integrated in 1947. The Yankees won 6 out of 7 WS between 1947 through 1953. And this was as a lily white team. Indeed, the Yankees, didn't start losing World Series competitions post-war until after they integrated, so I don't know where you're going with all this pre-1953 and post-1953--you seem to be playing pretty fast and loose with your cutoff dates and basing a whole lot of stuff on impressions and not much data.
I began this by just mooting a few points--I'm not making any definite declarations outside of the observations that the 1960 Yankees were better than the 1960 Pirates and out-played them in that series, and that the Yankees were more successful pre-integration of its team than post-integration, which is factually indisputable as to WS, although, as I conceded, raises cause/effect questions. But, nevertheless, they then continued to compete at very high level with mostly lily white teams until they fell off the cliff after 1964.
If I knew, maybe I wouldn't be asking. But that I don't know doesn't mean that those who make the assertion get a pass. It's their assertion. It isn't mine. My feeling is that you really can't tell--at the most, you have impressionistic inklings. And if that's so, maybe the dogmatism needs to be checked a little.
As for "vastly", see "if you think that the NL wasn't a far superior overall league that year" and other similar language, not just now on this thread, but all over the place here. Moreover, we didn't all wake up virgins this morning. This entire website, as well as baseball conventional wisdom all over, has a history. I just want to know if these opinions that the NL was superior to the AL are borne out in any data-driven schematic way. Many people for a long time here has been throwing similarly couched opinions around for quite a while, even going so far as to seriously handicap players in the respective leagues during certain times. And it's usually couched as something that goes without saying. Well, say it. And prove it if you can.
As for the NL's superiority in 1960, this whole topic of relative league strength in the 50's and 60's has been the subject of a million threads that don't really need to be rehashed. But if you want to examine the number of A-level Hall of Famers who were in their primes in 1960, count how many of them were in the American League. I'll start you off with Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford, and allow Al Kaline to slip in there for sake of argument; you can take it from there, and then try to count their counterparts in the National League.
And obviously the reason for that lopsided count was the AL's lag in integration. The first black Hall of Famer who made his debut in the American League was Reggie Jackson (and Rod Carew) in 1967. By that point the NL had seen Jackie Robinson, Campanella, Mays, McCovey, Marichal, Cepeda, Brock, Gibson, Banks, Billy Williams, Frank Robinson, Aaron, Stargell, Clemente, and Joe Morgan. If you want to dispute the significance of that, or show a list of white AL Hall of Famers that couldn't be balanced by a list of white NL Hall of Famers, be my guest.
Mine was, though. Why do you want to start with before and after 1953? Baseball was integrated in 1947.
But the real effect of that didn't begin for quite a few years, as more and more teams integrated, and as the NL began signing all the great black players.
The Yankees won 6 out of 7 WS between 1947 through 1953. And this was as a lily white team. Indeed, the Yankees, didn't start losing World Series competitions post-war until after they integrated, so I don't know where you're going with all this pre-1953 and post-1953--you seem to be playing pretty fast and loose with your cutoff dates and basing a whole lot of stuff on impressions and not much data.
What data are you talking about? After the NL began pulling away by getting all the best black players, the Yankees were held to a basic draw in the World Series, and the other two AL teams who appeared got their hats (and heads) handed to them. When you first said that the Yankees "dominated the National League teams in the World Series for pretty much forty years," I was showing you, with data, that this "dominance" ended in 1953.
I began this by just mooting a few points--I'm not making any definite declarations outside of the observations that the 1960 Yankees were better than the 1960 Pirates and out-played them in that series, and that the Yankees were more successful pre-integration of its team than post-integration, which is factually indisputable as to WS, although, as I conceded, raises cause/effect questions. But, nevertheless, they then continued to compete at very high level with mostly lily white teams until they fell off the cliff after 1964.
And I've never argued that they didn't continue to "compete at very high level with mostly lily white teams until they fell off the cliff after 1964"---but they were helped immeasurably by competing in a league that was virtually devoid of black stars. And after 1953 they stopped "dominating" the National League in any way at all.
Well, yes, in a larger sense, my question applies across the board.
No, it is those who make the assertion who must show that their theory is not couched in terms that make it unfalsifiable. I don't know. I want to know. Tell me what you know that makes you say what you do.
The results played themselves out, as much as was possible, in All-Star games, which the NL dominated from 1950 until the 1980s, in spring training, and in the World Series, which saw such "surprising" results as the Giants sweeping the 111-win Indians in 1954, the 88-win Dodgers defeating the White Sox in 1959, the Pirates' 1960 win, and two 100-win AL teams (the Yankees and Twins) losing to Dodgers teams that had lesser records in the mid-60s. Without interleague play, it's hard to know what the difference was, but it was real -- the only non-Yankees AL club to win a WS in the 20 years between integration and the Orioles mini-dynasty of the late 60s was the Cleveland Indians -- once, in 1948. That's it. If the AL contender was someone other than the Yankees -- and often even when it was the Yankees -- the smart money was on the NL club.
I have no educated guess as to how many games the difference was between the two leagues, but I've seen intelligent people around here estimate it was at least as large, if not larger, than the current AL-NL split. It was real, and there's plenty of evidence that winning 95 games in the NL of 1960 was considerably more difficult than winning 97 in the contemporaneous AL.
Part of the reason the early post-integration results may be different is that integration was exceedingly slow; the gap didn't begin to widen until a few years after Robinson played with the Dodgers -- I mean, by mid-1947, the AL had its own token black star in Larry Doby -- but once it did, it made an enormous difference, for nearly two decades.
***edited to add last bit
Fair enough. Since we can't really tell which is superior, it seems the only logical course would be to presume that they were equal.
That being that case, we have two teams that were each champion in their respective league. One team lead their league in both offense and defense (runs scored and runs allowed) while the other did not. It strikes me as illogical that the team that lead its league in both offense and defense would be the underdog to the team that did not. Likewise, it strikes me as even less logical to presume that the team that lost in the only head-to-head competition between the two teams is superior to the team that won. Therefore, I see no reason to disagree with Vortex's assertion that the concept of the 1960 Pirates as a "plucky underdog" is nothing but a baseball myth that has zero basis in fact.
DB
Sociology. Fine. That's all I wanted to know. I thought you had hard data, some rigorous formulaic mathematical explanations or something. (Hey, this used to be this deluxe sabermetric discussion site.) I thought I had missed some involved Jamesian interpretations somewhere.
You also clearly have no idea what the word "sociology" means.
there are 2 separate questions here: 1.) WERE the Yankees favored (or heavily favored) going into the series? and 2.) SHOULD they have been favored?
the answer to the first question is mo' defnitely yes--they WERE the favorites--but that was largely because they were the YANKEES. And so the "plucky pirate" myth will continue.
The answer to question 2 is a bit more difficult...
I should point out vis a vis the discussion above that it is perfectly conceivable that the NL was stronger than the AL as a whole during the period in question, but that the Yankees were still the best team
Sociology. Fine. That's all I wanted to know. I thought you had hard data, some rigorous formulaic mathematical explanations or something. (Hey, this used to be this deluxe sabermetric discussion site.) I thought I had missed some involved Jamesian interpretations somewhere.
Funny, I never would have dreamed that the results of actual games, and a listing of Hall of Fame players, fell within the realm of "sociology."
There are indeed "sociological" explanations for why the data are as lopsided as they are---which you seem to have no interest in addressing other than by evasion---but the results themselves are right there in black and white, in the form that I mention in the preceding paragraph. You act as if these facts don't exist.
It's conceivable, but you'd have to take it on a year by year basis, and in no year after 1953---with the possible exceptions of 1956 and 1961---could the Yankees remotely have been considered "dominant." "Dominance" is a term that's best reserved for years like 1927, 1929-30 (with the A's), 1932, 1936-39, 1975-76 (with the Reds), or 1998.
Carew is not "black" (at least in the African-American sense of the word). He is Panamanian.
Carry on.
But this is irrelevant. In the context of this conversation, he is a man who would not have played Major League baseball before 1947.
The dismissal of strong and concrete evidence because it doesn't come in the form of a number is a good way to be wrong about just about everything in life.
Nobody goes around calling Roberto Clemente "black" (in the African-American sense of the word), even if he would have been banned from MLB baseball pre-1947.
I'm not really sure that's true. I routinely hear Latinos negros referred to as "black".
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