Balance of Power

Anyone want to take a guess as to what this graph might be? It's a graph of what the SPI predicts each MLB team's win-loss record will be at the end of this season. Putting it in this form lets us see a few things that aren't quite as evident from just looking at the numbers.

Take a look at the upper left and right corners. At the end of the blue and red lines (for wins and losses, respectively), we see a sharp jump. Those sharp jumps indicate the Chicago Cubs and the Washington Nationals, each of whom are our outliers. The Cubs are far better than any other team, and are forecast to win six more games than the runners-up, the Boston Red Sox. At the other end of the curve, we see that the Nationals are far worse than any other team, coming up with seven more losses than the runners-up, the Kansas City Royals. It's interesting enough that we see significant spikes on both ends of the graph, but what's even more interesting is that the worst team in the league ends up being just as bad as the best team is good. The Cubs are forecast to finish at 104-58, while the Nationals are forecast at 58-104. That's an interesting balance.

Does that imply that the good teams in the league are equally balanced out by the bad? Not exactly. The graph shows us that the intersection of the two lines isn't quite at their midpoints, but about 60% of the way toward the right side. Simply put, that means 60% of the teams in the league could be loosely classified as "good," while the other 40% could be classified as "bad." Of course, some "good" teams are better than others, but the classification is enough for our purposes. It shows us that overall, we have more good teams competing with each other and slightly fewer teams getting beaten up on. That makes for a more entertaining league, I think. Better to have more teams worth watching instead of four fantastic teams and 26 terrible ones.