In sports law, the concept of “competitive balance” has played an important role as a justification for practices that would otherwise run afoul of the antitrust laws and the common law of unfair competition. The conventional logic has it that unless teams in an individual sports league are reasonably competitive, fans of the weaker teams will lose interest, which will cause those teams to fold, which will in turn threaten the survivorship of the league itself. Consequently, restraints on player mobility, like the amateur player drafts, salary caps, and reserve clauses, and territorial restrictions on franchise location and broadcast rights have been justified in the past (at least by their advocates) as necessary to maintain “competitive balance” in sports leagues.
Exactly what constitutes “competitive balance” and whether or not it has existed at particular times has been a matter of some controversy. Should competitive balance be measured by the closeness of competition during an individual season, or should it be measured by the frequency with which different teams win championships? Does competitive balance mean the same thing with regard to each sport?
Although the National Football League is often lauded for its competitive balance, within any given NFL season there is always great disparity between the winning percentages of the most and least successful teams. For example, during the 2009 season, the Indianapolis Colts, the team with the best record (14-2) won 87.5% of its games while the St. Louis Rams, the team with the worst record (1-15) won only 6.3% of its games. Overall, the Colts winning percentage exceeded that of the Rams by .812.
In contrast, in Major League Baseball in 2009, the winning percentage of the most successful team in the regular season, the New York Yankees, exceeded that of the worst team, the Washington Nationals, by only .272 (.636 to .364). The 2009 gap in baseball was actually somewhat higher than usual; in 2000, admittedly a very balanced year, the gap between the best team, the San Francisco Giants, and the worst teams, the Chicago Cubs and Philadelphia Phillies, was only .196 (.597-.401).
The disparity between baseball and football is often attributed to the very short (in terms of number of games) NFL season. While this may be part of the explanation, it is not the whole answer. If one aggregates individual team records for the past ten NFL seasons (160 regular season games), the best team, the New England Patriots compiled a record of 112-48, for a winning percentage of .700, a mark exceeded in a single season by only three major league baseball teams over the past 70 years. The worst team, the Detroit Lions, has a combined record of 42-188, for a winning percentage of only .262, a mark exceeded by only one baseball team (the 1962 New York Mets) since 1935.
Basketball season records also show much greater variation between the best and worst teams than is found in baseball. If the NBA’s current best (Cleveland Cavaliers) and worst (New Jersey Nets) teams finish the season with their current winning percentages, they will have accomplished the equivalent of a major league baseball team finishing its season with a record of 126-36 and 16-146, respectively. In the 134 year history of major league baseball, no team has ever done that well, or that poorly. In the NHL, the performance range is more narrow, but still much broader than in Major League Baseball.
The following text, which I originally submitted to the Listserv of the Society of American Baseball Research, explores the status of the competitive balance questions in 1960, which was just before the modern explosion of the number of major league sports teams in the United States and Canada. In 1960, there were a total of only 42 teams in Major League Baseball, the NFL, the NBA, and the NHL. By 2004, that number had grown to 122.
Now that we are almost 50 years removed from the expansion of major league baseball that occurred in 1961, it makes more and more sense to use 1960/1961 as a dividing point in the “periodization” of baseball history. Although relatively little changed in 1961 itself, it ushered in an era of significant changes in the way in which major league baseball was organized and, with the adoption of the designated hitter rule and the construction of multi-purpose stadiums, played.
This leaves us with three basic divisions—the Formative Era (1871-1900), the Golden Age (1901-1960), and the Modern Era (1961-present). I will acknowledge that this choice of terminology has “Baby Boomer” written all over it.
At the end of the Golden Age, Major League baseball had achieved a measure of competitive balance missing in the highest leagues of other major sports. The simplest measure of competitive balance is the index of how frequently lower performing teams defeat their higher performing counterparts. If we rank the major league baseball teams of 1960 in regard to their final regular season records, we find that in almost 42% of games, the team that would finish lower in the standings at the end of the year nevertheless won the game. In 1960, the lower ranked team came out victorious in 515 of 1232 games, for a winning percentage of .418 The NL was slightly more competitive than the AL, with its lower ranked teams having a winning percentage of .429, compared to .407 in the AL.
In the other sports, the teams that finished higher in the standings won much more frequently. In the NHL season of 1959-60, higher ranked teams finished 113-61-36 in games with lower ranked opponents, which translates into a .376 winning percentage for the lower ranked teams (using the NHL’s system of counting a tie as the equivalent of one-half of a win). In the NBA, the overall record of higher ranked teams was 211-89, which meant that the lower ranked teams won only 29.7% of the time. The greatest disparity was in the NFL (in which teams played only 12 regular season games). Not counting two games between teams that ended the season with identical records, the higher ranked NFL teams finished the season, 57-14-5, which translated to a .803 winning percentage by the method used at the time and to .783 by the current standards. Either way, lower ranked teams won only about 20% of the time.
There were, of course, major league teams in 1960 that baseball fans considered “terrible,” particularly the Philadelphia Phillies (59-95) and the Kansas City Athletics (58-96), the last place finishers in their respective leagues. However, the last place teams in the other leagues did much worse in 1960. In the NFL, the Dallas Cowboys were 0-11-1, and the Washington Redskins 1-9-2 (defeating only the Cowboys). The worst team in the NBA, the Cincinnati Royals, finished 19-56, which was the equivalent of 41-112 in baseball, while the last place finisher in the six-team NHL was the New York Rangers, whose record of 17-38-15 translates to 54-100 in 1960 baseball terms.
I am not arguing that this level of balance was a feature of major league baseball that developed only at the end of the Golden Age. It may well have been the pattern throughout the history of major league baseball. It is also my impression that the disparity between baseball and other major league team sports that can be seen in 1960 has continued into the modern age. However, I am suggesting that the factors that have led to greater competitive balance in baseball than in other sports do pre-date the modern era.
Hello Gordon
Thank you for the nice post on competitive balance. It seems like a very interesting topic to pursue. Some questions that come to mind are:
1. Which other seasons demonstrate a strong “competitive balance” (by some objective measure)?
2. Do we see a tendency for competitive balance to “develop”, or is the emergence of CB sporadic?
3. Are there times when leagues tend toward CB and then the CB collapses?
4. What factors increase CB?
5. What factors decrease CB?
6. Can the presence or absence of a few players increase or decrease CB?
7. Is there something about the way that baseball is played that lends itself to more CB than other sports?
8. Do particular rules changes lead to increased or decreased CB?
9. Could simple incompetence among several teams decrease CB?
I could make a very long list.
In any case, it would make an excellent topic for a SABR article. If you would like to cooperate on such an article, I would be delighted to do so because it seems so interesting to me.
Sincerely
John Eigenauer
This is my take for the relative competitive balance in baseball, at least as far as winning percentages are concerned.
1. You already mentioned the long season and large number of games. A good manager needs to use his entire roster to get through the baseball season. Hence, even a dominant team will put in the backup catcher just to give the starter a rest, or put in a left handed batter to face right handed pitching. So a weak team might find themselves playing a strong team’s backups from time to time.
Unless a football game is well in hand or a team has clinched a first round bye in the playoffs, you seldom see the starting quarterback get pulled unless he is injured or a game is well in hand.
2. Baseball is a game where outstanding individual performances, particularly pitching, can sometimes overcome weak team play. So a really weak team with one stud starting pitcher can at least be competitive every fourth game.
And as Brewers fans can attest, sometimes an average pitching staff can go on a tear for a month or two before settling back into mediocrity. The flip side of this is that even dominant pitchers and hitters sometimes go into slumps, so even great teams will have losing streaks.
In football, a great individual effort is seldom enough to overcome a bad team effort. Everything is too interlocked. It doesn’t matter if you have a quarterback with a cannon for an arm and can read defenses. If he is always playing from behind, running for his life, or never finding a receiver open, there isn’t much he can do. A great pass rusher can be double teamed if the rest of the defensive line can’t rush. Ditto for an outstanding wide receiver, if the rest of the receiving corps is not threat. This is why bad teams are really bad. No doubt, every pro football team has its share of talent, but these islands of strength are isolated and thus, negated by a better team effort by the opponents.
Baseball and football are opposite poles. I would put basketball somewhere in between, as I have seen examples where a hot shooter or single dominant player can make a big difference for an otherwise mediocre team, though again, a team with just one great player still has the problem of that guy getting double teamed on every play.
Dr. Eigenauer,
Thanks for this thoughtful response.
My interest in competitive balance grows out of my study of the intersection of the sports industry and antitrust law. There is now a consensus that certain anti-competitive practices that would be illegal in most industries may be legitimate in the sports industry, if they are “reasonable.” One of the accepted hallmarks of reasonableness is the need to protect the competitive balance.
As you can see, my current special interest also relates to why baseball has done a better job of establishing an in-season competitive framework than other sports.
In responde to your question, this is something that has improved over time. Virtually all of the best and worst single season winning percentages in Major League Baseball history occurred before 1940. My hunch is that the fully integrated farm systems are responsible for much of the balance. With every team controlling between 150-200 players at any given moment and with an amateur draft since 1965, it is hard for any team to be much better or much worse than any other team. I also suspect that the unique role of the pitcher–the most import player on the team but able to play only a small percentage of the time–also contributes to the balance.
I think it is easier to understand why basketball is less competitive. There the presence of one exceptional player can make an enormous difference. Kareem’s presence, for example, guaranteed a winning season throughout his long career. His addition to the Bucks in the late 1960’s took them from last place to an NBA championship in two years. LaBron James and Dwight Howard are demonstrating this today. In hockey, you also have developed farm systems like baseball, and goalies perform a role similar to pitchers, although individual goalies play much more than individual pitchers.
The real mystery is the NFL, which has (or had) rules designed to force the break-up of better teams–salary caps, reverse order draft–and a playing climate where most careers are much shorter than careers in other sports. Even so, the Patriots and Lions have significantly beaten the curve. As I note above, over the last 10 years the Pats are 112-48. Only three baseball teams have done better in a season in the last 70 years. Over the same period, the Lions are a woeful 42-118. In the past 70 years only the ’62 Mets were worse than that.
In spite of rules designed to encourage competitive balance, there is something about football that makes it possible for skillful or inept management to beat the system. In baseball, this is nearly impossible. As we know, in baseball the best teams lose at least one-third of their games and the worst teams win at least one third. In-sdeason differentiation occurs based on what happens in that “middle third.”
Things like rules and injuries do make a difference, but I am leaning toward the belief that there is something about the games themselves, or at least the way in which talent is distributed, that makes the difference. If a major league baseball team played a series of games against its own AAA affiliate, I am convinced that while the major league team would win most of the games, the minor league team would win several, maybe something like 6 of 20. This even though the major league team has the ability to pick the 25 best players for its roster and designate the worst 25 to the minor league team. The abilities of the best players are not incredibly greater than the abilities of the next best 25, particularly given the tendencies of pitcher to have good and bad days. However, if an NFL team had a 48-man taxi squad that practiced on its own, my hunch is that the NFL team would defeat the back-up team every time. The talent disparity would, I think, be much greater. The same would certainly be true if an NBA team played a series of games against at team in the NBDL (the NBA’s developmental league). On the other hand, I would expect an NHL team to lose occasionally in games with its AHL affiliate. If nothing else, the AHL goalie would occasionally have a phenomenal game in the same way that mediocre pitcher occasionally have spectacular outings.
I should note that I responded to the Eigenauer post before I had an opportunity to read Martin Tanz’s observations.
I agree with Martin that the levelling effects in baseball are ultimately more a product of the way the game is played–particularly in regard to pitching–than they are a product of the way the competition is organized.
That probably applies to the much wider disparity in outcome that we see in other sports.
Professor Hylton,
If you took the best and worst football teams out of the equation, does the greater football disparity go away?
In some ways, I think your focus on individual seasons misses a major point.
The major point is how many team’s fans can feel as if their team has a realistic shot to win the league in the coming years.
The NFL has gained its current reputation because it is designed in a way that at least 30 teams have a realistic shot of winning the Super Bowl within the next 10 years. Major League Baseball has dramatically increased the number of teams with a realistic chance of winning the league in recent years. By comparison in some of Europe’s top domestic soccer leagues there are only 4 or 5 teams have a realistic shot of winning the league within the next 10 years. Blackburn Rovers won the English Premier League in 1995, yet fans today feel as if TV & Champions League money has made the gap between the big clubs & the rest so large that Blackburn have no shot of winning the league under the current arrangement. There are similar issues in other countries, such as 2 clubs in Spain having vastly larger budgets than others. When the domestic seasons conclude in May it will mark a 10 year stretch where only 3 clubs won the English top-flight, 3 clubs won the Spanish top-flight, & 4 won Italy. It will mark a stretch of 7 consecutive seasons where only 4 clubs even finished in England’s top 3 & 6 consecutive years of Spain’s big 2 finishing in the top 3.