The Case Against the 2022 Dodgers

Baseball Greatness and the Politics of Time

The Case Against the 2022 Dodgers

Time for a little controversy.

I want to preface this by saying that I know that the 2022 Los Angeles Dodgers were a great team. There’s no question.

However, I think that you can make a good argument against them being one of the greatest teams of all time.

The Greatness Discussion

If you spend time looking through all the books and articles that have ever been written on the greatest baseball teams of all time, you’ll notice something. They all focus on won-loss records.

Now, this makes sense, right? After all, the best teams of all time tend to win their games. Nobody in their right mind is going to take an 82-79 team and call them the greatest of all time.

I suppose you can’t blame our media commentators when they take a look at the Dodgers’ 111-51 record and have stars in their eyes. And don’t tell them about their pythagorean won-loss record projection, which works out to a whopping 116-46. Yes, that’s right: the Dodgers were unlucky in 2022 to the tune of 5 games, which is a pretty big amount.

The Dodgers’ inability to get past the Padres in the NLDS had an interesting, albeit temporary, impact on the baseball media world. Some decried the increasing irrelevance of the regular season. Others hinted that wild card teams might have a path that is too easy to the postseason. Some merely basked in the attention that inevitably comes when a huge team collapses. And, of course, some moronic fans demanded immediate change from a team that dominated the regular season.

Now that the yelling has ended, now that the arguments over whether the postseason is a meaningless exhibition have temporarily died down, let’s take a closer look at the one aspect of the 2022 Dodgers that nobody talks about.

The Imbalanced Schedule

Did you know that Major League Baseball does not have a balanced schedule?

It doesn’t. In fact, the schedule isn’t even close to balanced. Baseball’s schedule is so far away from being balanced that any serious student of statistics will have to ask questions of how meaningful regular season won-loss records really are.

You can read all about it here at Wikipedia. If you don’t want to read all that, though (and I don’t blame you), let me sum it up quickly.

Between 1904 and 1960 (all years inclusive), teams played an evenly balanced 154 game schedule, playing each opponent 22 times. There was no interleague play. The one exception to this rule was in 1919, when owners decided to shorten the season arbitrarily for fear of lack of fan interest after the war.

Expansion didn’t knock out the balanced schedule, either.

When the American League expanded in 1961, it went to a 162 game schedule. Each team played each of its 9 opponents 18 times. You should be familiar about this: this was the year that they wanted to give Roger Maris an asterisk in the record books because his 61 home runs came in 162 games, not 154.

The National League followed suit in 1962. Like the American League, its schedule was balanced.

Everything changed in 1969.

Between 1969 and 1992 (inclusive), National League teams played 18 games against teams in their own division and 12 games against teams in the other division.

The American League followed this pattern between 1969 and 1976. However, when Seattle and Toronto joined in 1977, the American League plan changed: first to 15 games against teams in the same division and 10 or 11 against teams in the other division, and then to 13 games against teams in the same division and 12 against teams in the other division in 1979.

The National League adopted that 13 / 12 system when it expaned in 1993, and that’s how things were until 1997.

Now, I should add a quick note here. Playing 13 games against some teams and 12 against other teams isn’t a huge discrepancy. I think we can live with that system. In the long run, the difference in the competition level is largely going to come out in the wash.

I have a bigger problem when we’re talking about 18 games within the division and 12 games without. Some teams might benefit from having weak opposition in their division. Other good teams might wind up with a poor won-loss record because there just so happened to be teams of equal strength in their division. It makes these “greatness” conversations even harder.

The schedules today, however, make it impossible.

Why I Hate Interleague Play

There are many reasons to hate interleague play.

The one that gets to me the most, though is the scheduling disparities that it creates.

Let’s take a look at how the Dodgers played against each of their opponents in 2022:

Now, I didn’t do anything funky to get this total. I merely went to this Baseball Reference page and took a screenshot.

You can see right here, though, how funky the schedule is. The Dodgers played 19 games against each division rival, and then either 6 or 7 games against other National League teams.

They then had 4 games against the Angels (their designated interleague rival), and 3 games against AL Central teams for some random reason.

Now, for the sake of comparison, let’s see how the San Diego Padres did against each opponent:

The Padres had a similar schedule: 19 games against each division rival, 6 or 7 against other National League teams, 3 games against each AL Central team for whatever reason, and 4 games against their designated interleague rival. That rival team is the Seattle Mariners, and I can guarantee that there is no logic whatsoever behind that designation.

Now hold everything right there. We’ve already come across an absolutely huge scheduling discrepancy. The Padres had to play four games against the Mariners, a hot young team with an exciting star centerfielder, while the Dodgers got to play their four games against the Angels, who were en route to yet another ho-hum season.

The schedule lacks any semblance of equity.

Want to have more fun? Take a look at the Pittsburgh Pirates:

Nobody in their right mind would argue that the 2022 Pirates were a good team. At 62-100, they had one of the worst records of all teams in major league baseball.

But you’ll notice a few odd things when you compare this record against what we just saw from the Dodgers. While the Dodgers were feasting on NL West pitching, the Pirates had to play 19 times each against the Cardinals and Brewers. And, while the Dodgers had 15 games against AL Central teams, the Pirates had to play their 15 interleague games against the AL West, with predictable results.

The real funny thing here, of course, is that the Pirates dominated the season series with the Dodgers, 5-1:

So why do I hate interleague play? Because of the imbalance that it forces on the schedule.

Sample Size

Look: we’re always going to have a fundamental problem when we talk about great baseball teams in the post-1997 era.

That problem is called sample size.

There’s simply no way that we can adjust for the fact that the Dodgers played 4 games against the Angels while the Pirates had to play 4 against the Yankees.

Traditionally, statisticians have loved baseball because of the length of its regular season. The 154/162 game world meant that a lot of the sample size problems that plague analysis in sports like college football were never really a problem in baseball. Getting lucky and facing a poor pitcher here or there would largely come out in the wash.

But it’s simply not the same with these scheduling discrepancies. And cutting things down to make adjustments here and there for strength of schedule isn’t going to fix things — especially not when you’re talking about 3 games here and 4 games there.

Consider me an old fashioned traditionalist if you want. Still, I really long for the days when the schedule was even, when we knew that a first place team belonged there because they were the most dominant team in the league, and not because they happened to have a weak schedule.

The Dodgers went 4-0 against the Angels and 4-0 against the Twins last year. Their interleague record was a resounding 15-5. They showed great talent against certain poor teams, sweeping the likes of the Cubs and Reds for 14 more wins combined, and yet struggled against Colorado (11-8), the Mets (3-4), the Phillies (3-4), and the Nationals (3-3).

Would they have fared as well with a different schedule? If they had been in the NL East, would they have won 111 games? What if there were no interleague play at all? What if there were no divisions at all?

Implications

There’s another problem here that nobody wants to talk about.

If teams don’t play the same opponents, how reliable is our statistical analysis on the player level?

We’ve asked that question in the past, by the way. The old arguments between American League and National League fans were not just about choice of team colors or favorite players. There were real questions in the past about whether one league was stronger than the other, and whether this could even be measured.

All of our advanced baseball analytics are based on the premise that players play against a certain general “major league” level of opposition. Sometimes a hitter faces a better than average pitcher, sometimes he faces a guy going back down to AA — but it all comes out in the wash, in theory.

But the truth is a lot messier than that. Some players benefit from being on teams that face unusually weak schedules, and some players struggle because they face higher levels of opposition talent.

Not only am I convinced that we don’t do enough to account for that, I am convinced that we cannot.

And we can blame it all on interleague play — an experiment that has irretrievably muddied the waters for no real benefit.