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In 2002, Commissioner Bed Selig contended that baseball was so competitively unbalanced that he threatened to contract two Major League teams. In reality, competition between ML teams is more balanced than it has ever been.
All NL East teams are currently over .500. This is the latest in a season that an entire division has been over .500 since 1994, when all the AL East remained winners through the 12th of June. In the 2000 season, no major league team won or lost even 60% of their games. That’s the only time in ML history for this to have happened. As a result, no team was more than 30 games back. Compare that to 1899, when Cleveland won just 13% of their games and finished 83.5 games out of first. We’ve had a different World Series winner five years in a row now. That's something that never happened between 1903 and 1968.
So why all the furor about competitive balance over the past 5-10 years? Well, the decade of the 80’s featured perhaps baseball’s most competitive, exciting, and varied play ever. The Yankee and Brave dynasties therefore were not welcomed as much as the A’s and Reds’ were in the 70’s.
But there also exists another possibility. The newly released National Pastime by economists Stefan Szymanski and Andrew Zimbalist offers a unique comparison of the business aspects of baseball, America’s sport, and Football, the world’s sport. It thoroughly explores the somewhat ambiguous competitive balance issue: how prevalent it is, what factors contribute to it, and how much it actually affects attendance. We can conclude from their evidence that Selig must have some alternate agenda when he rants and raves about the impossibility of small market teams competing with the larger market ones.
Get a copy of Natinal Pasttime for yourself and explore the issue thouroughly.
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