Mostly Baseball Today …

The MLB regular season has figuratively entered its second half with the All-Star break behind us.  The All-Star Game was disappointing to execs in MLB and at the networks; the game drew only 7 million viewers and a 3 rating.  By comparison, All-Star Games in the past have drawn as many as 30 million viewers and pulled down ratings near 20.  It was probably 15 years ago that I advocated for all sports leagues to abandon their All-Star Games because they were nothing but garish spectacles where the players obviously did not care nearly as much about winning as was necessary for an entertaining product.  The MLB All-Star Game is far and away the best All-Star spectacle of the four major US sports – – and yet, it is pretty threadbare.

One of the interesting things from the first half of the 2023 MLB season is the lack of correlation between “Opening Day Payroll” and “Current Standings”.  A lot of big money teams have disappointed, and a lot of low-priced teams have surprised.  In business these days, the term “sustainability” has become a cliché; however, this year’s baseball season raises questions of sustainability for some of those surprising teams.  Some data from Statista.com:

• NY Mets:  Highest Opening Day Payroll in MLB history at $353.6M.  The Mets are 4^th in the NL East and are 18.5 games behind the Braves this morning; their record is 43-50.  CBSSports.com projects the Mets with only a 15.1% chance to make the playoffs.
• NY Yankees:  Opening Day Payroll was second highest for this year at $277.0M.  The Yankees and Red Sox are tied for last place in the AL East 9 games behind the Rays.  The Yankees’ record is 50-44.  At least the Yankees are projected to have a 52.9% chance to make the playoffs.
• San Diego Padres:  Opening Day Payroll was third highest for this year at $249.0M.  The Padres are in 4^th place in the NL West and are 10 games behind the Dodgers.  The Padres’ record is 44-50.  Playoff probability is projected to be only 10.4%

So far in 2023, the lack of a salary cap in MLB has not provided the “big spenders” with dominance.  In fact, the best stories for 2023 to date are how the “little guys” have held on for the first half of the season.  More data from Statista.com:

• Baltimore Orioles:  Opening Day Payroll was only $60.7M.  The O’s are in second place in the AL East only 1 game behind the Rays with a record of 57-35.  The O’s’ have won 8 games in a row and their road record is 28-17 which is the best road record in the AL.
• Tampa Bay Rays:  Opening Day Payroll was $73.3M.  This is not all that shocking; the Rays always get more bang for the buck than one would expect.  This year they lead the AL East with a record of 60-36.
• Cincinnati Reds:  Opening Day Payroll was $83.3M.  The Reds are second in the NL Central this morning only 2 games out of first place.  Their record is 50-44.
• Miami Marlins:  Opening Day Payroll was $91.7M.  This morning, the Marlins’ record is 53-42 and they would be a wild-card team if the playoffs began tomorrow.
• Arizona Diamondbacks:  Opening Day Payroll was $116.5M.  The D-Backs are in third place in the NL West only 2 games behind the Dodgers in that division.  Their record to date is 52-42.

Back in March as Spring Training camps closed down, anyone who had this status obtaining in mid-July would have been considered a tad “off-center”.  And yet, here we are.  “Sustainability” is sometimes a nonsense word/concept when it is tossed about in the business world; “sustainability” is at the heart of whatever drama exists in the second half of this year’s MLB regular season.  Those 5 “low-payroll teams” are all playoff eligible as of today …

There is one direct correlation between payroll and performance to date in 2023 that needs to be made.  I refer to the Oakland A’s whose Opening Day Payroll was the lowest in MLB at $56.9M.  The A’s have performed pretty much as one would expect the lowest paid team in MLB to perform.  Consider:

• The A’s had been on pace to shatter the Mets’ standing record of 120 losses in a season until a spasm of competence produced a 7-game win streak.
• Now, the A’’s are projected to lose “only” 117.5 games over the entire regular season.
• The A’s record is 25-70 but that does not tell the entire story.  In those 95 games, the A’s have a run differential of minus-259 runs.  Over 162 games, that projects to a final run-differential of minus-442 runs or a staggering 2.73 runs per game.

[Aside:  I went looking for the worst run-differential posted by a team in MLB history but was not able to find it.  If anyone digs that up, please leave it as a comment here.  I would not be surprised to learn that minus-442 runs for a season would be an all-time record.]

Moving on …  Gregg Drinnan had this in his blog, Keeping Score last week.  It is sort of a CFL story of futility that meshes with the Oakland A’s status just above:

“ICYMI, the Edmonton Elks lost their 20th straight home game on Thursday, dropping an ugly 37-29 decision to the Hamilton Tiger-Cats in front of a whole lot of empty seats. The Elks now share the professional sporting record for most consecutive home losses with the 1953 St. Louis Browns, who moved to Baltimore once that season was over. The Elks will have two weeks to stew over this one. Will Chris Jones still be running things in Edmonton when the B.C. Lions come calling on July 29? He has so many titles there that he likely would have to fire himself and that isn’t going to happen.”

Finally, since I mentioned the Baltimore Orioles as a surprising team for 2023, let me close here with an observation from “The Bard of Baltimore”, H. L. Mencken:

“It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake.”

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports………