Yankees or Mariners?

I have a soft spot in my heart for the Mariners. While I never was a fan of their team, Seattle did play against the Angels and Royals who did hold my childhood allegiance and one time and another. And I don’t like the Yankees. I lived in NY for 5 years, and no matter how hard I tried, I just could not convince myself to be a Yankee fan. I would get visible upset when Susan Waldman and John Sterling would interrupt the normal radio program to broadcast a Yankees game (I know wish the Rangers had their own Susan and John, their announcers put me to sleep after calling out a Josh Hamilton home run). In spite of this, I will try to provide an unbiased discussion of competitive balance.

Let’s turn back the clock to 2001. The Mariners had an amazing year. Their star players were a young Ichiro, a power hitting second baseman named Bret Boone, solid veterans like Jay Buhner and John Olerud, and even had the young Jamie Moyer on the mound (by young, I mean younger than he is today. He was still old in 2001). They put together one of the best single season any major league team has ever had. They won a total of 116 regular season wins (to tie the record set in 1906). To put that in perspective, only one team had 100+ victories this season. The Phillies had the best record with 102 wins.

That same year the Yankees ran away with their division, with the second placed team finished 13.5 games back. Their 95 wins was still good, 3^rd best in all of baseball. Their team had many Yankee greats: Derek Jeter, Paul O-Neal, Bernie Williams, Roger Clemens, and Scott Brosius (from Rex Putnam high school near Portland, OR; the one time that I made the starting lineup as a kid was when we played at Rex Putnam High School. We lost)

So the question is who was a better team?

	Seattle	New York
Winning Percentage	.716	.594
Runs Scored – Runs allowed	927 – 627	804 – 713

The record at the end of the regular season, clearly indicates the Mariners where the better team. They had a better offense as they scored more runs than the Yankees, and had a better defense as well.

Now let’s look at what happens when they played each other in the regular season

	Seattle	New York
Winning Percentage	.716	.594
Runs Scored – Runs allowed	927 – 627	804 – 713
Regular Season Matchup	6 wins	3 wins

Again, Mariners are clearly the better team. But they also met in the post-season.

	Seattle	New York
Winning Percentage	.716	.594
Runs Scored – Runs allowed	927 – 627	804 – 713
Regular Season Matchup	6 wins	3 wins
Conference Series	1 win	4 wins
Runs Scored - Runs Allowed	22 – 25	25 – 22

The series only lasted 5 games, as the Yankees won the series by a 4 – 1 margin. So when it really counted, the Yankees won. But as you look at the numbers of the series, the Yankees only scored 3 more runs than the Mariners for the entire series. This series was a lot closer than the final outcome shows.

In fact, the Yankees went on to win the World Series that year and furthered the thought that the Yankees are evidence of a competitive balance problem in baseball.

By most measures, these teams were fairly evenly matched, with the edge really going to the Mariners. The main difference was that the Yankees won their games in October, and as such won, the championship. So looking at only championships as a measure of competitive balance, can skew the actually balance that exists in the league.