Strength of Schedule

As we saw from the projected standings I recently posted, I consider the AL East the majors’ most-stacked division (duh!), with three teams forecast to win at least 94 games, and the eventual runner-up likely to win the league’s wild card. The NL East features three strong teams as well, with the second-place club likely to be in the thick of the wild card hunt. Given that these contenders’ interleague slates vary – the Mets play the Yankees six times due to their “natural rivalry,” and likewise for the Braves vs. Red Sox, but the Phillies draw the considerably weaker Blue Jays, and the Rays face the Marlins – it’s worth gauging the impact of the differing schedules.

To evaluate this, I used the aforementioned projected records to calculate the opponents’ winning percentages for all 30 teams, not only for the entire season, but also month-by-month and half-by-half so as to better appreciate the schedule’s contours. Instead of using the raw projected winning percentages, I applied two adjustments based on data from the last three years, one to account for the home team winning 55% of the time, and the other for the AL winning 58% of interleague games. This is a relatively simple task; a 25-point (.025) bonus or tax is applied based on whether the opponent is at home or on the road, and a 40-point (.040) one is applied for interleague play.

Thus when the Athletics (.519) play the Giants (.469) at the Coliseum, the latter’s adjusted winning percentage is recorded as .469 – .025 – .040 = .404. When they play at AT&T Park, it’s recorded as .469 + .025 – .040 = .454. From the Giants’ point of view, the Athletics are a .584 team (.519 + .025 + .040) in Oakland and a .534 team (.519 – .025 + .040) in San Francisco. Applying these adjustments uniformly is fairly crude, since it may be true that more extreme teams on either end of the spectrum have differing home/road or interleague splits, but for this exercise, it’s what we’re using.

Below are the full-season strength-of-schedule measurements:

Team Opp W%
Marlins .519
Orioles .514
Blue Jays .513
Nationals .512
Rockies .507
Padres .506
Pirates .506
Phillies .506
Braves .505
Mets .504
Red Sox .504
Giants .503
Astros .503
Yankees .501
Rangers .501
White Sox .500
Rays .500
Cardinals .498
Brewers .497
Reds .496
Royals .496
Mariners .494
Angels .493
Twins .493
Athletics .493
Dodgers .492
D’backs .492
Indians .491
Tigers .490
Cubs .488

As you marvel at the brutality facing the bottom two clubs in the two Easts, consider the following:

• Among contenders within the same division, full-season strength-of-schedule effects are overstated in the grand scheme of things. Only in the NL Central do the top two teams have more than three points (.003, or a half a game over the course of 162 games) of schedule difference between them; the nine-point advantage in that division equals roughly a game and a half over the course of 62 games) of scheduling difference between them. The top pairs in both Wests are effectively even. The NL East’s top trio, who have the toughest schedules of any contenders, are separated by just two points. These distinctions aren’t minor if they pertain to your chances, but in the big picture, injuries, reliever leverage, and players dramatically over- or under-performing relative to expectations will go further to shape the final standings.

• Among NL wild card contenders, strength of schedule should have a more drastic effect. The schedules of the Dodgers and Diamondbacks measure out at a .492 opponent winning percentage, while those of the Mets, Phillies, and Braves come in between .504 and .506, about a two-game difference. The Brewers, who with an 83-win projection need all the help they can get, catch a break facing opponents with a .497 winning percentage.

• Though the differences between division contenders are small, the breakdowns by half (before and after the All-Star break) are more pronounced. In the NL West, the Dodgers’ first-half slate measures out at .499, while the Diamondbacks’ is just .489. In the second half, L.A. plays the third-easiest schedule (.485) of any team, while Arizona faces a .496 slate. Coupling those splits with the likelihood that the Dodgers will be better able to take on salary at the trading deadline than the Snakes, and it’s not hard to imagine a race following a similar pattern to last year, with the Dodgers staying close in the first half and then breezing in the second.

• In the AL Central, the tables could turn almost perfectly. The Indians (.498 before, .481 after) and Tigers (.482, .498) both face the league’s easiest schedule in one half. Interleague play against the relatively weak NL Central helps account for the weakness of the Tigers’ early schedule, while the Tribe’s easier second half includes 10 games against the Mariners (seven of them at home), 12 games against the Twins (split evenly home and road) and six games hosting the Rangers. Note that Cleveland’s first half is actually the league’s sixth-hardest, and that at a projected 86 wins, the Indians aren’t exactly a powerhouse themselves. We might expect, as in 2006 and 2008, for them to stumble out of the gate but pick up momentum as the season progresses. Whether Eric Wedge is around to see that through is another matter.

• Thanks to their six-pack with the Yankees and the East-vs.-East pairings, the Mets have by far the toughest interleague schedule at .611, followed by the Marlins (.585), Braves (.575) and Phillies (.568). On the other side of the coin, the Tigers (.440), Royals (.441), Rangers (.444) and Rays (.444) have the easiest interleague draws. Among AL teams, the White Sox play the toughest interleague schedule (.484), followed by the Yankees (.480) and Red Sox (.475).

• As for September/October schedules, the Yankees have a slight advantage in the AL East at .507, compared to the Rays at .510 and the Red Sox at .512. Note that the Rays host the Yanks for the season’s final three games, while the Sox host the Indians. In the AL West, the A’s (.475) have a large advantage over the Angels (.495). In the NL East, the Phillies (.479) get the favorable draw relative to the Mets (.491) and Braves (.493), and in the NL West, the fates are with the Dodgers (.463) instead of the Diamondbacks (.496).

• Given Cole Hamel’s early elbow problems, the Phillies are lucky they have the easiest schedule of any team in April (.471). The defending champions had better get their house in order by June, because they’ll face the toughest schedule of any team in any month at .551. In a virtual tie for second-hardest month is Oakland’s July (.550), which could trigger another fire sale at the trading deadline if the youngsters on the team don’t hold up their end.

As for our heroes, the strength of their opponents breaks down by month thusly:

April .520
May .507
June .501
July .452
Aug .498
Sep/Oct .520

So the Giants start off with a relatively tough schedule in April. (But again, look at the poor Marlins; the Giants’ April is almost the same as the Marlins schedule for the entire season!) In fact, if the Giants can make it through April and May at roughly .500, they may still be within shouting distance of first place. If they can capitalize on the relatively weak opponents they face in July and August, maybe – just maybe – they will be in contention late in the season. Of course, they might have to trade pitching for hitting at the deadline to accomplish that. Let’s just hope that Sabean, if he makes a dramatic move, doesn’t mortgage the future, nor evaluate potential hitting acquisitions the way he did Aaron Rowand.

 

Giants Have Had It Harder Than Most

Given the relative success so far this season of teams like the Marlins and Cardinals, whom I had not expected to do well, I was curious as to whether strength or weakness of schedule had helped or hurt teams so far this season.  Using Baseball Prospectus’s adjusted standings page, and specifically BP’s stats for Equivalent Runs, Equivalent Runs Allowed, and the adjusted sets of those numbers (see the notes on the BP page and their glossary for the math), we can indeed determine which teams in baseball have had the toughest and easiest schedules through games of yesterday, May 5:

Toughest                         Easiest

Rockies                            Cardinals

Nationals                         Cubs

Pirates                             Phillies

Giants                             Marlins

Reds                                Braves

We can immediately see from this that the AL has a lot more parity right now, with five NL teams having tougher schedules than any AL team (toughest schedule so far in the AL is Tampa Bay), and six NL teams having an easier schedule than the AL’s easiest (the Angels).  Given what we know about the teams other than their records and schedules, it’s fair to say the Marlins are a sandcastle, and the Cards’ position is not sustainable.  The Giants have had a tough stretch of their schedule, and perhaps that is reason to hope that their winning percentage, better than I for one expected it to be at this point, can actually be sustained.  (Of course, it would still mean 90 losses.)

Remember, it’s only been 30-odd games, and so small-sample-size caveats apply.

 

Scheduling Mayhem

At one point early this month, the Seattle Mariners had had more games postponed (four) than they’d played (three). With a makeup-of-a-makeup wiped out, the Mariners left Cleveland having not played a game that counted in the standings in four days. The solution is not as simple as scheduling first-week games in warm-weather or domed parks. Teams would, all things considered, prefer to have home dates clustered in June through August, and sticking a segment of teams with a disproportionate number of early-season home games creates problems. Moreover, it’s a bad idea to create policies in reaction to a particular event. It’s unfortunate that the Seattle-Cleveland series became a bit of a circus, but there’s no solution to this issue that is going to be acceptable to enough people to enact. Well, you could start the season a week later and schedule six doubleheaders along the way, but good luck convincing MLB to go back to that.

One obvious solution to the immediate problem would be not to schedule a team’s only trip to a cold-weather city in the first week of April. The rainouts of two of the Giants three games in Pittsburgh last week would be hard enough to solve if the Giants were scheduled to revisit Pittsburgh. With a second trip not on the schedule, it becomes a minor nightmare, likely requiring extra home games for the Giants, or doubleheaders on travel days, or something equally confounding.

The more time I spend with the schedule, however, the more I see that it’s filled with odd quirks that particularly affect certain teams, if not quite so dramatically as being snowed out of a four-game series. It makes me wonder whether MLB has handled its schedulers the way an overbearing manager handles his bullpen: making constant changes until he finds the reliever who doesn’t have it that day.

I’m certain that this opinion is informed by my age. When I first began to follow National League baseball in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the schedule was a pretty simple thing, and remained that way through 1992. As a boy following the Atlanta Braves, I knew the Braves would fly all the way out to the West Coast three times a year, playing the Giants, Dodgers and Padres, always sharing the trip with the Astros and Reds. I can still remember when I, at maybe eight years old, figured out the NL’s scheduling plan with a pencil and paper at my desk at home. (“Five times 18, plus 12 times six . . . wow!)

Now, there’s no rhyme or reason to the schedule, no travel pattern that makes any sense. The Giants played (or tried to) a weekend series in Pittsburgh, but instead of trips to New York and Philadelphia on either side of that set, they played at San Diego before it, and then flew to Denver to face the Rockies after it. The Giants play eight series in the Eastern time zone this year, and they’ll make six separate trips into that time zone to get them played. How does that serve anyone?

The root cause of this is trying to play too many opponents in 26 weeks. The NL’s old version — 18 games against each of your division opponents, and 12 games against every other team in the league — was symmetrical in its way. Now, teams are playing 18, 19, 20 opponents, and added to that, playing some of those teams up to 19 games each. It’s virtually impossible to create a schedule that doesn’t have odd travel sequences, risky elements and a lot more flying than was the case twenty years ago.

MLB has simply tried to do too much with its schedule. I’m not sure you can reasonably play everyone in your league, play a clutch of interleague games, play a disproportionate number of games within your division, and do all that without making scheduling a Rube Goldberg contraption. There are already very good competitive reasons to oppose interleague play — take a peek at the interleague slates of the Mets and, well, any other NL team, as an example — and unbalanced schedules have been distorting wild-card races for nearly a decade. When you consider the travel and scheduling burdens these elements create, that should be the final nail in the coffin for this structure. Sensible scheduling should be a part of any good sports league. MLB doesn’t have that, and likely can’t have that, unless it gives up one of its two pet projects — the unbalanced schedule and interleague play.