This is the follow-up study of how well the top ranked AL teams in Runs Scored and Runs Allowed have fared in the playoffs during the Wild Card era, after I recently published my NL study. So that new readers can understand what I'm doing, I'm including the original beginning of my NL Study here:
I've been interested in the best ways to make the playoffs for a long while because the team I'm a fan of never made the playoffs much, let alone won a World Series championship, for many decades, for the entirety of their existence in this city. In the mid-2000's, I ran across two similar but different studies into Billy Beane's statement that his "stuff" didn't work in the playoffs, so I was very interested in if my team was following the findings.
While my study isn't as overarching or as statistically sophisticated as these two, I wanted to first recap their findings, so that one can see the difference between their datasets and methodologies and what I analyzed.
Studies of Success in MLB Playoffs
The findings of both Baseball Prospectus (in its chapter on Billy Beane) and Fangraphs The Hardball Times was both obvious and controversial: both found that it is pitching and fielding excellence that leads to success (winning) in the playoffs, and in going deep into the playoffs. The more controversial finding was that offense wasn't much of a factor in teams being successful in the playoffs. Each used similar but widely different methodologies.
The Fangraphs article compared dozens of offensive and defensive metrics of each playoff series' opponents and gave wins and losses based on whether the one with the better metric won or loss. Then it narrowed this win-loss data further by requiring a significant difference to record the wins and losses, as a way to filter out the borderline cases. 9 of the Top 12 were pitching or fielding metrics. And only one of the three offensive metrics were related to hitting, the other two were related to base stealing.
Baseball Prospectus used a scoring system, Playoff Success Points (PSP) to rate each playoff teams' success in going deep into the playoffs, and used correlation analysis to investigate various metrics vs PSP, a much different and statistically sophisticated methodology, but still came to the same conclusion, that pitching and fielding defense is vitally important in the playoffs, while offense doesn't. It only found one offensive metric of any statistical significance, which was base steal attempts (not stolen bases, nor successfully stolen, simply total steal attempts). Through a variety of more sophisticated statistical analysis, using regression analysis and tying it to PSP, BP came to the startling conclusion that "while preventing runs correlates with post season success, scoring them does not."
They narrowed down a long list of significantly correlated metrics, only one of which was related to offense (which as noted was base stealing attempts, there were none related to hitting), down to their secret sauce: a dominating pitching staff (as measured by K/9), a good closer (as measured by their WRXL metric, which they no longer calculate), and a good fielding defense. They no longer use this secret sauce, but that's another story*.
(* Side Note: Unfortunately, they no longer use this because a few years after publishing the book, they published a few articles reporting on that year's playoffs, and it did not do well in prediction. But they clearly misapplied the results, which resulted in the poor results that caused them to stop using it. Instead of comparing current playoff teams against each other, as they did in these annual analysis, they should have placed each new playoff team into their historical dataset and see where they ranked historically, and see what similar PSP teams did in the playoffs, as that is what they did to create their original Top 10 list, which had 9 of the 10 making the World Series, 8 of the 9 winning the World Series, with the one loser losing to one of the 8).
Methodology
I wanted to try my own study of the playoffs and came up with this idea: comparing the top NL Runs Allowed teams vs. the top NL Runs Scored teams. I wanted to see what type of findings I could come up with using this simpler methodology, as my data analytics skills is still nascent, but I still wanted to try something. Obviously, this is the AL version of that study.
I decided to just use the years since the Wild Card format was implemented, as that's a slightly different set of data than the divisional playoffs history, given that the original studies above were done to 2003 and 2005, respectively, so my study would have around 20 years of new Wild Card playoff data utilized in my study, while overlapping slightly with the two above, which covered the divisional playoffs which started in 1972. Given a much different set of data, though with some overlap, I was testing to see if the new playoff format led to a different conclusion than the two studies above.
So I investigated how the top 5 RA and RS teams did in the AL playoffs since 1995. I collected the Top 5 teams over the whole period, despite the recent change from 4 to 6 playoff teams, to keep the data consistent, plus the fact that Top 5 already covers a third of the AL teams. Then I split them into three groups: Dual Leaders, where the teams were both RA and RS Leaders, RA Leaders, where the teams were only RA Leaders, and RS Leaders, where the teams were only RS Leaders.
Playoff Results by RA and RS Rank
Overall, it was clearly better to be be a Dual Leader, and better to be an RA leader to go deeper into the playoffs:
- Total teams: 60 Dual; 85 RA only; 85 RS only Leader Teams
- Total Playoff teams: 55 Dual; 35 RA only; 38 RS only
- Total ALCS teams: 29 Dual; 15 RA only; 12 RS only
- Total WS teams: 17 Dual; 8 RA only; 4 RS only
In total 62% of RA Leader teams made the playoffs vs. 64% of the RS Leader teams, a difference of 3 teams, and widely different from the NL, where RA Leader teams dominated. Separating out the Duel Leaders, 92% of the Dual teams made the playoffs (which makes total sense), 41% of the RA only Leader teams made the playoffs, and 45% of the RS only Leader teams made the playoffs. There is virtually no different between being an RA Leader or RS Leader in the AL.
However, being an RA Leader is a key factor in going deeper into the playoffs, with 25 of the 29 World Series AL participants (ALCS winners) were RA Only Leaders or Dual Leaders, and only 4 of the RS Only Leaders reached. And 8 RA Only Leaders (23% of RA Only playoff teams; 9% of all RA Only Leaders) vs. 4 RS Only Leaders (11% of RS Only playoff teams; 5% of all RS Only Leaders) were in the World Series, double in number, even though RA Only Leader teams made the playoffs slightly less than RS Only teams in playoff participation (35 RA Only, which is 23%, vs. 38 RS Only, or 11%).
Ranking Comparisons
Overall, the Top RS teams got into the playoffs more often than the Top R teams, 64% vs. 62%, which is only marginally better. Comparing the rankings means much less datapoint per population, but it was still interesting to see the results.
Results were similar from 2 to 4, but much different for 1 and 5:
- RA 66% < RS 90%
- RA 79% ~ RS 79%
- RA 69% ~ RS 66%
- RA 41% ~ RS 45%
- RA 55% > RS 41%
Based on this data, being a Top 3 RA or RS team is a lot more effective for getting into the playoffs than being a Top 4 or 5 RA or RS team, when comparing overall ranking. In addition, the addition of the second wild card team, starting in 2012, has made it more of an advantage of being an RA Leader team, as 9 of those 12 RA #5 teams made the playoffs, vs. 7 of the 12 RS #5 teams, which was only 58% (vs. overall 64%).
Ranking Comparison using PSP
Using Baseball Prospectus' Playoff Success Point (PSP) scoring (which awards 3 points for making the playoffs, another 3 points for winning the LDS, another 4 points for winning the LCS, and another 4 points for winning the World Series, and then +1 for each postseason win and -1 for each postseason loss; there were no Wild Card games in their data set, so I just counted the +/- 1 for each Wild Card game), I found similar results.
An average total of 19.7 for the Top RA teams was tallied, versus 17.7 for the Top RS teams tallied, or 11% better overall. So, this datapoint confirms that the RA teams also did much better overall in going deeper into the playoffs.
Cutting deep into the data, for RA Only and RS Only, across the Top 5, while the data points count ranges from 14 to 20 (less than the 30 data points that text books teaches), I thought it would be interesting to present:
The RA Only teams mostly outperformed the RS Only teams when comparing by ranking. Oddly, the #1 RA Only teams have not done well at all in making the playoffs and hasn't gotten to a World Series yet. More of them are Dual RA teams, so perhaps it is a quirk of the data set, where the Dual RA teams do very well. For the other ranks, generally, while they have made the playoffs at about the same rate, RA Only teams made the World Series many more times than the RS only teams. And overall, RA Only teams made the World Series 8 times vs. 4 times for RS Only teams, and this is in spite of the fact that RS Only teams made the playoffs more often (38 times) than RA Only teams (35 times)
Here is the data for the Dual leaders by their ranks in RA vs RS (total data points ranged from 9 to 15):
Clearly it is best to be a Dual Leader, as noted before and clear to any baseball fan. The Average PSP is much higher for most of the Dual splits than it is for the RA Only and RS Only splits by rank. There is randomness by rank, but compared to their RA Only and RS Only fellow rankers, they are obviously much more successful in the playoffs, which make obvious sense, they are best in both, and not just one. However, generally, a lower rank hasn't been as good a combination for Dual Leaders going deep into the playoffs, even if they are a Top RA Leader.
In any case, the AL playoffs are even more dominated by RA and RS leading teams than the NL. There were a total of 133 playoff spots in the 29 years of playoffs, and these teams took 128 of them, or 96% of them. These Leader Teams also went to the World Series 29 of those 29 seasons, or 100%.
Recent Trend: Dual Leaders Are More Prevalent
Dual Leader teams have become more common in recent years. In the first 15 seasons, there were 25 Dual Leader teams (1.7 per season). In the 14 years since, there has been 35 Dual Leader teams (2.5 per season, 50% higher). As shown above, being a Dual Leader has meant making the playoffs almost 100%, with only five teams out of 60 not making the playoffs.
Once making the playoffs, things are as expected for Dual Leader teams.
- 31% of the Dual Leader playoff teams made the World Series (28% of all Dual Leader teams)
- 23% of the RA Only Playoff teams made the World Series (9% of all RA Only teams), and lastly,
- 11% of the RS Only Playoff teams made the World Series (4% of all RS Only teams).
Altogether, 53% of the Dual Leader playoff teams made the ALCS (48% of all Dual Leader teams), 43% of the RA Only Playoff teams made the NLCS (18% of all RA Only teams), and 32% of the RS Only Playoff teams made the NLCS (14% of all RS Only teams). Again, RS Only Leaders do not perform as well as the RA Leader teams in going deep into the playoffs.
Wild Card Effects
The Wild Card has helped a lot of the RA/RS Leader teams make the playoffs. Out of the 43 Wild Card teams (excluding 2020, when all the teams were Wild Card teams), 41 of them were RA Only, RS Only, or Dual Leader teams (95%). Only 2 non-leader teams got into the playoffs via the Wild Card (versus 5 in the NL).
Unlike the NL, where there were 5 non-leader teams and 3 of them made the World Series, the AL only had 2 non-leader teams and they fizzled out of the playoffs quickly with a Wild Card loss and a Division Series loss. Also unlike the NL, the Dual Leader Wild Card teams did much better in the playoffs, with 3 of 17 (18%) making the World Series, and 8 (47%) making it at least to the ALCS. Only 1 of 11 RA Only (9%) made the World Series and 1 of 13 RS Only (8%) made the World Series, and 2 of 11 RA Only (18%) made the ALCS and 4 of 13 RS Only (31%) made the ALCS, all much less than the Dual Leader Wild Card teams. So while the RA Only teams ruled the Wild Card teams in the NL, it was the Dual Leader teams that ruled the Wild Card teams in the AL.
Making the Playoffs: The Non-Leaders
Altogether, from 1995 to 2023, there were 133 playoff teams, with 55 Dual Leaders, 35 RA Only Leaders, and 38 RS Only Leaders, which means that there were only 5 Non-Leader teams that made the playoffs, or 4% of the playoff teams were not categorized as a leader in that season. That's half of the NL (which had 11 and 8%).
Unlike the NL, these five teams did not do much in the playoffs. There were one Wild Card loss, two Divisional Series losses, and two Championship Series losses. And 3 of the 5 were from the Wild Card.
Looking at the teams inhabiting the 43 Wild Card teams, I noticed a few teams who benefited most from the Wild Card slots. The Yankees and Red Sox benefitted the most, with each gaining the playoffs 8 times via the Wild Card, in the 28 seasons with at least one wild card team (skipping 2020, where every team was treated as a wild card team). That's 19% of the open slots each. And the Rays got a Wild Card slot 5 times, while the A's got one 4 times, and the Rays got 3 slots. Altogether, these teams got 28 out of 43 slots, or 65% of the slots.
Defense Is Best for Winning in the Playoffs
The findings of Baseball Prospectus and Fangraphs/TheHardballTimes were partically supported by this study of the Wild Card playoffs era in the AL. The RA and RS teams were making the playoffs about the same amount of the time, and similarly for RA Only and RS Only, though I should note that so far, the RS teams have made the playoffs a few times more.
However, deeper runs through the playoffs happens more often for RA teams than RS teams. Overall, 44 RA teams made the ALCS vs. 41 RS teams (although 93 RS teams made the playoffs vs. 90 RA teams), and 25 World Series teams for RA vs 21 RS teams.
This is repeated for RA Only vs RS Only teams. There were 15 ALCS RA Only teams vs 12 ALCS RS Only teams, but 8 World Series RA Only teams vs. 4 World Series RS Only teams.
All of these findings from this study, that it is defense (RA excellence) that more frequently leads to winning in the playoffs and thus deeper runs into the playoffs, aligns with the findings from the Baseball Prospectus and Fangraphs/The Hardball Times studies. But unlike the NL playoff study, being an RA Leader in the AL did not lead to more playoff spots.
As follow up to these studies, I think I will look into the Top 5 overall RA and RS for the MLB, and see what that data shows. Clearly, within the NL and AL, being an RA Leader helps with making deeper runs into the playoffs. What I also found was that so far, more AL teams have won a World Series than NL during the Wild Card era. I've suspected for a while now that the AL has had an advantage because they had a full time hitter at DH, which I feel is an advantage when the DH is used (because they have a full time hitter in that role, vs. the NL having, at best, an okay hitter off the bench) and an advantage with no DH (a full time hitter now sitting on the bench, who can come in and deliver a key hit or walk at least a third of the time).
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