For the first time in a decade, no MLB team is going to win 100 games.
Probably.
The upstart Cleveland Guardians currently have MLB’s best record, a 72-49 mark good for a .595 winning percentage. To finish the year with 100 victories, Stephen Vogt, José Ramírez and Co. need to go at least 28-13 over the final 41 games. That’s a .682 clip. The Yankees, Phillies, Orioles and Dodgers, all of whom have surpassed the 70-win plateau and are generally considered more formidable than Cleveland, would have to play even better to reach the century mark.
Most likely, for the first time since 2014, no club will end the year with triple-digit wins. Given recent history, that’s a dramatic shift. A year ago, three teams reached 100. In 2022, that number was four. Over the past decade, MLB has averaged 2.75 teams reaching or surpassing 100 wins per season.
Is this shift a trend or a quirk? And is it a good thing or a bad thing for the sport?
Conversations with more than two dozen industry insiders reveal … a lack of consensus. Some see 2024 as a blip. Those folks believe that a series of specific events, particularly injuries to great players on great teams, are to blame. But other front-office people, MLB coaches and big-league players disagree, viewing the increase in parity as a sign of things to come. That crowd points toward the more balanced schedule, the playoff structure and a homogenous, tentative approach to roster-building as potential causes for this season’s lack of dominant teams.
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Is this season’s parity due to injuries?
The regular season is long and full of terrors. Just look at the 2024 Atlanta Braves.
On Opening Day, FanGraphs projected the Braves for 98.1 wins and a .605 winning percentage, easily the highest mark in MLB. Three consecutive, extremely crucial wins against San Francisco this week have boosted Atlanta to a .533 winning percentage, which puts them on pace for 86 wins.
To account for that gap, look no further than the injured list.
Flame-throwing ace Spencer Strider, who compiled 5.5 fWAR in 2023, made just two starts this season before undergoing Tommy John surgery in mid-April. In late May, reigning NL MVP Ronald Acuña Jr. tore his ACL, sidelining him for the remainder of the season. All-Star catcher Sean Murphy missed the first two months due to an oblique issue. Center fielder Michael Harris II returned Wednesday after a two-month IL stint of his own. Second baseman Ozzie Albies has been out since June 21 because of a fractured wrist.
That’s a notably snakebitten run for a team coming off two consecutive 100-win seasons. Similarly, a rash of injuries, particularly on the pitching side, has plagued the two other clubs that reached triple digits in 2023: Baltimore and Los Angeles.
“I’d be curious if it has to do with the amount of pitching injuries. Looking at the Orioles and the Dodgers, for instance,” one National League front-office person said.
The Orioles have lost four crucial pitchers to Tommy John surgery: last year’s fourth-place Cy Young finisher Kyle Bradish, all-world closer Félix Bautista and rotation staples Tyler Wells and John Means.
Los Angeles’ injuries have arguably been even more impactful. Much-ballyhooed free agent Yoshinobu Yamamoto hasn’t thrown a pitch since mid-June. Both Walker Buehler and Bobby Miller have been compromised. Depth arms Dustin May, Emmet Sheehan, Tony Gonsolin and River Ryan all underwent surgery of some kind. And, of course, perennial MVP candidate Mookie Betts missed two months due to a broken hand.
Analytically inclined baseball people were more likely to classify 2024’s lack of juggernauts as a one-off, as small-sample-size aberration. The scale and scope of devastating injuries to valuable players on the best teams this season has been remarkable and unpredictable (beyond, of course, the never-ending wave of elbow injuries for pitchers). And besides, drawing significant conclusions from a year’s worth of games is always a flawed exercise.
“Anecdotally, it seems like there’s more projected WAR on IL this year [than usual],” one American League front-office person told Yahoo Sports. “I’m guessing this is a short-term randomness thing, and I would expect there to be at least one 100-win team next year or the year after.”
Or is it a sign of things to come?
Baseball is different than it was three years ago. That much is inarguable. Besides the changes to on-field game play, the shift to a more balanced schedule, the larger playoff field and a more general acceptance of analytics have all had an enormous impact.
Have those changes helped create this lower ceiling for the best teams? Many experts think so. One simple take is that the technological advancements that entered the game in the mid-2010s have become accepted practice. The advantages that teams such as Houston and Los Angeles and Tampa Bay derive from data aren’t as big as they once were. If everyone is pretty smart, nobody is that much smarter than anyone else.
But the most agreed-upon theory has to do with the playoff structure and what it incentivizes teams to do … or not do.
A number of insiders, unprompted, made reference to Seattle Mariners president of baseball operations Jerry Dipoto. After his M’s missed out on the 2023 playoffs by one game, finishing the season with a solid, though unspectacular, 88-74 record, Dipoto addressed the media for a year-in-review. It’s the type of media conference that has become standard for top baseball executives following the conclusion of a season. During that availability, Dipoto made a comment that wrinkled some feathers.
“Nobody wants to hear the goal this year is, ‘We’re going to win 54 percent of the time,’” he said. “Because sometimes 54 percent is — one year you’re going to win 60 percent, another year you’re going to win 50 percent — it’s whatever it is. But over time, that type of mindset gets you there.”
Seattle’s POBO was critiqued for being cold, calculating, soulless and risk-averse. But many within the game understood that Dipoto’s biggest crime was saying the quiet part out loud.
“There’s 10 teams trying to win 54 percent,” one American League coach told Yahoo Sports this week.
Nowadays, “just getting in” is often enough when it comes to the MLB postseason. The 2023 Arizona Diamondbacks won 84 regular-season games, snuck into the playoffs, got hot in October and won the National League pennant. That’s the exact blueprint that many teams are crafting. Executives such as Dipoto forgo moves that might increase a team’s ceiling in order to not risk lowering a team’s floor. Emphasizing organizational sustainability is also the best way to not get fired; going for it and failing is what leaves quarter-zip-wearing execs unemployed.
And so the question becomes: Why strive for 100 wins when 88 might achieve the same thing? In other words, being decent and being dominant provide relatively similar chances at glory.
“It’s more efficient to just try and sneak in,” one NL evaluator said.
That wasn’t always the case. From 2012 to 2021, the one-game wild-card playoff was a horrifying boogeyman lurking in the distance. Clubs such as the Astros and Dodgers stacked their rosters to win division titles and avoid having to risk their season on a coin flip. They often won 100 games along the way.
The three-game wild-card round is still unideal, but it’s much more palatable and much more favorable for all the teams lurking in the middle. And because it has never been this easy to get into the playoffs, there are more middling teams in the mix than ever before. That means more teams are optimizing their rosters and their in-game decisions deeper into the season, which means fewer easy wins for the best teams in baseball.
“More teams around .500 are making aggressive and competitive in-game bullpen and bench deployment moves in mid-leverage situations because their playoff odds are north of 30-40 percent later into the summer,” one MLB coach explained.
Bad teams that have accepted their 2024 fate are focusing on development. They’re letting young players fail, pushing flawed relievers into high-leverage spots, trying and tinkering, throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. But mediocre teams, teams that in the past would’ve begun that process in June, are still on the hunt for wins. That creates a more competitive atmosphere and makes it harder for teams to reach triple-digit victories.
Some believe the new balanced schedule does something similar. Prior to 2023, teams played three home and three road series against each team in their division. Last year, in the name of fairness, MLB restructured the calendar, replacing some of those in-division games with interleague showdowns. Now teams play every other team at least once per season. For the best teams, that’s a slight detriment. For instance, instead of playing the woeful Marlins or Nationals for the 13th to 18th time, the Phillies have games against lesser-known interleague opponents.
Video scouting makes the whole process much simpler than it was 20 years ago, but the general lack of familiarity still hurts the favored club. Quality cedes some ground to randomness, and so the better team’s inherent advantage wins out less often.
Is this a good thing for the sport?
That depends on what you like.
An obvious positive byproduct of this less top-heavy environment is that this year, four of the six divisions have races coming down to the wire. The best teams are less good, so the gaps between first- and second-place teams are generally smaller. That should help foster intrigue that lasts into late September.
But when it comes to October, the new state of play might detract from the drama.
Homogeny is boring. If every club is between 86 and 96 wins, there’s less narrative heft to the entire operation. Last year’s World Series between Arizona and Texas, a pair of wild-card teams, didn’t draw a lot of eyeballs. Sports are about underdogs and favorites, minnows and monsters. People want to watch Godzilla vs. Kong or David vs. Goliath; nobody wants David vs. David.
Then again, maybe it’s just a blip, and next year, 15 teams will win 100 games.
