{"id":14666,"date":"2013-09-24T17:30:14","date_gmt":"2013-09-24T21:30:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2013\/09\/24\/14666.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T19:06:22","modified_gmt":"2018-03-14T00:06:22","slug":"baseball-ten-years-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2013\/09\/24\/baseball-ten-years-on\/","title":{"rendered":"Baseball, ten years on"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>So. Ten years ago, I wrote about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2003\/09\/24\/1471.html\">Baseball<\/a> here on this Tohu Bohu, and maintained that Major League Baseball did not have a competitive balance problem. I said <i>There are currently no well-run teams that have not competed for a division title in the last three years<\/i>. That was 2001-2003, the last three years at the time, and I listed as poorly-run teams those from <i>Detroit, Tampa Bay, Baltimore, Texas, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, San Diego, Colorado, and Milwaukee<\/i>.\n<p>What constitutes success for a team in a 30-team league over ten years? If the answer is only <i>a championship<\/i>, then at least 20 teams are going to be unsuccessful, which makes it an unuseful definition for me. A pennant? Two playoff appearances? A couple of 90-win seasons, whether you actually make the playoffs or not? Let&#8217;s see how those teams have done.\n<p>Since 2003, the Detroit Tigers have won two division titles and a wildcard and won two pennants and had three 90-win seasons, the Tampa Bay (redacted) Rays have won two division titles and a wildcard and won one pennant and had four 90-win seasons, the Baltimore Orioles have won one wildcard and had one 90-win season, the Texas Rangers have won two division titles and a wildcard and won two pennants and had three 90-win seasons, the Cincinnati Reds have won two division titles and had three 90-win seasons, the San Diego Padres have won two division titles and had one 90-win season, the Colorado Rockies have won two wildcards and one pennant and had two 90-win seasons, the Milwaukee Brewers have won one division title and one wildcard and had two 90-win seasons.\n<p>It hasn&#8217;t been a great decade for each of those teams, but then of course if you want competitive balance, not everyone can have a great decade. Still, each of those teams&#8212;eight teams I had specifically singled out for both crappy results and crappy management&#8212;have had substantial success over the last ten years.\n<p>Oh, and the Pittsburgh Pirates have had one 90-win season and one wildcard, as of&#8230; now.\n<p><I>Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,<br>-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In Which Your Humble Blogger is unsure why the Kansas City Royals didn&#8217;t make that list. Because they certainly qualified as a poorly-run lousy team from 2001-2003, and they have been pretty much crap ever since. But hey, eighty-three wins! That&#8217;s not bad. Not exactly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[193],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14666","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-baseball"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14666","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14666"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14666\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16664,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14666\/revisions\/16664"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14666"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14666"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14666"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}