Super League

I really don't care whether Kansas City has a MLB team.  Nor Toronto.  Nor Pittsburgh.  I'm tired of junk like small market teams and revenue sharing.  There's a reason it's called MAJOR league.  It does not mean that Kansas City cannot have a baseball team.  It means that Kansas City is not entitled to a MAJOR league team, subsidized by fans of the Yankees, Mets, Red Sox, Dodgers, etc.

Why don't those teams drop out of MLB and form a super league of their own?  They could form their own television network and/or cut deals with existing networks.  Ten teams would do  it.  Here are my suggestions:

New York Yankees

New York Mets

Chicago White Sox

Chicago Cubs

Los Angeles Dodgers

Philadelphia Phillies

Boston Red Sox

Detroit Tigers

Cleveland Indians

St. Louis Cardinals

Five from each of the two current MLB leagues.  All but the Mets are traditional teams that existed long before modern expansion began in 1961.  The Mets would replace the Giants who play in a small market.

Each team would have nine opponents.  They could play each opponent 18 games.  That's what was done after expansion from eight to ten teams in 1961 (AL) and 1962 (NL) before expansion to 12 teams in 1969 and the creation of the first divisions, east and west, and the introduction of a playoff system.

The Super League  (SL) could have a playoff system that is superior to the existing MLB system.  The first four teams would qualify with two best of seven series.  Seeding in the first round would be: one plays four, two plays three.  The higher seed would get home field advantage, i.e., play at home in games one, two, six, seven.

Currently eight of the thirty MLB teams make the playoffs.  That's 27%.  Forty percent of SL teams would make the playoffs.  SL teams would play only among their own.  MLB plays many more games outside of the stupid four or five team divisions, plus stupid interleague play, which is not done fairly because of natural matchups such as those between New York teams and between Chicago teams.  Let the remaining teams go their own way.  Who would care?  Not SL fans.

Strike Outs to Walks Ratio ... for Batters!

If the strike outs to walks ratio provides useful information about pitchers, why not for batters?  For good batters, maybe it should be reversed: the walks to strike outs ratio.

In a previous post I recommended that pitchers be examined on OPS+, a tool to evaluate batters.

To view database work for walks to strike outs ratio for batters click this link:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pUaBnw1vjE8Txd_5cUpEjKw

Use same criteria for batters and pitchers.

A friend of mine has long contended that Pete Alexander was better than Christy Mathewson.  Recently he expanded that to Alexander was better than Walter Johnson.  I showed him that ERA+ (earned run average adjusted for era and park) showed that Alexander and Mathewson were maybe even but that Johnson was clearly better than either.  He countered that ERA+ is not everything and that we should not rely on only one stat.  I agreed but I also knew that he was dodging the issue.  OK, he's a lawyer, so what can you expect?

I challenged him to attack ERA+ but have not heard back on this.  He never admits mistakes, like his long standing and discredited contention that  Joe Torre was the reason that the Yankees have not won the World Series since 2001.  Torre in his first season with the Dodgers won the first round of the 2008 playoffs, something he had not done with the Yankees since 2004.  The lawyer thing again.

I am not nuts about ERA in general.  Two outs, batter reaches on an error and any subsequent runs are unearned.  That does not accurately represent the pitcher's performance.  Some pitchers seem to wallow in it.

There is general comfort in using OPS+ to judge batters.  It is on base average plus slugging average adjusted for era and park.

Why not use OPS+ to evaluate the performance of pitchers, too?  Not because it's clearly better than ERA+ but because it's at least as good and because it would be the same for both batters and pitchers.

Now that people contributing to retrosheet.org are providing the missing values (doubles and triples allowed) for this equation we can determine the results.  There would be much more symmetry in comparing performances of batters and pitchers.  I'd like to know the percentage difference between a player's OPS+ and the league average.  I'd like to know if great pitchers have a higher percentage difference than great batters.

Let's use the same criteria to judge batters and pitchers.