Average

Back at the end of the 2023 season, Seattle Mariners GM Jerry Dipoto said the quiet part aloud: “If you go back and you look, in a decade those teams that win 54 percent of the time always wind up in the postseason. And they more often than not wind up in the World Series. So, there’s your bigger-picture process,” Dipoto said. “Nobody wants to hear the goal this year is, ‘We’re going to win 54 percent of the time.’ 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.”

Mariners fans were outraged. Everybody else's fans laughed. It was unfortunately apropos for the Mariners, who were fresh off a twenty-year playoff drought while putting up a mediocre, but not terrible, winning percentage of .480). And Dipoto had to immediately publicly walk back his comments, apologizing for how indelicately he had revealed the realities of his job to the broader public (or, as he put it, the "poor job of illustrating the points that [he] was trying to make.")

Dipoto (something of a cult favorite among baseball sickos due to his extreme willingness to trade) wasn't wrong, just misunderstood. What perhaps the casual fan doesn't really understand is that winning 54% of games every year is a massive success. 

"What?" you protest. "Why isn't the goal winning 95 games? Always winning the division? Making the Championship series, if not the World Series?"

Think about the way professional sports are balanced. I don't mean small-market versus large-market, salary caps, or the way the collective-bargaining agreements tilt the playing field. It's even simpler than that: sports are a zero-sum game. Each game has both a winner and a loser. The average team has a winning percentage of .500, 81 wins a year. It's same, of course, in the other sports. This isn't just true of baseball. The NFL currently has seventeen games, so you can't finish with a .500 record, but the league as a whole still goes 544-544. The average NBA team is 41-41, etc. Someone has to win, and someone has to lose. And while the Mariners do all they can to win as much as possible, so does each of the other twenty-nine teams (except, perhaps, the Rockies).

The result, of course, is that on average, year over year, your favorite team should win half of its games. It should have as many losing seasons as it has winning seasons. Anything better is good fortune; the result of an especially diligent front office, perhaps, a generous owner willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to win a championship, or stumbling into a generational player on draft night. Any of these can and do occur, of course. But it shouldn't be expected, and it shouldn't be taken for granted.

We can take the thought a bit further. As of this writing, twelve of the thirty MLB franchises make the playoffs each year (40%). Thus, the average team will make the playoffs twice in every five years, four times a decade. And only eight make the Division Series, four the Championship Series, etc. I'm sure you see where I'm going. The average franchise wins a World Series every thirty years. Anything better than that? Wonderful. But after a title it had better be three full decades before I hear you complain. After all, some have it worse.

Before we depart, one more observation on Dipoto's infamous 54%: a .540 season is right between 87 and 88 wins in a full season. It's also a 66th-percentile season. 54% sounds mediocre, right? It's really not. 54% should put you above two-thirds of the league, right around the 10th or 11th best team in baseball... and the verge of a playoff spot.

Baseball lends itself a bit more to this aggregated style of thinking. The difference between an 86-win team and a 90-win team is often razor-thin: two wins that could have been losses, two losses that should have been wins. A season is long; games often hinge on a matter of inches. In other words, putting a quality team on the field and knowing you're going to have to have a couple breaks fall your way is quite literally Dipoto's job. And that manner of thinking only heightens during the postseason. Every year we see that a five- or seven-game postseason series is little more reliable than a coin flip. GMs know that mortgaging future years' success in order to put together one überteam is a sure recipe for disappointment. Every year, the favorite to win the World Series enters the postseason with a slightly less than 20% chance of actually bringing home the title, depending on your model of choice. In short, what this means is that (unless you're the Dodgers) it's best practice to consistenly assemble a high-quality team, year over year, and eventually (exactly as Dipoto was trying to say) you'll win it all. The Astros reached every postseason from 2017-2024; the Yankees made it every year but one. In that span, the Astros won two titles, while the Yankees didn't win one. Does that mean the Astros' front office was somehow better than the Yankees? Not necessarily. (Except for orchestrating a sign-stealing scheme to benefit their hitters. Maybe that's a bad example.) Every sport (and this is a good thing) reaches a point at which everything hinges on the players playing the game. The time for front office deliberations are over, and they join us as helpless observers.

Did I write all of this to justify my Out of the Park Baseball online league performance? Who can say?

(I've won two championships in thirty years. And do you know what? That's better than average).