As the 2010 season comes to a close, all eyes are now on post-season play. As pundits debate which team has a chance to go all the way, they will be able to use a boatload of data from the regular 162-game season. Two series in particular drew my attention, the Cincinnati vs Philadelphia and the New York vs Minnesota games. Both of these series feature teams from the Eastern and Central divisions of their respective leagues. In both cases, the central team lost, badly. I thought to myself if it was possible that these teams were overrated, after all, the central divisions in each league have some of the league’s worst teams.
I set out to rank the overall strength from top to bottom of each division. I created my own ranking system based on the division medians of offense, pitching, and defense to create a rating for each category. I chose to use the median average as opposed to a mean average because a median will not punish or reward any division to strongly for outliers like the Yankees or the Pirates.
These rankings are based on sabermetric stats that I will describe on each slide. I understand that there is a good deal of disagreement over the validity of sabermetrics here so I included another metric in my rankings: results. In fact, I weighted final win-loss record twice as much as any of the other categories.
The first few slides will discuss the rankings in each category and I don’t expect much disagreement with those slides, I just copied and pasted numbers and calculated a simple average. But when it comes to the later slides with the Divisional rankings, I welcome comments and criticism.