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Parity is Alive and Kicking Posted by Jason Thornbury at 10/23/2006 5:19:00 PM View more posts by this author

Speaking of Will, here's one on baseball's parity that is good reading. Conventional wisdom says baseball has the least parity of the major sports. But as Will notes, "when the Tigers dispatched the Yankees Oct. 7, baseball was guaranteed its seventh different World Series winner in seven years. There never have been seven consecutive Super Bowls, or seven consecutive NBA championships, won by seven different teams." I have maintained for a long time it's not how much money you spend but how you spend it.

Comments....

I think it's misleading to measure parity srictly by who wins the title. You'll get a better measure looking at wins and losses compared to payroll, or playoff spots compared to payroll. But hey, maybe Brian Cashman impresses you and George Will more than he does me. Posted by spianow at 10/23/2006 9:04:00 PM

Using that statement to show more parity in the MLB than in the NBA or NFL is totally misleading. Both football and basketball are games which are geared towards the better team winning the game more often. It has nothing to do with parity, it's just that baseball has more randomness that allows for upsets. Posted by herbilk at 10/24/2006 12:50:00 PM

The equivalent of winning 60 games in hoops (73 percent) is winning 119 games in baseball, which never happens. Football's even more extreme - at least one team wins 80 percent or more of their games almost every year, but some of that could be attributed to the small sample size, i.e., if baseball teams all played 16 games, one might go 13-3. But hoops has a pretty big sample, and the records are more lopsided than in baseball generally. Posted by cliss at 10/24/2006 1:48:00 PM

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