I’m sure you’ve all heard the old saying “There’s more than one way to skin a cat”. As a cat owner, I’m simply revolted by this, but at least understand the lesson, that there is more than one way of finding success in our endeavors. Major League Baseball is perhaps the best example of this in professional sports. In basketball, a LeBron James type of player could single-handedly propel a team to a championship. Not so in baseball, otherwise the Angels would never lose with Mike Trout playing for them. In football, a dominant defensive unit can stymie the opposition and result in a Super Bowl victory, very similar to how the Seahawks won it all last year. If this were the case in baseball, The Arizona Diamondbacks would be better than a .500 ball club. So what is the equation for building a winner in today’s modern game?
There really isn’t one. You could say pitching is the common denominator, but the World Champion Boston Red Sox didn’t have a single pitcher make more than a half season’s worth of starts and post an ERA under three and a half. Similarly, the Kansas City Royals posted the best team ERA in the AL last season but failed to finish better than third in a somewhat weaker AL Central. We know the answer isn’t offense, otherwise the Orioles, Angels and Rangers would’ve been in the playoffs last year. Fielding is a harder metric to evaluate. According to errors and fielding percentage, the Yankees have one of the top defensive units, but they also have a smaller ball park and didn’t exactly pass the eye-test in terms of being a great defensive unit.
So perhaps the answer is to simply not have a major weakness. The Red Sox were middle of the pack in both pitching and defense. The same goes for the Tampa Bay Rays, who were middle of the pack again in two of the three major team evaluations, only being ranked among the best defensively. The obvious exception to this rule would be the Dodgers, who were a bad defensive unit, but had a very effective pitching staff and were middle of the pack in offense.
These criteria force us to conclude that building a winner involves finding one thing your team is particularly good at and ensuring that you aren’t so weak in another area that this is offset.
The Rockies may have had the second best offense in the NL last season (clearly inflated by the home environment, but let’s not diminish their accomplishments), yet their pitching ranked dead last (again, home environment but also just bad pitching too) and defensively they were middle of the pack. Their pitching disadvantage offset their offensive advantage. The Royals had a great pitching staff, but this advantage was offset by their inability to consistently score runs.
The beauty of all the randomness and madness to all of this is the simplicity of the answer. You could win any which way, it doesn’t matter, just as long as you likely don’t have a pressing weakness. You could piece together a collection of effective platoon bats like the A’s did to accompany a solid pitching staff and adequate defensive unit, or you could create an unparalleled offensive force the way the Red Sox and Cardinals did. You could build a defensive stalwart like the Rays did or assemble a seemingly unbeatable pitching staff (Verlander, Scherzer, Sanchez and Fister) like the Tigers did.
From what we can gather, the riskiest way to achieve victory is to create a one-dimensional powerhouse. It might work like it did for Boston and Los Angeles, or it could backfire like it did for the Royals and Rockies.
