Best Team Ever Formula / Article

[webmaster]

Is it really possible to create a formula that correctly identifies the best teams ever in Major League history? We here at Baseball Fever certainly wouldn't try and neither would our sister site Baseball Almanac. Research Roger Weber though has taken a shot and his new article is here:

Determining the Best Major League Team Ever Through Logical Statistical Comparison

Read through, download the Excel spreadsheet, and share your opinions with us here in this thread.

Sean

[RuthMayBond]

Similar to my list, maybe he puts more emphasis on winning the World Series

[RuthMayBond]

Is it really possible to create a formula that correctly identifies the best teams ever in Major League history? We here at Baseball Fever certainly wouldn't try and neither would our sister site Baseball Almanac. Research Roger Weber though has taken a shot and his new article is here:

Determining the Best Major League Team Ever Through Logical Statistical Comparison

Read through, download the Excel spreadsheet, and share your opinions with us here in this thread.

Sean

Can anyone tell me why the 1920 Philadelphia Athletics are in the same universe as this list?

[SABR Matt]

Randy (TKD) and I have actually just completed work on a major project that has a number of applications (more stable and accurate park factors, a fair dividsion of the responsibility for changing run scoring contexts between the league itself and the players within the league, the possibility of finding an objective measure for the strength of a league...and determine the greatest teams of all time objectively are among them).

I'll be posting our top fifty list when randy gets online tonight along with a bunch of information about this new team rating system (actually...we've discussed it once before here at BBF but it went rather unnoticed because we weren't quite at the point where we'd fully tested it for errors, and implemented it for the entire history of the game) called the Fiato-Souders Arithmetic Adjustments (FSAA).

I can tell you right now that we have the 1939 Yankees and the 1927 Ynakees as 1 and 2 all time among great teams...that the 2001 Mariners, 1998 Yankees and 1906 Cubs are bang-bang-bang close in overall rating but none of those three approaches the top two (they're close ordinally, but there is a substantial gap between the top two and the next down on the l ist, and that we didn't include the post-season in our analysis, although even if we did, we don't think the results would change too much...most of the winners are crammed to the top of our lists.

[538280]

Looking at the spreadsheet, it is quite clear this method is biased against modern teams. Too bad. It looks like he worked hard on it too. Why is it people always forget the game has become much tougher to dominate in the last 50 years?

[SABR Matt]

A good question...part of the problem is...his formula includes post-season winning percentage...for older teams...there was one post-season series...if they sweep in 4 games...is that the same greatness as say...the Yankees of '98 going 11-0?

[Ubiquitous]

second problem is that in a league of 8 teams playing in an era of poor infrastructure, resource management, and improper/inadequate governing body it is easier for one team to separate from the pack then in newer times.

Teams of the early 20th century were able to rack up the wins because team building and team maintenance overall was so horrible. And everything he is using to measure teams exacerbates the problem. Run differentials are going to be greater when teams can't build and maintain quality teams. Separation from the pack will be greater, and in imbalance in leagues is likely to occur which will favor the team who is built better then the best team in the sister league.

One small quibble is that for some reason he uses teams ERA instead of runs allowed. Not sure why he would do this. This also helps early 20th century teams out because it hides an enormous amount of runs allowed while not masking any of the runs scored. For instance the 1907 Cubs had 264 earned runs, while they actually allowed 390 runs to score. The teams hitters scored 3.7 runs per game. They had a 1.73 ERA, but actually allowed 2.52 runs to score. A huge difference, a difference that dissipates as the years move on and the defenses improve. In fact the more I think about it the more I realize that it isn't a small quibble but another major mistake.

[SABR Matt]

Agreed on both counts Ubi..wow...we agree on something completely...

How odd...

[Ubiquitous]

Not really, I think there is probably a lot we agree on. Agreements don't get talked about, disagreements do.

[Ubiquitous]

I'm actually surprised that they posted that on Baseball Almanac. I remember noticing this thread when Webmaster first posted it and thinking perhaps it was an old article they had found and decided to post on the ALmanac. Which they have done before, but to my surprise its basically just another stat/history thread. One mans opinion backed up by his pet formulas. No real difference between that and say my WARP rankings or I think it was Applings HAA, or SABR Matts PCA.

[SHOELESSJOE3]

Agreed on both counts Ubi..wow...we agree on something completely...

How odd...

If one thinks it over many disagreements on this and any board are not as far apart as they seem. Many are not total disagreements only disagreements in degree.

What I mean, an example a Hornsby debate, the home park how much of a factor was this in his career stats. Some believe it meant more than others, some think not as much. There are a good number of debates, disagreements on players, teams, even those who disagree do agree that a factor should be considered, they disagree on how much, of what value was that factor in coming to a conclusion.

At times when a debate gets to go on too long and I know nothing will ever be agreed on 100 percent I usually end it by saying pehaps the answer is in the middle of what I believe and those I disagee with. I'm not 100 percent right and neither are those that I disagree with, I have to yield some and hope they can do the same.

[webmaster]

[QUOTE=Ubiquitous]I'm actually surprised that they posted that on Baseball Almanac. I remember noticing this thread when Webmaster first posted it and thinking perhaps it was an old article they had found and decided to post on the ALmanac.QUOTE]

It was from last year, but I never did post it due to it's size. I asked him to update it for 2005 and went the Excel download angle which has worked well. Since being published yesterday the sheet has already been downloaded 25 times.

As for it going up on Baseball Almanac, I always enjoy adding research. I NEVER wanted to be just another stats site. I still don't. I never want to be a news site - MLB.com has that covered. I wanted to be a site for everything else that we all love which makes the game great. Lists, feats, records, poetry, pictures, baseball cards, history, stories, articles, anecdotes, and so on. I just got sidetracked a bit with stats (I think 145,954 pages counts for being sidetracked) for a couple years and am now getting back to some of the things I love...

Sean

[Ubiquitous]

By the way the #10 greatest team of all time the 1920 A's lost over 100 games. Its a typo it should be the 1929 A's.

Also there is a link and a discussion about this over on Baseball think Factory.

[redbuck]

Response from author

I'm Roger Weber, creator of the study.

Obviously any study that includes postseason winning percentage gives an advantage to older teams that played fewer postseason games. But it really isn't fair to call a team that finished 111-43 but lost the World Series in 4 games equal to a team that finished 107-47 and won the World Series in 4 straight. Winning a World Series is critical to a team's greatness. Even though there are factors like weather, injuries, etc. that can compromise a great team in the postseason, it seems like the whole point of playing the season is to win a championship.

As for the 1920 Athletics, that is a typo. It's stupposed to be the 1929 Athletics.

There are lots of other factors that could be considered, and the weights I use are obviously debatable. I tried to give reasons for them but obviously something like that will stir up debate, which was in part my intention.

Through all of this, I have pretty much concluded that there is no real perfect way to measure teams from different eras against each other. The league expanded and the postseason was lengthened. That's why it seems so logical to exclude pre-1920 teams.

Maybe a game of strat-o would do it!

[Ubiquitous]

Also why would one exclude 1942? Virtually nobody has left for the WWII and all the regulars are there.