Dark Matter

The American League Central is 80 games under .500 as a division. The American League West is 54 games over .500. Here are all 6 divisions, as the standings would look if the divisions were the units competing with each other:

DIVISION              W       L     GB     GAMES OVER .500

AL WEST:            254 – 201    —               53

NL CENTRAL:    231 – 214     18               17

AL EAST:             230 – 215     20              15

NL  WEST:          230 – 224     23.5            6

NL EAST:            216 –  227     32              -11

AL CENTRAL:    183 – 263     66.5           -80

In 2017, the strongest MLB division  NL West) was  28 games over .500, and the the worst (NL East) was 46 games under — at the end of the entire 162-game schedule.  Our outlying divisions are almost twice as far from .500 after only a little more than half the games.

Here are the spans for the last 14 MLB seasons since the founding of the EFL:

YEAR            STRONGEST               WEAKEST

2017              NL WEST   +28                  NL EAST  – 46

2016              AL EAST   +36                  NL WEST  – 30

2015              NL CENT   +44                  NL EAST  – 62

2014              AL EAST   +12                    NL WEST – 32

2013              AL EAST   +55                    AL WEST  – 37

2012              AL WEST   +54                  NL CENT  – 46

2011               AL EAST   +46                   NL CENT  – 44

2010              AL WEST  +52                   NL CENT  – 48

2009             AL WEST  +40                   NL CENT  – 34

2008              AL EAST   +61                  NL WEST  – 60

       2007              NL WEST  +32                  NL CENT  – 54

2006              AL WEST   +32                  NL CENT  – 65

2005              NL EAST   +40                  NL WEST  – 66

2004              NL CENT  +32                  AL CENT  – 40

(NOTE: Prior to 2012, the NL Central had 6 teams, adding to its potential for extreme above or below average results.)

The biggest gap between strongest and weakest divisions in the last 10 years was the 121-game chasm separating the AL West from the NL West in 2008.   This year the chasm is already 133 games wide, with about 70 games left to play.  Unless something reverses the trend, the AL Central will end up more than 140 games under .500 and the AL West will come in about 96 games above .500 for a total gap twice the size of the largest in the last 14 years — and that one was a statistical outlier, about 14% bigger than the next biggest.

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I have been watching this phenomenon since late May.  The gap between AL West and AL Central has been about the same proportion since then, growing with only a few pauses in pace with the number of games played. It’s very strange, this inexplicable divergence from normality in MLB.  We haven’t seen anything like it since Babe Ruth doubled the season home run record. But that was one man. This isn’t just one person, or even one team, discovering new territory. This is the entire league all at once. Something has begun to act on the entirety of MLB, bending the laws of probability, or at least the distribution of talent in ways not seen at least since the founding of the the EFL.

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It’s almost like what would happen to the solar system if a massive but unseen new planet, larger than Jupiter, suddenly got inserted into orbit where the asteroids belt is now. We would discover that planet by how it immediately began changing the other planets’ orbits, even if it took us years to directly observe the planet itself.  Could there be some new “object” in baseball’s system tugging the  teams into ever more widely divergent paths?

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Maybe we don’t need to worry about it.  Maybe it’s just a new reality, this season with the five AL playoff spots already locked up, and the NL drifting in the same direction. Maybe we just aren’t going to have pennant races anymore. We’ll get used to it and baseball will go on its merry way.

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Sort of like how Florida will go on its merry way once Floridians get used to living under water?

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I want to understand.  I want to identify the dark matter bending baseball.

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I discovered something last night. I was curious about how the  range of divisional records compares to the EFL’s deviation from .500.  As of yesterday, the EFL was 514 – 465, 49 games above .500.  Our eleven-team league, noted for skewing far away from .500 as a league, is closer to .500 than either the AL Central or the AL West.

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I made two important notes about this fact.  First is we seem to be safe from having a required expansion draft next spring.  We enacted a rule this year requiring an expansion draft any time the league averaged over 90 wins per team. That would be an average of 18 games over .500.  At present we are averaging about 4.5 games over .500.  Unless we go crazy over the next three months, we should stay well below 18 games over .500.  But this isn’t really a new thing; I’ve been tracking this off and on all season.

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The other thing I discovered is radically new. I got to wondering what it would take to drag the EFL back to balance as a league at .500, where I suppose it should be.  And here’s what I discovered:  the EFL would be a .500 league overall, like MLB is, if we had a 12th team with a record of 20 – 69. That would be a winning percentage of .225. A team of purely EFL replacement players would have an 89-game record of 10 – 79.  We’ve never had a team anywhere near that bad, nor even as bad as 20 – 69.  But one could imagine such a team, going 20 – 69, the worst all-time EFL team, composed of players the rest of us have dropped or something.

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Astrophysicists are always discovering stuff by positing the existence of things they need to make their data make sense.  That’s how Pluto was discovered, and all the other microplanetlings out beyond Pluto, right? Even the fact of the Earth orbiting the sun in an ellipse was posited to make the maths come out correctly a long time before it was actually observed.

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So maybe that 12th EFL team actually DOES exist, and our current above-.500 average success is explained by the fact of a hidden team, the TransPluto Dark Matter, currently winning at a .225 clip with players like those found on our waiver wire.

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This discovery could be confirmed by studying last year’s standings, when we averaged 92.6 wins (926 – 694).  That’s 232 games above .500.  The league would have been at .500 if we had two more teams, each attaining a 23 – 139  record — at .142 winning percentage, very close to what a team of true EFL replacements would accomplish.

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We expanded, but the team we got refuses to win at its designated .142 winning percentage. Fortunately the entire league has cooled off a little, so the Dark Matter team still out there occupies the plausibly-habitable .142 winning-percentage zone in our fantasy solar system.  It could exist, it explains our super-.500 performance, it is elegant and fun… so it must exist!

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This might seem to indicate we should be on the lookout for the owner of the .142 cloaked Dark Matter team, so we can add him (or her, not that the owner of a .142 team would be expected to be a woman)to the league  next year and be able to see whom it is we are competing against. 

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Anyway, what all this establishes is the probable existence of invisible Dark Matter teams skewing visible results.  I wonder if this type of thing might also explain what’s happening in MLB this year.  In fact, I wonder if the EFL itself is the Dark Matter driving the extreme results in the visible MLB world.  (“Visible” in this case means “what you can see reported in the mainstream media.”  Of course we can see our EFL teams.)  But I am out of time today.  Perhaps one of you can carry on the research to establish what I suspect:  the EFL is what’s causing the MLB to take on such a highly improbable and unprecedented pattern of wins and losses.

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