Your annual MLB vs NFL parity report

Champs last 10 seasons:

MLB: 7 teams

NFL 6 teams

Teams in "finals" last 10 seasons:

MLB 13

NFL 9

Reminder: The NFL is the "any team can win" league

40 comments

  4. Because there is way more variance in baseball than football.

    Do people really not understand this when this point is made over and over or are we just being willfully ignorant?

  5. I really don’t care about these debates, be it debates over parity or revenue or viewers. You don’t have to defend a sport. Just let people like things.

  6. Yeah because there’s a lot more randomness to the results of baseball than there is for football. It’s like comparing tennis to golf. Tiger Woods was just as good if not better at golf than Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic is at tennis. However, Djokovic and Federer had multiple seasons winning three slams while Tiger only had one because there’s a lot more randomness to the winners of golf tournaments than there is in tennis.

  7. I think a nuanced discussion can exist where we acknowledge that baseball is the least “pay-to-win” sport of the big 3 while also recognizing that the massive payroll deficit is hurting the integrity of the game in the eyes of (many of) the fans

  8. Apples to oranges argument. Baseball is a 162 game season where your success is determined by one series in the postseason going for or against you. Dodgers for example did A LOT of winning in the 2010’s with no WS to show for it, doesn’t mean they were all of the sudden a bad franchise. Baseball is just inherently more volatile when you condense it down to a few games

  9. Now do playoff appearances and regular season wins. The MLB has the illusion of parity when looking purely at the WS because of baseball’s high variance that makes playoff results very random.

  10. I don’t think anybody calls the NFL the “any team can win league.”

    My entire life I’ve only ever heard people say there are less big upsets in football and basketball than baseball and hockey.

  11. The AFC has been an outlier from a few decades of Patriots/Peyton Manning/Chiefs dominance. The NFC has been a real rollercoaster in that time.

  12. This a useless stat and didn’t prove his own point. Also, there’s 30 MLB teams and 32 NFL teams – you can’t compare them with nominal values.

  13. Championships? I’d love to think that my team could even play .500 ball this year.

    ![gif](giphy|ejDxbDaxZZkeQmr0yu)

  14. I hate this type of comparison as it acts as if only championships count to parity and nothing else matters. Playoff appearance consistency is a way better measure of parity

  15. I mean the Pats won 4 games and Seahawks missed playoffs the previous year. It is much easier for a team in the NFL to make a major turnaround after 1 year, while baseball teams can be dominate for years while others play the waiting game with prospects

  16. > Reminder: The NFL is the “any team can win” league

    …but only if you have a quarterback AND a decent coach

  17. I’ve made this point before I think a few years back, but in the MLB a team like Kansas City couldn’t be a dynasty. The issue is that the smaller markets can’t keep their players, which burns people out. If hypothetically in the NFL without losing anyone Kansas City added Justin Jefferson, Trent Williams, Breece Hall and Trey Hendrickson this point would be valid.

  18. 20 of the last 29 WS champions had top 10 opening day payrolls.

    Since 1995 there has only been 3 champions with bottom half opening day payrolls. 2 of those – 2017 Astros, 2015 Royals – made deadline trades that pushed them into top half payrolls.

    There has only been 1 champion in the wildcard era that started the season with a bottom 10 payroll – 2003 marlins.

    Yes, there is more parity in champions compared to the NFL, but that is driven by the variance of the sport itself. It is ridiculous to think any given MLB team has a greater chance of a championship vs any given NFL team.

  19. Yeah, but now Kyle Tucker is on the Dodgers, so you can throw all these numbers out the window.

  20. Elite qb play works in football the way owners do in baseball. If you have it, you can win. Only 10-15 to go around. If you don’t have it, it’s very difficult. The chance of the Rays winning is about equal to the chance of a team with a qb like Trent Dilfer winning the Super Bowl. Possible, not probable.

  21. Yeah the number of individual champions says absolutely nothing about parity.

    Baseball fans want an even playing field where they feel they actually have a chance of competing. The natural variance in the sport is the only thing keeping the MLBs head above the water with this

  23. I think this is misleading.

    The baseball playoffs are probably the biggest crapshoot of any of the four major sports. The amount of champions does indicate parity in the season champion but that’s largely due to baseball being a game not as well suited to be measured in a smaller sample size.

    What it doesn’t indicate is a parity in contenders. There’s a very clear lack of parity in contention: some teams are almost always in it, some teams are almost always out of it. And it’s directly tied to payroll and resources that no single individual can fairly say every team could afford in the current league.

    MLB needs a cap. And if it means locking out for an entire season, replacement players, or whatever, so be it.

  24. The Patriots just had two 4 win seasons.
    The Chiefs just had a 6 win season.

    Let me know when the Dodgers win 60 games in a season.

  25. Nfl games during the season have high variance but a team can lock tf in for three playoff games

  26. It’s such a stupid argument, so much of success in the NFL is just finding a star QB. You CAN win with an ok QB as evidenced last night, but acting like baseball has as much parity in football while have a completely different roster construction is just being willfully ignorant.

  27. This just seems silly. You can clearly correlate the Dodgers success with spending money. NFL dynasties are typically built around drafted talent and coaching. It’s so blatantly obvious it’s not the result it’s about how the results come to be. 

  28. And if this was like baseball, people would say anyone good from the Seahawks “will be a NY Giant / LA Ram soon” because those would be the only teams that could afford the next contract. But that doesn’t happen, some of the best players play for Cleveland and Buffalo and Cincinnati.

    That’s really all the parity I want. Just a chance to keep a generational player. If everyone great wants to play for the Dodgers because they want to wear blue, that’s fine. But not just because they have hundreds of millions more in TV money.

  29. Aside from the randomness difference between the two sports, there is no position in baseball like quarterback, and a coach in football has much more of an effect on the outcome of a game via mid-game decisions than a manager does in baseball. The dynasty Pats and Chiefs had future HOFer’s at both spots, and that is an ultimate competitive advantage in that sport.

  30. When half the league makes playoffs, anyone can win it at anytime. The regular season is cheapened now. MLB wanted to give bad franchises hope with 3 wild cards, and it worked sadly

  31. Now do payrolls. I bet MLB team winning championships are all in the Top 5-6 in payroll that year.

    It’s not so much any team can win in NFL as it is guaranteed at least 70% of MLB teams have 0% chance of winning the World Series because there is such a difference in payrolls.

  34. The difference, of course, is that you need money to consistently compete in MLB. In the NFL, it’s getting the QB/Head Coach combination right.

    A team from Green Bay would have no chance to compete for a championship in MLB.

  35. Comparing baseball to football is so dumb. The comparison and salary cap model if we do get one should be versus basketball

  36. I hate this headline/comment by Stark. Free agents and players want to play / be traded to Green Bay in the NFL. Free agents and players do not want to play in Milwaukee despite the fact they’ve been a really good team for a number of years with championship aspirations. Excepting maybe Las Vegas and Arizona every NFL team is in a better position to turn it around and become champions than all but maybe 4 MLB teams.

  39. It’s more due to how the salary cap and revenue sharing is structured.

    Any team can. Most in baseball can’t win.

  40. Does anyone think NFL parity would be improved by getting rid of their salary cap and segmenting revenue by market size? No, well, there’s your answer.

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