From the Yankees to the Royals, the great divide in Major League Baseball

As the calendar flips to June, Major League Baseball teams have played almost a third of their schedule and it’s beginning to be clear who the contenders and rebuilders are. Thus far, 2022 has been a year like no other in recent history with a great divide between the best and worse teams.

If you feel like there are a lot more Major League Baseball teams than usual out of contention after just two months of baseball, you’re correct.

According to Baseball-Reference, nine teams have a 1 percent chance or less of making the playoffs, and 14 teams have a less than one in six chance of making it. Similarly, FanGraphs has eight teams with a less than 1 percent chance to make the playoffs and half the league with a less than one in five chance of a postseason birth. There are few things worse as a baseball fan than knowing your team’s games are inconsequential over the final two-thirds of the season. For a record number of fan bases, that will likely be the case in 2022.

While it’s still early and plenty can change, the standings after two months of baseball this season represent the greatest divide since baseball expanded to 30 teams in 1998. There are exceptions (see: 2021 Atlanta Braves) but, in general, a better than .550 win percentage (90-win pace) is a good threshold for competitive teams. Conversely, a .450 win percentage (90-loss pace) is conducive to a team being a seller at the trade deadline.

In looking at the standings on the morning of June 1 for each of the last 24 full seasons, 2022 is the most divided season in history with 11 teams on pace for 90 or more wins, 11 teams on pace for 90 or more losses, and only eight teams in the middle. How unique is this season? There have never been more than 11 teams on pace to win 90 games at the end of May, as few as eight teams hovering around .500, and more than 10 teams “waiting ‘til next year.” All of those three things are happening this season.

In a typical season (21 of 24 evaluated), the middle group is the biggest number and often by a large margin. On average, 13 teams are within four to five games of .500 at the end of May. In 2014, there were a whopping 21 teams (70% of the league) in this group. Only one other time has there been fewer than 10 teams, in 2013 when there were nine.

Fans of the 2019 Washington Nationals may note that that team was in the bottom tier at the end of May … but they are the outlier. Even the 2006 World Series Champion St. Louis Cardinals, winners of only 83 regular-season games, don’t fit that mold. They were 34-19 at the end of May. Other recent underdog stories like last year’s Braves (24-26) or the 2003 Florida Marlins (26-31) weren’t in the bottom tier entering June.

How rare is what the Nationals did? Of the 188 clubs that had a 90-loss pace entering June in the last 24 seasons, they are the only team to win the World Series. That 0.5 percent chance is slightly greater than the Miami Marlins’ current odds on FanGraphs. Anybody placing bets on the Marlins winning the World Series this year might want to seek help now.

So the third month of the 2022 season begins with a record number of teams needing a miracle to be competitive. This is just bad for baseball and it’s not hard to see what the root cause is. The divide in spending is remarkable. Nine of the 11 teams out of contention have payrolls in the bottom half of the league. The other two teams, Philadelphia and the Chicago Cubs are fourth and 15th, respectively, in payroll. Of the contenders, eight of the 11 have payrolls in the top half but really only Tampa Bay (26th) are pulling off something remarkable as both Minnesota (17th) and Milwaukee (18th) are at least moderate spenders.

As the players and owners just agreed to a contract, it seems unlikely that any of this will change any time soon … but it is a real problem. Certainly, there are team owners that refuse to spend and will continue to reap the benefits of revenue sharing and television contracts. There’s also the trend that smaller-market teams can’t reload and need to rebuild more frequently and hope their brief window of opportunity works. The Royals were able to make it work in 2015 and Cleveland almost did in 2016. Other than that, it’s been a tough road for fans in places like Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, or Oakland with many more bad years than good years in recent history.

Hopefully, what we’re seeing in 2022 is not the beginning of a new race to the bottom for more than a third of the league and what we’re seeing is an anomaly but, if it isn’t, baseball is going to have quite the task to rebuild fan bases in some of the greatest and most historically important baseball cities.