Having long since dispatched the National League West, the Los Angeles Dodgers will spend the final 10 days of the 2022 season pursuing all-time greatness.
There is a chance, slim but a chance, that the Dodgers could become only the 11th team since the creation of the two present major leagues in 1901 to finish with a winning percentage above .700. To achieve that, the Dodgers would have to go 8-1 through the remaining nine games on their schedule.
That’s unlikely … except we’re talking about the Dodgers here. They’ve had several stretches of winning eight of nine this season, most recently between September 10-20.
Beyond that, those final nine games include three with the Padres and six with the Colorado Rockies. The Dodgers are a combined 20-9 against those two opponents.
To find the last team to finish with a .700 winning percentage over a full season, you have to go back to 2001, when the Seattle Mariners did so. Three seasons earlier the New York Yankees also did so. But the last before that was the 1954 Cleveland Indians. Reach back to the 1930s and you can add the 1939 Yankees and 1931 Philadelphia Athletics.
Even at their present .693 winning percentage, the Dodgers are in elite company. Only 14 teams have won that high a percentage of games since 1901. Aside from the four mentioned above, the only one to do so since 1930 was the 1932 Yankees (107-47, .695)
How do the 2022 Dodgers stack up against baseball history’s elite teams, the 10 members of the .700 Club? To get at least an idea, we can compare the performance of the 2022 Dodgers against those teams in five highly relevant categories: Offensive WAR, Defensive WAR, OPS+, ERA+, and Run Differential.
To ensure against any sort of era-based bias, we’ll normalize the data for the three categories not automatically normalized — oWAR, dWAR and Run Differential. By looking at the ordinal rank of the Dodgers and the 10 .700 percentage teams, we can assess how L.A. 2022 measures up to the all-time greats.
For the record, the 10 members of baseball’s .700 club are, in order of win percentage: 1906 Cubs (116-36, .763); 1902 Pittsburgh Pirates (103-36, .741); 1909 Pittsburgh Pirates (110-42, .724); 1954 Cleveland Indians (111-43, .721); 2001 Seattle Mariners (116-46, .716); 1927 New York Yankees (110-44, .714); 1907 Chicago Cubs (107-45, .704); 1931 Philadelphia A’s (107-45, .704); 1998 New York Yankees (114-48, .704); 1939 New York Yankees (106-45, .702).