Is MLB's Balanced Schedule Working?

Strength-of-schedule disparities are down, but other forces are at play.

The Blue Jays have faced MLB’s toughest set of opponents.

With MLB’s many rule changes taking up all of the attention going into the 2023 season, it was easy for another structural tweak — the introduction of a more balanced schedule — to fly under the radar. That was understandable; adding a pitch clock, banning the shift and changing the size of the bases are pretty dramatic changes to a sport known for resisting that kind of thing. And the new rules are practically all working, to some extent or another, with a demonstrable impact on how the game is played. But for something like the schedule, it’s harder to see the effects playing out in front of us — and there are confounding factors that might be working to unbalance the schedule despite MLB’s efforts.

What changed in the schedule anyway? Here’s how MLB’s Mark Feinsand described it in March:

“Beginning in 2023, teams will play five fewer games against division opponents, instead playing one series against every team in the other league. Teams will continue to play their ‘rival’ Interleague team four times, twice at each ballpark.

Teams will face their four division opponents 14 times each season -- seven home and seven away -- for a total of 56 games. They will also face the other 10 teams in their league six times apiece, playing a three-game set at each ballpark.

Rather than 16 Interleague games, teams will have 46 such games on the schedule -- four against their geographic rival and three each against the other 14 teams, alternating ballparks annually.

As a result of the adjusted schedule, teams within the same division will have 91% of their games in common, an increase from 84% under the old schedule. Schedules among teams in the same league will feature 76% of common opponents, up from 52% in an unbalanced schedule.”

In theory, this should help flatten any differences in schedule strength between teams, since it takes away intra-divisional games (which are unfairly hard if you’re in, say, the AL East) and re-allocates those to interleague play on a semi-shuffled basis. But how has this played out in practice so far?

In one sense, pretty well. Through 60 games, the standard deviation of each team’s average opposing Elo ratings faced is down from 7.3 the past couple of seasons (and an absurd 10.4 in 2020, when the schedule was very much unbalanced) to 6.5 this season, its lowest level since 2016. In other words, the spread in schedule difficulty faced across all MLB teams is narrower than usual.

However, there are limitations to how much the current approach can smooth out the influence of schedule difficulty on team performance.

Because MLB is in an era of extreme stratification— with teams at the top frequently putting up 100 wins or more, while tanking clubs at the bottom flirt with historically bad records — the luck of the schedule draw can have more of an outsized effect on a team’s record than it would otherwise. Using a regression with a team’s preseason Elo and its Elo strength of schedule faced through 60 games as inputs, we can estimate that the difference in opponent quality between the hardest schedule faced this season (that of the Toronto Blue Jays) and the easiest (Kansas City Royals) would mean the difference between a totally average team having a .465 winning percentage or a .527 winning percentage.

Over the course of 60 games to date, that’s a gap of 3.7 net wins depending on whether you faced the easiest or hardest schedule, irrespective of your own team’s quality. Is that a large gap? All but one division in baseball is being decided by fewer games than that right now, so it definitely matters. And that schedule-strength effect between easiest and hardest, while down from the 5.3-game gap of 2020, is actually wider than the average since 1995, despite MLB’s efforts to make the schedule far more balanced this year.

Scheduling luck still includes which division you happen to be in, too. I mentioned both the AL East and the Blue Jays already, but it bears re-emphasizing that one of MLB’s six divisions has a collective record of 178-122 (a .593 WPct), while no other division is better than the NL West at 152-147 (.508). Meanwhile, the AL West (.487), NL Central (.476) and especially the AL Central (.432) all sit far below .500 collectively.

MLB’s move to switch games away from intra-divisional play helps downplay the unfairness of facing so many good teams — and in fact, has helped enable the AL East to have such a strong total record, since its teams have more games in which to clean up against external opponents. But using the same method as above, I estimate that playing in the AL East still has already cost each of its members 0.6 wins on average (and as many as 2.1 wins for Toronto), compared with if they played a totally neutral schedule. By contrast, playing in the AL West or AL Central has been worth an extra 0.4 wins per team on average based purely on schedule weakness.

This isn’t to say I don’t like the move toward a balanced schedule. While there’s something a bit illogical about continuing to emphasize divisions in playoff races but de-emphasizing divisions in scheduling, the wild card race is playing more of a role in the postseason landscape and a more balanced schedule makes things much fairer in that regard. Unlike the clear success of a pitch clock dropping the average time of game from 3:03 to 2:37 instantly, though, there are too many other structural factors involved to make this year’s balanced schedule more than a mild step in the right direction for now.

Filed under: Baseball