Is MLB's Superteam Era Facing Its Kryptonite?
The past decade was defined by top teams' dominance — but 2024 is a huge exception to that.
Ten years ago, one of the topics on the minds of baseball’s smartest thinkers was parity. We were coming off an era in which the standard deviation of leaguewide team winning percentages was at one of its lowest points in decades, with plenty of teams in the playoff mix but no true superpowers. The San Francisco Giants were running a dynasty, sure — but it was arguably the weirdest dynasty ever, only manifesting itself in even-numbered years.
How long would MLB have to wait for more dominant teams to emerge at the top of the league? As it turns out, not long at all. On the heels of that more subdued era for the best clubs, baseball’s pendulum swung toward a handful of squads dominating everyone else — leading to seasons like 2019, when a record four teams won 100+ games, or 2022, when it happened again. But now, it’s looking like things have swung back the other way again in 2024.
Forget record-breaking numbers of 100-win teams. We may not even see anyone get to 95 wins this year, if the projections are any indication. In my composite forecast, only one club — the Los Angeles Dodgers, at 95.3 wins — are tracking to break that modest barrier, down from seven in 2019.1 In the 162-game era, no season has ever failed to see at least one club win 95+ games, and only three — 1967, 1982 and 1989 — featured just one team crossing that threshold.
So we really are potentially looking at a deeply weird season in which none of the theoretical powerhouse teams seem to want to rise above the fray. Just look at the Elo ratings, where only one team is above a mark of 1550 and just six are above 1540. This has helped make for a downright bizarre distribution of talent across the league, compared with the usual norm over the previous decade:
Unsurprisingly, the best teams of 2024 are a lot worse than the usual top teams during the Superteam Era, which has meant better teams in the middle of the pack than usual. But what jumps out to me is that the very worst teams of 2024 are also worse than usual, headlined by the historically bad Chicago White Sox down at the bottom. One critique of the previous decade’s superteams was that it is easier to rack up wins when the worst teams are openly tanking, which potentially makes the presence of so many 100+ win squads less impressive. But this year is proving that worse-than-usual teams at the bottom of the league don’t guarantee excellence at the top.
Anyway, let’s bring our focus back to those top clubs. The average rating for the Top 5 teams through 125 games this season (1547.0) is the second-lowest of any season since 2000 — ahead of only 2007 (1546.2) — and, in conjunction with a dip last season, it might be signaling the end of baseball’s Superteam Era from the previous decade (which you can clearly see the arc of in this LOESS curve):
Of course, maybe this year is simply an anomaly fueled by ridiculous levels of injuries for top teams. Players on the Dodgers alone have lost 16.6 WAR of projected value to IL stints this season, while the Atlanta Braves (No. 3 in WAR lost) just got their latest bad news when it was announced that Austin Riley would miss 6-8 weeks with a fractured hand. Even the most stacked rosters will find it difficult to excel when key players keep getting hurt.
However, many have also blamed structural factors such as the luxury tax and expanded postseason, which discourages greatness by flattening leaguewide World Series odds. Why build a Superteam when Top-2 seeds are 3-for-8 in getting out of the Division Series under this current format? Because of this, there may be real reasons to expect fewer dominant teams going forward.
Either way, 2024 is looking like a year when extreme parity has come back to MLB again. Love that or hate it, it’s going to be fascinating to see all of this play out when the playoffs start in about six weeks.
Filed under: Baseball
The record for most 95-win teams in a season is eight, set in 1999. But that makes sense, as 1999 was just generally one of the best years ever, by any measure.
I'm going to say overall I love the parity. Look no further than (my other co-favorite sport) the NHL's playoffs where it seems every year 8-10 teams going in to the first round have a legitimate chance to win it all. Makes for very exciting playoff action. Though, full disclosure, I may have been more than a little steamed in the moment that my favorite NL team won their DIVISION over 162 games, but didn't even qualify for the DIVISIONal round because of only 2. Hashtag my 2 cents.