Baseball’s Disappearing Middle Class
Yesterday, on the last day of baseball’s regular season, the Cincinnati Reds lost 15-2 at home to the Chicago Cubs. That loss made them the fourth team this season to lose 100 games, after the Pittsburgh Pirates, Oakland Athletics, and the Washington Nationals. The day before that, the New York Mets had become the fourth team to win 100 games in 2022, along with the Los Angeles Dodgers, Houston Astros, and Atlanta Braves. This is unusual – prior to 2019, there had never been a season with four 100-win teams. Now it has happened twice in the last three 162-game seasons.
But these years are not outliers – they are part of a growing trend. There have been at least three 100-win teams in every full season since 2017, for a total of 17 in five years. By contrast, in the ten seasons between 2005 and 2014, there were only four 100-win teams combined. Indeed, winning 100 games used to be somewhat rare. If we take the 70 seasons between integration in 1947 and 2016, before this recent trend began, we find only 59 teams that won 100 games in a season. Even if we throw out seasons that were too short for anyone to get to 100 wins (1981 and 1994), that’s still fewer than one per year. Years without ANY 100-win teams were more common than years with multiple. Now, it has been eight years and seven full seasons since the last time 162 games went by without a team hitting the century mark..
And, of course, for a team to win, another team has to lose, and the last few years have seen a similar rise in the number of teams LOSING 100 games. Since 2018, there have been 15 100-loss teams in baseball. Prior to 2019, there was only one year in baseball history with four 100-loss teams. Now it has happened three full seasons in a row.
As a result, baseball’s middle class has been hollowed out. I’m talking about your salt of the Earth teams; your lunch pail teams; the teams that get up every day and compete. These teams aren’t glamorous – they may only win between 75 and 90 games a year. There’s probably no deep playoff run in store for them. But they are the backbone of this country. And they are dying out.
Indeed, in 2022, only 10 of the 30 teams finished in that tax bracket, of between 75 and 90 wins.* That’s roughly where the league has been the last few seasons, but it has been trending down for a while. I went back to 1979, which includes 40 seasons of 162 games. For the first 17, between 1979 and 1998, over half the league finished in that “middle class” category. In only four of those seasons was less than half the league “middle class” and the percentage never fell below 46%. Then, in 1999, that number plummeted. Only a third of the league finished between 75 and 90 wins; over half the league finished 20 games back of first place in their division.
*This cutoff is somewhat arbitrary – there’s nothing special about these win totals. But what I’m trying to get at with “middle class” is a team that is COMPETITIVE without necessarily being GOOD. A middle class team is not a pushover; it feels like an accomplishment to beat them, even if they aren’t making any deep runs in October. And, crucially, a middle class team is usually in contention for most of the year. You’re probably not a playoff team with 75-90 wins, but you MIGHT be, and you’re at least not out of the race by July.
That became the new normal for about six seasons. Then, the numbers rebounded between 2005-10 – every year in that stretch featured at least 50% of the league in the “middle class” sweet spot. But then there was another recession: Since 2011, only ~40% of the league has finished in that window, and only two seasons have seen the number cross the 50% threshold.
Why does this matter? Well, for one, it’s hard for a sport to attract fans without middle class teams. Without a robust middle class, baseball’s long regular season becomes very boring, as the upper class teams gradually pull away from the pack, draining most of the suspense from the pennant race. Especially with the newly expanded playoffs, whatever middle class teams remain simply stumble into whatever wild card spots are unclaimed. It’s hard to attract fans to the season with so little suspense.
In general, baseball’s predicament helps illustrate the problem with inequality. Whenever anything gets criticized for being too inegalitarian, someone inevitably pushes back, wondering what’s so bad about inequality anyway. Shouldn’t different abilities earn different outcomes? Indeed, in sports especially, it’s the great teams, the ones that separate themselves from the middle class, that we remember: the 1998 Yankees, the 1986 Mets, the 1975 Reds, etc.
But in order for those outcomes to be impressive, you need outcomes in the middle. Without a middle class, then inequalities entrench themselves through various modes of exploitation. Those at the top can no longer be said to have earned their way there – they’re simply insulated from the lower class, who are playing by a totally different set of rules.
In our economy, these typically take the form of debt peonage systems. Whenever wealth inequality persists, then the upper class figures out ways to loan that wealth out to the lower and middle classes, so that any money they do accumulate has to be paid back through various debt instruments: student loans, credit card debt, mortgage payments, etc. These debt systems get thrown up like a moat around the upper class, allowing them to protect their class position.
In baseball, a similar situation has crept into the league, with lower class teams – the teams losing 90 or 100 games per season – serving as little more than fodder for the upper class teams. The root of this problem is tanking, which started to become more common at roughly the same time that baseball’s latest inequality problem took off.* Now teams no longer want to finish in the middle class. If you can’t win 95 games, the thinking goes, you might as well lose 100. That way you can at least stockpile high draft picks and save money.
*The Cubs are a particularly instructive example, building a mini dynasty in the mid-2010s by more or less skipping the middle class phase: Since 2010, they are, cumulatively, 12 games over .500, which comes out to ~82 wins per 162 games – a solidly middle class performance. But only once in those 12 full seasons did they actually end up between 75 and 90 wins. The rest of those years, they’ve either been really good (2015-18) or really bad (2010-2014; 2021-22).
Look at this year’s 100-game winners. Almost all of them fattened themselves on the carcasses of tanking teams, both by beating them up in the actual games, and picking up their discarded stars:
The Los Angeles Dodgers got Mookie Betts from the Red Sox when Boston decided to finish last in 2020, and they picked up Trea Turner (and Max Scherzer) last year from the tanking Nationals.
The Houston Astros added Justin Verlander in 2017, when the Detroit Tigers started their current “rebuild,” and added Trey Mancini from the Orioles this year at the deadline, since Mancini didn’t fit into Baltimore’s “competitive window.”
The New York Mets picked up Chris Bassitt and Daniel Vogelbach from the 100-loss A’s and Pirates, respectively. They also, of course, signed Max Scherzer after the Nationals traded him last year when they went into tank mode.
The New York Yankees didn’t get to 100 wins – they dropped their last two games in Texas, staying stuck on 99. But they were also built on the backs of the lower class teams*, adding DJ LeMahieu when the Rockies let him walk, Giancarlo Stanton when the Marlins’ new ownership decided to rebuild, and Anthony Rizzo during the Cubs’ latest roster purge.
Even the Atlanta Braves, a model for developing young talent, picked up Matt Olson from Oakland during their fire sale last off-season.
*It’s worth stressing that these lower class teams are not “small market teams,” This year’s lower class includes teams in the DC-metro area and the Bay Area – two of the largest media markets in the country. Other big market teams, like the Cubs and the Astros, have taken their turns in baseball’s lower class as well this decade. These teams are not UNABLE to spend money – they are choosing not to so the owners can keep money from the players.
With so many teams getting stripped for parts, it’s no wonder the few teams willing to amass talent are running up the win totals. But it doesn’t make them impressive – it just means they’re exploiting an unfair system.
Meanwhile, the game suffers. Fans are left to endure long, predictable seasons, with roughly a third of the league barely trying to compete. Baseball doesn’t have what the NBA has, with enduring dynasties and dynamic rivalries; nor does it have what the NFL has, where practically every fanbase enters the season with hope of making the playoffs. Instead, it is stuck somewhere in the middle, stratified between Have Nots who spend 4-6 years assuring their fans the future is bright, and Haves who spend months waiting for a postseasons that can often feel like crapshoots after a 162-game season.
This inequality cannot stand… viva la revolutión!