BwM's Consistency Index 4/16/18

Hey baseball fans!

So there's always this talk about which team is the greatest in baseball history and there are always these comparisons made that aren't applicable for most teams. For example, how can you judge a team's success based on World Series championships when some teams have never been to the World Series in the first place (I'm looking at you, Nationals and Mariners)? With this in mind, I wanted to come up with a definitive way to define a team's success with the one stat that is measurable among all MLB teams: regular season success. After doing some calculations, I came up with a sort of consistency index, a score that measures a team's year-to-year success during the MLB regular season.

Here's how the index is calculated. To be fair to all teams, I took the total number of wins of every MLB team since 1998, the last year of MLB expansion, and averaged them out to get an average wins per season. From there, I took the absolute value of the change in wins from season-to-season for all the teams and I averaged those numbers out to get a volatility score. From there, I subtracted the volatility score from the average seasonal wins total to get the consistency index. There are several numbers that caught my eye that are worth mentioning. First of all, it's no secret that the Yankees had the best average seasonal wins total at 94.75 wins a season, but they also had an extraordinary volatility score; their wins total from year-to-year only changed by 5.84 wins a season, meaning they were consistently good. In fact, their consistency index of 88.91 was the best in the majors. On the opposite side of the spectrum, the Diamondbacks averaged 79.80 wins a season from 1998-2017, but their year-to-year difference in wins was an average of 14.95. Their MLB-low consistency index of 64.85 means that they were consistently mercurial, meaning that their season-to-season win total is completely random and void of any trend.

Other teams with good consistency indexes include the Braves, Dodgers, A's, and Cardinals, among others. To see my calculations, click here. Would you change any of my math? What other ways could you objectively determine a team's success? Leave your thoughts in the comments section below. Thanks for reading this post and I hope you enjoyed it. Check back soon for more of "all the buzz on what wuzz."