With favorable slate, Dodgers lead Super League at All-Star break

It was hard for the Dodgers to get into the Super League, but now that they're in, they've taken a pretty easy draw to the league lead at the 2021 All-Star break.

By couple of whiskers, the Dodgers missed out of the first season, 2019, of what we then were calling the Elite Division, but now are calling the Super League.

The Dodgers finished fifth in the 2018 First Division and barely lost out on the National League traveling championship. In each case, their downfall was the Arizona Diamondbacks, who finished barely ahead of the Dodgers in the First Division and the traveler. The main culprit was Arizona's 9-4 record against the Dodgers in games for the lineal title.

The Dodgers crept into the Super League for 2020 with their fourth-place finish in the 2019 First Division. Of course, we didn't actually play the Super League in 2020 (coronavirus, and all of that), so the 2021 Super League really is the 2020 Super League, a year late.

Here, the Dodgers received a quite favorable draw. They came to the All-Star break 20-9 in the Super League, first place. This occurred largely because about half of their games, 14 of them, came against the bottom two teams in these Super League standings, the Colorado Rockies and Washington Nationals. The Dodgers were 13-1 in those games, so 7-8 against the rest of the Super League.

Hard to argue against the Nationals being in this Super League. They did, after all, win the World Series in 2019, the year from which they qualified. But we're picking it up two years later, rather than the usual one, and the Natties aren't the same team. 

The Rockies aren't one of the illustrious teams in the game, but they have been in both Super Leagues, 2019 and 2021, qualifying the first time in the pyramid and this time with a lineal championship. They barely finished last in the 2019 Super League (then called the Elite Division) by our adjusted winning percentage, but ended up one-half game out of the basement in that column, buttressed by the Boston Red Sox. This time, they are buttressed by the Nationals.

There's still a race here, but barely. The Dodgers had 23 games remaining in the Super League, 12 of them against Colorado. They also were slated for two games with the Houston Astros, three with the Philadelphia Phillies, three with the Atlanta Braves and, at the very end of the season, three at home against the Milwaukee Brewers. Those last four named are the next four teams in the standings, all coming to the break between  3½ and 4½ games behind the Dodgers.

Astros bolt to big lead in American League lineal

At the All-Star break, there is a team to beat for the American League lineal championship, and it is the Houston Astros. With 26 games of lineal title, the Astros have more than the next two clubs, combined.

At the halfway point of the 2021 baseball season, the Houston Astros have set themselves as the clear favorites in the American League traveling championship race.

The Astros strung together a title and six straight defenses, holding the championship for almost all of June.

Comically enough, the team that ended it for the Astros, they being the Baltimore Orioles, entered the series in question in a 9-38 nightmare, then swept the Astros three straight in Houston June 28-30.

Baseball is weird. The Orioles, of course, immediately dropped the championship to the Angels. The Orioles won an earlier title in April, before all the losing started, but they failed to defend that one, as well.

Oddly, then, the Orioles and Astros are tied on top of the league in lineal championships for the year, each with two. However, the Orioles couldn't defend either one, while the Astros defended their second title six times. Thus, the Orioles have six games of championship, but the Astros have 26.

The New York Yankees and Toronto Blue Jays are next in line to the Astros. However, the Yankees have 13 games of title, half as many as Houston, while Toronto has 12.

Balance across divisions shows need for 'Super League'

The reason for running the newly-named Super League is simple. Every year, baseball contenders emerge from all over the pyramid. The Super League gives us a better chance to put those clubs in top competition.

The Elite Division made its first run in 2019, and if we're just looking at the top of the standings, it looks like the First Division. The New York Yankees won it, finishing one game ahead of the Houston Astros.

One reason for having an Elite Division – oops! First, this: We're changing the name of the Elite Division to the Super League, in honor of the public, legislative and media outrage that destroyed a plan by American sports conglomerates to monopolize European soccer earlier this year. A group of the leading English clubs owned by American magnates attempted to corral elite clubs from France, Germany, Italy and Spain into a permanent franchise arrangement, the like of which has made their American franchises increasingly valuable. It also would have wrecked the professional pyramids in each of these nations. It was to be called the Super League. But it was not to be.

Good name, though, and it suits our purposes here, so we'll use Super League instead of Elite Division across the sports where we have them, which are the North American versions of pro baseball, pro basketball, pro hockey and pro soccer.

All right, then, why do it? The Super League. Why do it? Just to see. What the hell?

We've been running the pyramids in baseball for 10 years through 2019, and there is a strong sense in which the pyramids rightly render the relative strengths of the teams through the game. It could be a lot better, but it would take a change in the schedule, rather than the structure, and we only control the structure. And the structure is simple. Eight teams each in the first three divisions and six in the fourth. At the end of the season, the top two in each division go up and the bottom two go down.

We started it in 2010. At the end of every year, the top two go up and the bottom two go down. And it has worked out that, if we use Major League playoff berths as a measure, then, year by year, the First Division is the best division, the Second Division is the second best, etc. 

Taking a look at entrants to the Major League playoffs, 96 of them in the 10 years that we have run the pyramid, we find that 41 of them played that year in the First Division. With eight teams each year, the First Division is 26.7 percent of the big league teams, and they are accounting for 42.7 percent of the playoff berths.

Seems about right. The difference between the top and bottom in Major League Baseball is not large, so you wouldn't expect the top division to monopolize the playoff bids. But you would expect a strong plurality, and this is what we have here.

The Second Division has kicked in 25 playoff teams. The Third Division has contributed 17, and the Fourth Division, with only six clubs each year, has contributed 12 playoff teams in these 10 years.

No big surprises. Here's what is surprising: when if comes to getting beyond the playoffs and actually winning the pennant, or even the World Series, the Second Division rules. Out of 20 pennant winners in those 10 years, nine are Second Division teams, compared with seven First Division teams. Out of the 10 World Series winners, five were Second Division clubs, compared with three from the First Division. Two World Champions have emerged from that year's Third Division.

One big difference between a pyramid and the permanent franchise system, as this exercise illustrates, is that teams can and do rise faster without the pyramid. There is no such thing as going from worst to first in the pyramid because any team in the Fourth Division is at least three years from joining the First Division, let alone winning it. 

So, teams rise in the pyramid much more slowly, and many – seven of the last 10 – win the World Championship without being in the First Division. We've seen some of the pennant winners of the last 10 years, like the Chicago Cubs, Kansas City Royals and Texas Rangers, peak either as they reach the First Division, or before they can even get there. 

Reaching and remaining in the First Division takes years of sustained excellence, and there aren't a lot of clubs with the resources for it. Especially for smaller market teams, the game is to build quickly and take your shot before the players get too expensive. One can track the trajectory of any small market club through 10 years of the pyramid and see abrupt rises and falls. That's just how a lot of these teams have to play it. And it means we can expect to see premium short-run teams below the First Division.

Seeing it happen that a Third Division champion is better than the sixth-place team in the First Division, we formed an over-arching division that takes in the leading finishers from each division the previous year. Thus, the Super League includes the top half of the previous year's First Division, the top three from the Second Division, the top two from the Third and the champion from the Fourth. 

Thus, any year's Super League will have six of the eight teams in that year's First Division, three teams from the Second Division and one from the Third Division. In addition, teams can qualify through the lineal championships and the four-by-four. Typically, the Super League will have 10-12 clubs.

Indians fall short, Astros claim 2019 AL lineal

The Cleveland Indians, falling from the First Division in 2019, needed to snag a traveling championship to at least qualify for the Super League. But the Houston Astros outpointed them.

The 2019 lineal championship in the American League offered up five contenders, each with such a different story to tell that one longs for a bygone day when decisions about them did not have to be made.

But that day is not today. Now, we need to name a winner, and no such thing emerges from these standings. Fortunately, we've worked up criteria so we won't go to the Christmas holidays every year arguing with ourselves about it.

First, of course, we decide which clubs are entered into the glamorous criteria stat-off that will decide which club will win the Super League berth that goes to the winner. For that decision, we also have criteria, which amount to requiring some combination of championships and defenses adding up to five or more. Five teams made that cut: the New York Yankees, Houston Astros, Cleveland Indians, Tampa Bay Rays and Seattle Mariners.

One interesting team that did not make it: The Toronto Blue Jays, who won the championship three times, tied at the top, but could not produce two defenses to go with them. Until mid-September, the Jays had only one undefended championship to their credit, but they then beat the Yankees two of three in Toronto before defending that title with a sweep of the Baltimore Orioles.

Now, the Jays were two series of championship away from the stat-down, but it was not to be. The Yankees took them down in Yankee Stadium, two-of-three, Sept. 20-22. A week later, as the season ended, it happened that the Rays had taken the title from the Yankees when they arrived in Toronto. The Blue Jays won that series, putting themselves at three titles and one defense. All they needed was one defense to make cut. But the season was over.

Next, we run the five remaining teams through the criteria. The winner in each category gets a point, which is split in cases of ties. Here's how it ended up:

1. Most championships. (New York .5, Tampa Bay .5)

2. Most title defenses per championship. (Cleveland)

3. Best winning percentage in traveling championship games. (Houston)

4. Most victories per time playing for the championship. (Houston 2.22, Cleveland 2.14, )

5. Most games as champion per time playing for the championship. (Cleveland 2.71, Houston 2.44, New York 2.28)

6. Fewest failed challenges. (Houston, Cleveland)

7. Head-to-head record in traveling championship games (Houston).

The last of those, the head-to-head record in traveling championship games, really functions as a tie-breaker. The only teams worth considering are those that are within a point of the top when we get to it. In this case, those teams were the Astros and Indians. The Astros were 3-0 and the Indians were 2-1.

So, it was close, but the decision matters. The Super League goes to the Astros, who didn't need it because they finished in the top half of the 2019 First Division. The Indians, relegated to the Second Division, still could have gone to the 2021 Super League by winning this traveler. Didn't happen.

 

Yankees win 2019 First Division

The New York Yankees could have been caught on top of the First Division during the 2019 playoffs, but they weren't. They finished ahead of the Houston Astros and Tampa Bay Rays.

Of all the sports in 2020, none took a worse hit for timing from the coronavirus than Major League Baseball (MLB), which was half into spring training when all went dark in mid-March.

The process of starting baseball again in 2020 was labored, in more ways than one, but the solution landed on playing as, in effect, three separate leagues during the regular season, then as two leagues in the postseason. The season, only 60 games, isn't enough for teams to really get around. 

So, we decided to suspend the usual alternative league configurations in baseball for 2020, simply because they weren't played. Same with the traveling championships. As an example, Colorado ended 2019 with the older circuit's lineal championship, but defending it in 2020 would have been a matter of just doing it against the four other clubs in the National League West. What's the point?

The only exception is that we ran the original version of the East, Center and West Leagues, as the compromise schedule in 2020 was accommodating Unlike the MLB season, the regional leagues here actually produced some interesting results.

The 2020 schedule also made the pyramid and the Elite League not feasible. Which means that when we pick these up in 2021, we will pick up from the 2019 results.

Let's, then, review the pyramid from 2019.

In the First Division, the New York Yankees entered the postseason in firm control of the lead. However, by its nature, the First Division is bound to produce many playoff teams and there's no telling in advance how the postseason will change the standings. 

It happens that the three leading First Division teams at the end of the regular season – the Yankees, the Tampa Bay Rays and the Houston Astros – all went to the American League playoffs.

Down two games to the Yankees, the Rays had the best chance of catching them in the playoffs. If they could have taken down Houston in the divisional series, even if it took five games, they still could have gone in front of the Yankees by sweeping them in the championship series. It was a stretch.

And it didn't happen, anyway. The Astros eliminated Tampa Bay in the divisional round, so they entered the championship series needing a sweep against the Yankees just to reach a tie at the top. As it worked out, the Astros won the championship series in six games and the Yankees pulled through the postseason with a one-game lead in the First Division.

So, a little drama came to us, but the outcome wasn't much in doubt. The Yankees won the First Division, the Astros rallied to second, the Rays dropped to third after losing their playoff series to the Astros, and the Dodgers finished fourth. All four teams will be in the 2021 Elite League, as the 2020 version was suspended because of adjustments to the coronavirus.

On the bottom of the top division, the Cleveland Indians and Boston Red Sox struggled mightily in the 2019 First Division and now will try their luck in the Second Division as the new relegants in 2021.

The Milwaukee Brewers faced little opposition in the 2019 Second Division, ending with a five-game cushion on top, with the Minnesota Twins and the Washington Nationals behind them. The Twins will join the Brewers in the 2021 First Division. Both, along with the Nationals, will be in the 2021 Elite League. 

The Pittsburgh Pirates and Texas Rangers continued their declines in 2019 and finished that season at the bottom of the second tier. They are going to the Third Division in 2021.

The free-agent signing of Bryce Harper didn't help the Philadelphia Phillies into the 2019 National League playoffs. Did it help the Washington Nationals win the World Series? Either way, it might have been the difference for getting the Phillies out of the Third Division. The Oakland Athletics actually won the third tier, with the Phillies in second place, a robust 3½ games behind Oakland. 

The Phillies finished a mere one-half game ahead of the Seattle Mariners in the Third Division. That difference matters in these pyramids, because the top two Third Division teams are simultaneously promoted to the next season's Second Division and Elite League, while the third-place club gets neither.

The two worst teams in the American League Central Division, the Detroit Royals and Kansas City Royals, also were the worst two teams in the 2019 Third Division. Each is going to the Fourth Division in 2021.

The winners in the Fourth Division, easily, were the Atlanta Braves, who will be promoted to the Third Division and the Elite League in 2021. The Cincinnati Reds, finishing second in the Fourth Division, will go up to the Third Division in 2021.

Yankees take North League traveling title for 2019

The fight for the North League lineal championship began between the Chicago Cubs and Milwaukee Brewers, but it really ended with the New York Yankees, who put themselves way ahead with two titles and seven defenses in the middle of the summer.

The New York Yankees fell short of their usual aspirations in 2019, bowing out with a six-game loss to the Houston Astros in the American League Championship Series (ALCS).

By the light of the championships chronicled on these pages, though, no one was better in 2019 than the Yankees.

In the two highest level competitions, the First Division and the Super League, the Yankees won the championships. The Yankees also finished a strong second place in the American League and interleague lineal championships.

Then, we have the four-by-four, which places each club in six distinct but related competitions. In future years, we'll say that any team winning three of these will qualify for the next year's Super League, if that club hasn't already qualified through the pyramid or the league-wide lineals. In 2019, the Yankees won four. 

Those would be the North League East Division, the East League North Division, the Eastern lineal and, here, the Northern lineal. The Cleveland Indians won the other two titles in the Northeast -- the Northeast Conference and the Northeast lineal.

Opening these traveling titles in the cardinal regions (north, south, east, west) presented a small challenge, as there is no such thing as a standing champion from established competitions to be the obvious caretakers. So, we tried to be fair and balanced about it, and we all know how that goes. 

The Boston Red Sox won the 2018 World Series, so we gave them dibs here started them as the East Champion. The Los Angeles Dodgers, as the National League pennant winners in 2018, were the clear choice as the caretaking West champion.

What about North and South? It's fair to start one in the American League and the other in the National League. The Houston Astros, with 103 wins in 2018, were the obvious choice in the South. So, we're going National League in the North. It happens that the Chicago Cubs and Milwaukee Brewers each won 95, tied for the league's Central Division championship with the best record in the NL. The Major Leagues decided it with a playoff game, won by Brewers.

We decided to do it a different way. Fortunately, the Cubs and Brewers were to start the 2019 season against each other. So, instead of deciding to name one or let the playoff decision from a year earlier stand, we just put the North lineal on the line in that series without picking a caretaker beforehand. Just this once. Because it made the most sense.

The Brewers won that series to open 2019, as well, and defended it once to kick off this championship. In the end, the Brewers were better than most teams in the North, winning two titles for a total of 14 games in the championship.

But that's not the Yankees. Somehow, we didn't pick the Yankees as one of the four clubs to caretaker a lineal in a cardinal region, despite their winning 100 games in 2018 before being bounced from the playoffs by the eventual world champs. The Yankees didn't care about that, of course. They simply went out and won their two cardinals, the East and the North.

In the North, they finished with 29 games of championship. The Yankees did their big damage by winning the championship in mid-June and hanging on through six defenses until the last week of July.

Yankees cruise through first East League lineal season

The New York Yankees ripped through the Eastern half of baseball in 2019 to the tune of 35-16, capturing the first season honors in the new East League lineal championship.

The New York Yankees had a pretty easy time of it for the first running of our Eastern lineal baseball championship, which includes the clubs in our Northeast and Southeast conferences.

The Boston Red Sox, coming off the 2018 World Championship, were deemed worthy of caretaking the Eastern title for a start, but the Red Sox were headed for struggle in 2019, and it began with dropping the new lineal title in their opening series against Toronto.

With four series wins into the second week of May, the Tampa Bay Rays took the early lead. But the Yankees took the title from Tampa Bay by winning two out of three in St. Petersburg May 10-12, then they proceeded to hold the title for four defenses to take the advantage.

After losing two of three on the road against the Toronto Blue Jays to lose the title, the Yankees got it back by sweeping the Blue Jays three games in Yankee Stadium June 24-26. From there, it was five more title defenses for the pinstripes, building up an enormous lead before the All-Star break.

The title finally crossed into the National League when the New York Mets swept three from the Cleveland Indians at Citifield Aug. 20-22. But the Atlanta Braves went immediately into the same park and swept the Mets to gain the championship.

From there, the Braves defended the championship five times until mid-September.

They never had a chance to catch the Yankees, who produced a stately 35-16 record games for the Eastern lineal. The Yankees ended the year with 41 games of championship, by far the most of any team. Atlanta was second with 18.

Yanks prevail with interleague baseball traveler for 2019

The New York Yankees had only one shot at the interleague baseball traveling championship in 2019, and did more with that than the Arizona Diamondbacks did in several. The Yankees won the bid for the Elite League, not that they needed it.

Like a good Gleyber, Torres is there — John Sterling (Keith Allison/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license). 

The 2019 traveling championship across big league baseball went into the books at the end of the regular season with the Chicago White Sox in possession, the Arizona Diamondbacks on top of the pile in games of title and the New York Yankees as the top club across the competition.

The Yankees won on criteria established here in 2018 for determining which clubs should receive the traveling championship bids to the next year's Elite Division. In the old days, we'd just make a valedictory announcement naming a Team of the Year based on the data and the general drift of the season, not unlike how we chose the national champion in college football not so long ago. But the establishment of the Elite Division forced some tighter focus, so we worked up criteria.                                                                                                                                                   

The criteria should naturally demonstrate how we value performance with the traveling championship. It would seem, for example, that simply having the championship for the most games might be sufficient. But what we really value is being good at playing for the championship (that is, winning it) and being good at defending it. Could it be that the club with the most games of championship is not the best at winning it and defending it?

Well, look at our standings. The Diamondbacks are way ahead of everyone else with 28 games holding the title. But the Diamondbacks actually were a middling performer with the traveling title on the line. 

They were reasonably good at winning it, succeeding in four out of five challenges. But their overall record in games for the traveling title is less than stellar, 21-23. They only defended the championship on five of nine occasions. And three of their successful defenses were absolutely the weakest kind. In each of those cases, the series ended in a draw, the other team scored more runs and the DBacks held it because that's how it works with the interleague championship. You have to beat the champion. In the traveling title across either of the leagues, the run totals would have broken these ties away from the Diamondbacks.

Arizona won its second traveling title of the season May 3-5, taking two of three from the Colorado Rockies in Denver, then lost it right away by dropping two of three to the Tampa Bay Rays in St. Petersburg. Next, the Yankees dropped in on Tampa Bay and won two of three, becoming the new champions.

From there, the Yankees tore it up with six defenses, finally losing two of three to the Toronto Blue Jays in Toronto June 4-6. The Yankees never saw another chance at the traveling title. But their output already was 21 games of title, six defenses in seven attempts and a 17-7 record. At that point, the Yankees were well ahead in the main categories. Arizona was 9-9 with two titles, 12 games and only two defenses in four attempts.

The Diamondbacks continued accumulating, but all of it put together didn't seem to match what the Yankees did with just that one turn, and the criteria supports that. Of course, the criteria worked out great for the Diamondbacks in 2018, as it put them ahead of a 48-game season by the Dodgers in the National League traveler and kept the Dodgers out of the Elite Division. This time, the criteria turned back the Diamondbacks.

The criteria before the criteria are the standards for being included in the "stat-off," which are one title with six defenses or at least two titles with three defenses. Only the Yankees and the Diamondbacks made the standard. 

The Cincinnati Reds fell one defense short of six in mid-August, losing to the Washington Nationals. Then the Nationals came through with five defenses before losing to the New York Mets in early September. The Dodgers, Atlanta Braves, Philadelphia Phillies and San Diego Padres each won two titles, but they totaled two defenses between them.

So, here are the criteria, and here is how the two eligible clubs, the Diamondbacks and Yankees, measured up to them.

1. Most championships (Arizona 4, New York 1).

2. Most title defenses per championship (New York 6, Arizona 1.25).

3. Best winning percentage in traveling championship games (New York .708, Arizona .477).

4. Most victories per time playing for the championship (New York 2.13, Arizona 1.5).

5. Most games as champion per time playing for the championship (New York 2.63, Arizona 2).

6. Fewest failed challenges (New York 0, Arizona 1).

7. Head-to-head record in traveling championship games (No head-to-head).

The last of those goes to neither side, and the Yankees carry five of the other six. So, the Yankees get the bid here, but they don't really need it. At this point, they are almost certain to win this year's Elite Division and take the first bid next year as the defending champion. Moreover, there is all but no chance that the Yankees will fall from the top half of the First Division, and they would be in that way.

However, the result is fatal, in this limited sense, to the Diamondbacks, who had no other chance of returning to the Elite Division. The Diamondbacks were the only club out of the top eight in this year's Elite Division to miss the Major League playoffs, and they'll finish in second place if the Yankees go all the way. In that event, they would finish second to the Yankees by much more than in the traveling championship. 

But it's still second place, and that's the outside looking in. 

Yanks lead Elite Division, but playoffs will decide

The New York Yankees lead the Elite Division at the end of its first regular season, but this chase probably won't be decided until the end of the postseason.

Outfielder Aaron Judge is one of many who has powered the New York Yankees to the top of the Elite Division entering the 2019 playoffs (Keith Allison/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license).

The baseball season that is entering its final and deciding stages happens to present our first reckoning of an Elite Division, which also will crop up in some other sports.

In concept, the Elite Division is a tournament of champions, but they are the champions documented in these pages. In short, the best teams from the pyramids, traveling championships and regional four-by-four arrangements shall be entered into the next season's Elite Division.

For example, the 2019 Elite Division is composed of the top half of the 2018 First Division, the top three clubs from the Second Division, the top two from the Third Division and the top club from the Fourth Division. Any traveling champions who haven't qualified in the pyramid will be entered, as well as qualifying teams from the four-by-four who haven't qualified in the pyramid or the travelers.

The mix this created for the 2019 Elite Division has produced a robust, even competition that remains far from decided entering the postseason. Seven of the top eight clubs in this 11-team Elite Division are going to the playoffs, with a mere 6 1/2 games separating first place from eighth place.

The New York Yankees lead the Elite Division ending the regular season, but their position is far from secure. It unlikely that the Yankees will finish on top of this pile without winning the World Series, and anything short of that for the Bronx Bombers stands to leave this championship up for grabs.

The Houston Astros are in second place, two games down and trailing the Yankees by 13 percentage points (.543 to .530) weighted to the mean, as we do these standings. The third-place club, the Arizona Diamondbacks, are the only contending club not in the playoffs. Thus, they are frozen at a mean weighted percentage of .528, which could win it if the Yankees and Astros both falter.

Or, the Atlanta Braves (.524), St. Louis Cardinals (.521) or Oakland Athletics (.511) could make a move. Anything can happen in these playoffs. If one of these clubs can turn up a four-game sweep anywhere in this near future, it's a race changer.

Way down these standings, almost at the very bottom, we find the Boston Red Sox, and this tells us something interesting about the Red Sox. It's true that the Red Sox have fallen a long way after winning two consecutive First Division titles and the 2018 World Championship. It's also true that it still took a pretty good club to beat the Red Sox in 2019.

Against this prestigious stack of clubs from the Elite Division, the Red Sox finished 25-39. But they were 88-74 overall, meaning they were 63-36 against everyone else. They did beat the teams that you have to beat. They just didn't beat the teams that you need to beat.

The Red Sox will not be in the 2020 Elite Division. However, the Yankees, Astros, Braves, Cardinals, Athletics, Minnesota Twins and Tampa Bay Rays already have either qualified for return to the Elite Division in 2020, or have all but qualified.


The winner of the Elite Division also will be qualified for next year's version so that it can attempt a defense of its championship.

Dodgers in fight for 2020 Elite Division spot

The postseason is coming soon to Major League Baseball, and much is at stake in that process for the top two divisions of the pyramid across the game.

The Dodgers will need a big bat from Cody Bellinger to avoid a repeat of last season's postseason collapse that dropped them from the Elite Division (TonyTheTiger/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license).

Going to the final weekend of the Major League Baseball regular season, our pyramid of ordinal divisions is half set.

To a greater degree than usual, perhaps, the top of the pyramid remains to be decided in the postseason. The bottom of the pyramid is where the decisions have been made.

We've mentioned several times in these pages that baseball presents unique challenges for running a pyramid. Other long-season sports like pro basketball, hockey and soccer schedule at least a home-and-home double round-robin. Everybody plays everybody, home and home, at least once. That's a fair way to run a pyramid.

Baseball plays a 162-game season for each team, and your ball club is still playing four games against some club it hasn't seen in three years. In the way old days, you had eight clubs in a league, each club played each of the others 22 times per year and you had 154 games. You pretty much knew the opposition. Now, you need a CIA dossier to find out who you're playing. So, there is some usefulness for analytics.

Once upon a time, baseball was two separate but equal leagues, the American and National Leagues, which agreed to a strong over-seeing commissioner to maintain public faith in the game, ensure the legitimacy of transactions between clubs and keep them from poaching each other's players. Over time, it made increasing sense for the two leagues to centralize their national business operations and relationships.

Ushering in the new century in 2000, the two league offices dissolved and merged into one entity called Major League Baseball. All of the game's national operations were ceded to the commissioner's office.

The problem is that the American League and the National League are Americana. They are a folk tradition. Generations of our countrymen spent their entire lives arguing about which was better. If you're Baseball, you can't just say to the public that you have eliminated the American and National Leagues, even though this is, in fact, what you have done. People might think that baseball, itself, had come to an end.

So, Baseball undertook a charade and baseball fans, being baseball fans, played along. Baseball continued to act as though the American and National Leagues still existed as separate entities. The lie was put to all of this at the 2002 All-Star Game in Milwaukee, hometown of then-Commissioner Bud Selig. The game ended in a tie because both teams ran out of pitchers. The truer reason was because the entities allegedly being represented on the field, the American and National Leagues, no longer existed and, therefore, didn't concern themselves with winning. That's why Selig was compelled to put something on the line in the All-Star Game: home-field advantage in the World Series.

Another component of the ruse, which fans wanted, was the maintenance of scheduling as if two separate leagues existed, so each club still plays 85 percent of its games in its traditional but no longer existing "league." The crowning and focal absurdity is interleague play. The absurdity, of course, is that in order for there to be interleague play, there would have to be at least two leagues involved, and there is, in fact, only one.

Through nearly 20 years of this, Baseball has butchered the competitive integrity of its nominally separate leagues by imbalancing the schedule to accommodate interleague play, but it hasn't been able to take full advantage of interleague play that way. Once a comforting salve to a jolting change in business arrangements, the fictional maintenance of American and National Leagues now has become a limiting belief.

That shows especially when we try a competitive arrangement of universal scope, such as the pyramid with promotion and relegation. This season, 2019, is our tenth of attempting such a pyramid in baseball, and the most persistent and irksome problem, by far, is dealing with the scheduling disparities across the game.

When we look at these pyramids at the end of a year, we see that some team has played 60 games in a division and some other team played 30 in the same division. Some team played five other teams in its pyramid division, and some other team played three. This problem does not arise in any other sport where we do pyramids (the only sport where we don't is American football, simply because the seasons are so short).

MLB could solve the problem for us by facing reality and scheduling at least a home-and-home double round-robin across its universe, but we're not waiting for that. Instead, we need to make decisions about how certain performances will be valued and which achievements truly warrant promotion or demotion, especially now that we have ramped up the Elite Division and there actually is something riding on these calls.

Here's where the rubber meets the road: The probabilities tell us that it is more difficult to win 62 percent of 100 games than to win 67 percent of 50 games. The more games you play, the more your results will converge on the mean. In real baseball standings, the team winning 62 percent of 100 games is 62-38 with a .620 winning percentage, and that team is four games ahead of a 33-17 club with a .660 percentage. Typically, we have split championships in cases like this, or let percentages prevail when we needed a choice.

But when our result matters, such as when we qualify clubs for the Elite Division, do we really think the 33-17 club is better than the 62-38 club? The numbers tell us that both clubs over 162 games or some other long haul will regress toward the mean, which is .500, and that the club with the .620 through 100 games is likely to come through that process better than the club that's .660 through 50 games. The team with 62 wins out of 100 games is the better team and should be promoted.

Fortunately, the eyeballs and intuitions in this matter are supported by mathematicians who delve in baseball statistics. They don't all agree on how heavily to weight the mean over 162 games, but they do all agree that the accurate way to determine how some club would fare over 162 games from a limited sample involves adding some weight of .500 to a club's actual record and computing the percentage that results. Phil Birnbaum, purportedly following Tom Tango, says the weight is 74 games (add 37 wins and 37 losses). Fivethirtyeight.com says it's 67 games (33.5-33.5). This Bayesian approach lands on 100 (50-50).

For no particular reason, we'll weight the actual winning percentages that pop up here with 74 games of mean and let Birnbaum explain the math. Thus, the winning percentages showing up in these baseball standings will be determined by a club's winning percentage weighted by 74 games of .500. Fair enough. Problem solved!

Unless it isn't. In that case, if we discover that we're applying this wrong or we come up with a better idea, we'll try something else. For now, we'll try this.

What does 74 games of .500 weight do to our example? Well, 62-38 plus 37-37 is 99-75, a winning percentage of .569. And 33-17 plus 37-37 is 70-54, a winning percentage of .565. So, the 74 weight agrees with our intuitions about which team is better and also has working credibility among baseball researchers. The 62-38 club also comes out better if we apply weights of 67 or 100. They all do roughly the same work.

This will come up a couple of times as we run through the pyramid.

The most striking aspect of this pyramid as we look out across the standings is how well it conforms to the playoff entries across Major League Baseball. The top five clubs in the First Division at this moment all are ticketed for the playoffs, as are the top three in the Second Division and the champions of the Third Division and the Fourth Division. If the Cleveland Indians can somehow catch the Tampa Bay Rays or Oakland Athletics for American League wildcard spot, that won't be the case, but it's unlikely with three games left in the season that the Indians can do it.

The upside, for us, with the scheduling imbalances in baseball is that when the playoffs arrive, we just go ahead and include them. In other sports, the regular season pyramids work so well that including the playoffs would ruin them, but the proportions in baseball are so screwy that there is no integrity to ruin, so we include playoffs.

Often, something big happens in some division during the playoffs, though more of the action in the early years took place in the lower divisions. In 2016, though, the Dodgers rode a good run of playoffs to the First Division championship. It's hard, sometimes, to convince Dodgers fans that they've ever accomplished anything in the postseason, but they have.

Looking at the very top of the First Division, we see the New York Yankees, Houston Astros and Tampa Bay Rays bunched tightly together. The Rays just beat the Yankees twice in St. Petersburg this week to arrive within two games of the top. If the Rays can make it through the wildcard playoff round, they're playing the Astros or the Yankees, and the winner of that series is likely to play the Astros or the Yankees. Any of these clubs could go up or down during the playoffs.

Of course, there is a cost to going too far down. The top four clubs in the First Division go to the Elite Division. The fifth-place club does not. Dodgers fans in the know remember how this went down last year. The Dodgers were the fourth-place club entering the postseason, then got knocked down the standings with a five-game loss to the Boston Red Sox in the World Series and missed the Elite Division.

This time, the Dodgers are 19-17, fourth place again, thanks largely to the Arizona Diamondbacks winning two of three from the St. Louis Cardinals in the desert this week, pushing the Cardinals down to 8-8. By our rules of the pyramid, a team needs 10 wins to qualify for the Elite Division, so the Cardinals are short at the moment. However, if it gets to the Cardinals and Dodgers meeting in the playoffs, two wins for the Cardinals make them eligible and a series victory would put them in fourth place. Pending the World Series.

The top of the First Division is up for grabs. The bottom is settled. The Boston Red Sox, two-time defending First Division champions, fell all the way to the bottom of the First Division in 2019 and will be demoted. In ten years of the pyramid, the Red Sox have won the First Division three times, including 2010, the first year. No other club has won the First Division more than once.

Following their 2010 victory, the Red Sox fell to the Second Division for 2013 and to the Third Division for 2014. Then the Red Sox went on a streak of four straight years winning pyramid division championships, capturing the Third Division in 2015, sharing the Second Division title with the Cleveland Indians in 2016 and winning lopsided First Division titles in 2017 and 2018.

The Indians, who were promoted with the Red Sox to the First Division in 2017, appear to be headed back to the Second Division with the Red Sox in 2020. A slim chance remains that the Indians can slip into the playoffs and fight their way through there to avoid relegation, but it is slim.

The top of the Second Division remains open, but not like the top division. The Milwaukee Brewers and Washington Nationals could meet in the playoffs, and either of those clubs could play the Minnesota Twins in the World Series. It's not likely that any combination of results could dislodge the Brewers from the top, especially if they can win just a couple games in a series against either of these Second Division foes.

But if the Nationals get hot in the playoffs, they could overtake the Twins for the second promotion to the First Division. If we're just looking at winning percentage, the Twins have a formidable advantage at .619 (13-8) to .551 (16-13). But when we add the weights, the Twins are up only 11 percentage points, .526 to .515.

At the bottom of this pile, we see another example of weighting. The Pittsburgh Pirates actually are well ahead of the Toronto Blue Jays and Texas Rangers by raw percentage, even at a modest .400. But the Blue Jays have played so few games that they barely lost the 10 required for relegation, and the Rangers played not many more. Adding the weights put 102 points on the Blue Jays, raising them from .375 to .477. The Pirates gain on .500 with the weights, too, but not nearly so much because they played at least twice as many games as either of the other clubs. The weights are getting the Pirates relegated.

The weights are making an impact on top of the Third Division, too. They don't matter so much for the Oakland Athletics, who roared through this group and would have won it under any scenario. Under the old rules, though, the San Francisco Giants would be joining the A's both in promotion to the Second Division and entry to the Elite Division. With the weights, though, the Giants finished fourth in this level.

With that, the Philadelphia Phillies took in the big payout they sought with the Bryce Harper contract, rising to second place in the Third Division and the glorious credentials that come with it. The Phillies will go both to the Second Division and the Elite Division in 2020. The Seattle Mariners made a surprising bid to capture Third Place.

With no other clubs in the Third Division playoff bound except for the Athletics, there will be no change in these standings. That's no consolation for two forlorn American League Central clubs, the Kansas City Royals and Detroit Tigers, who drop to the Fourth Division and join the Chicago White Sox, a long-time dweller in that cellar.

Down in the Fourth Division, we saw crushing performances by the Atlanta Braves and the Cincinnati Reds, who both will be promoted to the Third Division in 2020. The Braves, for winning the Fourth Division, also will enter the Elite Division.

The teams being held over in the Fourth Division have, more or less, established permanent residence there. The San Diego Padres entered the basement in 2013 and still haven't come out, a seven-year streak that stands as the longest ever. But the Baltimore Orioles actually have spent the most time in the Fourth Division, eight of the 10 years since we began running the pyramid. The Orioles were an original Fourth Division member before making a brief escape.

The Chicago White Sox entered the Fourth Division in 2012 and got out in 2016 only because of a special ruling necessitated by the light schedule at the bottom level. They returned in 2019. The Royals, an original Fourth Division club and the last to finally escape after the 2013 season, now are headed back to the lowest tier.

Rays rally with big September for 2018 AL traveling title

The Tampa Bay Rays aren't saying a lot for their 2018 season, but their strong September run against playoff clubs put them ahead of the rest of the American League in the traveling championship.

The Tampa Bay Rays were going nowhere when the Boston Red Sox dropped into St. Petersburg on Aug. 24 with the American League traveling championship in hand. The Rays were 67-61 overall, which could happen to any club on a steady diet of the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees.

The Rays were nine games behind the nearest playoff spot and 22½ games out of first place in the American League East. And they somehow salvaged something from their season.

The Rays are the Team of the Year in the AL traveling championship in 2018 for their 20-9 late to a 31-17 record for the season, which included 37 games of title defense. The Rays tied four other teams for the league lead with two championships, but the Rays came out on top in wins games of defense.

The Rays took the prize with a three-game sweep when the Reds Sox went to their dome, then they produced seven straight defenses. Counting the win against the Red Sox, four of the first five series in this title defense came against teams that would be in the playoffs. As they continued their streak, the Rays surpassed the New York Yankees, Cleveland Indians and the Houston Astros on their path to the top of the traveling championship standings.

Yankees pass Angels for AL season traveling title

The Angels all but had Team of the Year for the American League traveling championship clinched, but the New York Yankees got their mitts on it, then produced a torrid September to prevail.

The American League (AL) traveling championship raised two questions, which amounted to one: Did the New York Yankees win it? Or did the Angels lose it?

On the morning of Sept. 3, the Angels were a lusty 26-12 for the AL traveler, winning it three times,  defending it five times in eight tries and holding 30 games of title defense. They were tied, 1-1, against the Texas Rangers in Arlington with the rubber game of their three-game series coming up that day. A win would allow the Angels to take the prize with them to Oakland and, maybe, later, to Seattle. 

Only the Seattle Mariners were making any kind of claim to contest the Angels for the season title. Despite leading all AL clubs with five titles, though, the Mariners were only 22-25 for the prize, succeeding only twice in seven defenses.     

We'll never know if a win for the Angels on Sept. 3 would have sealed the season title or not. Anyway, it didn't happen. The Rangers won that day, 7-6. The Angels staged a furious three-run rally in the ninth to come in a run short. Turned out to be their dying gasp.

The problem was that the Rangers had the New York Yankees as their next AL opponent after taking a weekend detour in the National League against the Atlanta Braves. And the Yankees, unlike the Angels, Rangers or Mariners, were in the playoff hunt.

The Yankees were 8-6 in the AL traveler with one title at that point. But they wanted the September games the most, and they won them. First, they won two of three against the Rangers to gain the championship for the first time since Aug. 2. They followed with consecutive defenses against the Tampa Bay Rays, Baltimore Orioles and Minnesota Twins. 

The Toronto Blue Jays took two of three from the Yankees Sept. 29-Oct. 1 at Yankee Stadium to temporarily derail the New Yorkers. The Jays held the prize by winning two of three from the Red Sox at Fenway Park before a return match with the Yankees at Yankee Stadium.

There, the Yankees reclaimed the crown with two wins in three games to end the regular season and take the prize into the playoffs. A one-game playoff win against the Twins preceded a five-game win in the American League Division Series (ALDS) against the Cleveland Indians. The Houston Astros claimed the prize from the Yankees with a seven-game win in the American League Championship Series, but the Yankees were in by then with the traveling championship for the season.

The Yankees did a season's worth in September, winning the title twice and making five defenses in seven tries for a 19-11 overall record and 26 games of title defense.                                                                                                                                                         

Yankees rip up September, win big league traveler in October

The Baltimore Orioles appeared to be all but guaranteed of winning the big league traveling championship deep into September, but the New York Yankees won eight title series during a torrid six-week stretch drive to prevail as the 2017 Team of the Year.

The New York Yankees mounted a furious rally in September and deep into the Major League playoffs to claim the 2017 big league traveling championship.

When the Yankees won two of three from the Baltimore Orioles at Yankee Stadium Sept. 4-7, it appeared the Orioles could retire comfortably with the prize. They had just won their second traveling title of the year and defended it twice, and even after losing to the Yankees they still had 39 games of title defense, well ahead of second-place Tampa Bay at 27. The Yankees, with a mere 12 games of title defense at that point, were an afterthought in the standings.

But the Yankees took off from their victory against the Orioles, claiming two of three on the road against the Texas Rangers and the Rays successively, then returning to Yankee Stadium to win three of four from the Orioles and sweep the Twins in three games.

The Toronto Blue Jays took two of three from the Yankees Sept. 22-24 in Toronto, but the Yankees won the return series at Yankee Stadium the next weekend to finish the regular season with the title in their hands, a wild-card playoff bid to keep it alive and 28 games of championship defense in their pockets.

It would be impossible to pick one hero for the Yankees in their run to the Team of the Year title for the traveling championship. In the wild card game, they fell behind the Minnesota Twins, 3-0, in the bottom of the first inning. But Didi Gregorius hit a three-run homer in the bottom of the inning to tie the game and the Yankees went on to an 8-4 win.

Next, the Yankees faced the Cleveland Indians in the American League Division Series (ALDS). The Indians almost finished the Yankees off, taking a 2-0 lead in the best-of-five affair. But the Yankees rallied with three straight wins and advanced to the American League Championship Series (ALCS) against the Houston Astros.

Entering the ALCS, the Yankees had 34 games of title defense, still five short of Baltimore's leading total of 39. It meant that even if the Yankees couldn't win the series, they still could clinch the traveling championship for the year if they could make it last at least six games.

That, they did, and just a little more. After losing the first two games of the series, the Yankees took an 8-1 victory in Game 3 behind six shutout innings by starting pitcher CC Sabathia. In Game 4, the Yankees trailed, 4-2, going to the bottom of the eighth inning at Yankee Stadium. But Aaron Judge and Gary Sanchez each hit RBI doubles against Astros reliever Ken Giles to trigger a four-run inning and give the Yankees a 6-4 victory.

With that win, the Yankees guaranteed that the ALCS would go at least six games. In fact, it went seven games before the Astros prevailed to win the league pennant.

But the Yankees had the traveling championship across the major leagues to show for a fantastic six-week run, during which they went 23-14 with two traveling titles, six title defenses in eight attempts and 29 games of title defense through motivated competition.

The season began with the Orioles carrying in the title from the end of the 2016 season. The Orioles were loath to let go of it for a long time, defending that championship in their first seven attempts of 2017 as they went off to a 14-6 start. They already had a 23-game head start on the whole rest of the world in title defenses when the Yankees finally knocked them down with two wins in three games at Yankee Stadium April 28-30.

But that loss to the Yankees wasn't the beginning of the end for the Orioles. That came in September, when the Yankees did the same thing to them again.

Red Sox make mark, fly through First Division

The Boston Red Sox won their second First Division title in 2017, setting the record for the largest winning margin in the games behind column. The San Francisco Giants and Texas Rangers fell to the bottom.

New to the First Division in 2017, the Boston Red Sox cruised to the title by five games on their partner in promotion, the Cleveland Indians.

The First Division title normally is a pretty tight affair, but the Red Sox ended the campaign with the largest margin in the history of this competition. The Red Sox won the inagural First Division in 2010 by four games on the Philadelphia Phillies and the Tampa Bay Rays claimed the 2011 top tier title by the same margin over the San Francisco Giants in the two previous largest margins.

The 2010 title was Boston's only previous First Division championship.

The Giants and Texas Rangers fell to the bottom of the First Division in 2017 and are headed to the Second Division in 2018. Coming up from the Second Division to the First Division are the Arizona Diamondbacks and the New York Yankees.

The Diamondbacks will be in the First Division for the first time in their history. The Yankees were an original First Division team in 2010 but finished last in the tier in 2013 to be demoted and are headed back to the top level for the first time since then. The Yankees won the Second Division in 2017 by one game over the Diamondbacks and the Milwaukee Brewers, who missed the second promotional spot by percentage points.

The Detroit Tigers and New York Mets both won promotion to the Second Division for 2017, but both found the soup a little too thick at the higher level and they're both going back to the Third Division in 2018. In their place are the last two World Champions, the Chicago Cubs (2016) and the Houston Astros (2017), the top two Third Division clubs of 2017.

The fight to stave off relegation to the Fourth Division came down to two losers and one survivor, with the Miami Marlins coming out of it in the preferred position. The Seattle Mariners and Atlanta Braves are going down to the Third Division in 2018.

The Colorado Rockies and Minnesota Twins, easily the best two Fourth Division teams in 2017, are going up to the Third Division in 2018.

Jays quickly reclaim interleague traveler for AL

The Cincinnati Reds defended the interleague baseball traveling championship for only three days before losing it back to the American League. The Toronto Blue Jays took it from the Reds with a prodigious surge of home run power.

Russell Martin batted .500 with two homers as the Toronto Blue Jays reclaimed the interleague traveling baseball championship from the Cincinnati Reds with a three-game sweep (Keith Allison/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license).

It was fun while it lasted, perhaps, but it didn't last for very long.

About as quickly as the Cincinnati Reds won the traveling championship across big league baseball, securing it for the National League for the first time since the middle of last August, they lost it.

The Reds did defend it once. After winning the title by capturing the only game of a rain-shortened one-game series against the Cleveland Indians on May 24, they defended it by winning two of three on the road against the Philadelphia Phillies.

But the schedule then sent the Reds to Toronto for three games to be played May 29-31. The Toronto Blue Jays were waiting with their home run bats. The Jays beat the Reds in all three games they played, outscoring their visitors by a combined 28-10. A 17-2 win in the opener had a lot to do with that total margin.

Here is the rendering from baseball-reference.com of how the Jays hit against Cincinnati. The Jays hit nine homers – two by Russell Martin and one each by seven other players. Ezequiel Carrera had six hits for Toronto in the series, followed by Martin, Kendrys Morales, Jose Bautista and Devon Travis with five each.

The Jays are at home against the New York Yankees this weekend, with the Yankees winning two of the first three games. The final game of the series is on Sunday. If the Jays win, they will gain a split in the series and maintain the interleague championship, which does not change hands in a split series.