I guess you could force the Yankees to 'redistribute' their 'fair share' of pennants to the other teams. I'm sure Tampa Bay probably thinks they're 'entitled' to a piece of the action by now. 'Course the downside is, the Yankees might decide not to compete at all next year, win no pennants, and deprive the rest of the 'group'. Or, you could just hand everyone a pennant at the beginning of the season, tear down the score board; and don't even bother playing the game! ..........Oh, Utopian bliss!

I think that there's a fundamental flaw in the assumptions behind this chart, namely that all pennants are equal and all titles are equal.

Who care who won the World Series in 1912? Who care cares who won a pennant in 1937? Recent stuff matters more to us than older stuff.

So, I would propose something a little more complicated, but not very much. World Series titles are worth 1% less each year (not compounded). So, a win 99% ago is still worth a tiny bit, but not much. A win 50 years is worth half as much as a win today. Pennants should age at twice the rate, losing 2% a year.

(Honestly, i think that they aging is more complicated than that, with virtually no aging for 2 years, lots of aging for years 3-10, less aging for 11-25, and then staying pretty level for a long time. But that's a harder spreadsheet to do.)

(Well, actually, I am sure it is MUCH more complicated than that, but I was thinking it up while I was typing, so it's very approximate.)

So, who cares that the Red Sox won a bunch of World Series in the early 20th Century? What matters is the recent ones.

...head the list. True, the city had no baseball team for 33 years (curses, Calvin Griffith, then Bob Short), but if you look prior to the second Senators' move in 1971, you'd have to go back to 1933 for a pennant (from the first AL Senators), and 1945 for the last pennant race. Think about it: when Washington last experienced truly significant September baseball (2005, when the Nationals had already collapsed to the periphery of the NL wild-card race, doesn't count), area native Goldie Hawn was still in her mother's womb (she'll turn 63 on Nov. 21). And given the current Nats' management, I fear Goldie's daughter Kate Hudson may turn 63 before we see postseason baseball return to D.C.

the next step to take this would be to figure how likely it is that any particular team would have won the number of pennants it did. This would give another perspective on how lucky Yankees fans are compared to Indians fans.

I'm a middle school math teacher and this bumped my lesson for the day. It's a great example of probability and leads to a discussion on why the teams aren't closer to the "fair share" (which is that baseball isn't random).

No asterisk for the Best Team in Baseball, 1994?

Just another reason to say "Thanks for nothing, Bud".

Generallyamused Second, your last post was all about how the Phils aren't quite due for a win if the world was all fair and square. Now granted my analysis looks at the numbers you have presented in a slightly different way, as a general overview rather than chronological predicter, but the Phils are the only team in your chart which should have won 5.4 championships by your reckoning and yet have only won 1 (at least till Wednesday...or Turkey Day).

Right. There are different ways of looking at it. I tried to make that point in the piece this is a companion to.

If you're about my age, the Phillies have been a reasonably successful franchise, with four World Series appearances, one title going on two, plus several other playoff berths in memory. If you're 20, they've always been terrible until last year. If you're 80, you witnessed one lonely pennant when you were 22 and didn't get to see another one till you were 52, and for most of that time there were only eight teams in the league.

A chart that starts at 1980, or 1960, or almost any year, would look very different. If you start it at 1965, the Yankees aren't nearly so dominant, and the Cubs, Giants and Red Sox move down while the Twins, Braves and Orioles move up. Separating transplanted teams, counting only Atlanta years for the Braves, for example, would also change things.

There are lots of charts you could make. Go ahead. The math's pretty easy.

Colorado.

Thanks for the heads up.

@dhadbawnik

Nah...best way to fix this broken system is to have the Yankees removed from contention. When the system has returned to a more acceptable equilibrium we can try to reintroduce them to the system. It should only take about a 100 years or so.

The Giants won titles, yes ... when they were in New York.

But I fail to see why those titles should provide any solace to San Franciscans. They've been in SF for 50 years, which means we're getting close to being due for our second title ... and have zero.

Fans rarely stay with a team after a major move, so it seems more appropriate to talk about championships by team/city combination than by team alone ... which is what you're doing, of course, even though your chart makes it look like you're doing it by city.

This just goes to show statistics can be manipulated to say just about anything...(No Mccain fans that doesn't mean poll numbers having your horse down by double digits can)

First, Kaufman, with all due respect, as has been pointed out your chart is factually flawed. Colorado does have a pennant.

Second, your last post was all about how the Phils aren't quite due for a win if the world was all fair and square. Now granted my analysis looks at the numbers you have presented in a slightly different way, as a general overview rather than chronological predicter, but the Phils are the only team in your chart which should have won 5.4 championships by your reckoning and yet have only won 1 (at least till Wednesday...or Turkey Day).

Looking at your chart this actually constitutes one of larger deviations from expected performance if all things were equal (in terms of underperformance...no accounting for those damn yankees). So given that differential and accepting the fantasy world where all teams have the same chance on opening day, you would expect the stats to normalize and therefore the wider the distribution between expected performance and actual performance the greater chance that the world would right itself... (if only!)