Editor’s note: It’s always great to be able to provide a guest column. This one comes from Thomas Danielson, a freelance writer who has loved baseball ever since he went to his first live game at Fenway Park. It’s especially timely given the previous entry on the Bookshelf.
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In 2004, baseball analyst Buster Olney published an outstanding book called The Last Night Of The Yankee Dynasty: The Game, The Team, And The Cost Of Greatness. It was about the winding down of the Yankees’ exceptional run of success from 1996 to 2001, during which they won four World Series titles, and came very close to winning all six that took place in that span.
More than anything else, Olney’s book is an exploration of what made the late-’90s and early-’00s Yankees so good. However, the concept that it was the end of a dynasty was what really made the whole story dramatic. Many baseball fans (and even Yankee haters) dismiss the idea that the Yankees’ dynasty ever really comes to an end. The team has had hot and cold stretches over the decades but never seems to fade away completely.
Yet I might go the other way with this discussion and suggest that the Yankees’ World Series loss in 2001 ended not only that particular sub-dynasty in the Bronx, but baseball dynasties in general. And I believe we have to look no further than winning percentages for evidence that the likelihood of another genuine MLB dynasty is low.
It may be the simplest measure of a team’s success, but the winning percentage of a league leader or World Series champion can be pretty telling as to the level of parity in the overall game. For instance, one analysis of baseball betting strategies noted that in 2014 the Angels led the regular season with a .605 winning percentage, which to many who don’t follow the sport would seem low. A modern day baseball fan, however, knows that .600 is actually a fairly exceptional mark for a season’s worth of work given the level of competition.
I bring this up not to suggest that .600 or above is by any means rare — a handful of teams knock on that door each season — but rather to illustrate the way in which winning percentage measures parity. And when we consider that same idea with regard to some of baseball history’s most undeniable dynasties, the idea begins to take shape that increased parity (and even number of teams in general) may actually be killing off the notion that a team can dominate the sport for years on end.
We’ll begin with the late’40s and early’50s Yankees, who won five World Championships in a row (specifically between 1949 and 1953). Those teams’ winning percentages were .630 (1949), .636 (1950), .636 (1951), .617 (1952), and .656 (1953) for an average of .635 over the five-year span. By modern standards that’s unheard of dominance. It’s also worth noting that in this span there were only 16 teams in the MLB, meaning a heavyweight had fewer contenders to deal with.
The next genuine dynasty (though the term is always subjective) was probably the 1972-74 Oakland Athletics, who won three World Series titles in a row. Those A’s had winning percentages of .600 (1972), .580 (1973), and .556 (1974) for an average of .579 over the three seasons. For a team to be so successful as to win three straight titles, yet boast a winning percentage over .050 lower than that of the previous “dynasty” suggests far greater competition all those years later. There were also simply more teams to contend with, as the MLB had expanded to 24 teams during this stretch in the ’70s.
Next we come to the late-’90s/early-’00s Yankees Olney wrote about. In the four years in which that team won the World Series, their winning percentages were .568 (1996), .704 (1998), .605 (1999), and .537 (2000). That makes for a .604 average, which breaks the trend of dynasty winning percentages declining over time. However, I’d argue that the 1998 season can be omitted as an outlier. Some still argue that these Yankees were the best team to ever take the field, and the 114 wins and .704 winning percentage they posted were nearly unprecedented. It skews things a bit, but excluding the absurd 1998 numbers, the dynasty’s winning percentage was an average of .570 – slightly lower than that of the ’70s A’s. Again, the indication is that competition was tougher, and there were more teams (28 in 1996 and the modern count of 30 by the end of this run of championships).
Some would say that was the last run worth considering, though there’s some debate as to whether or not the 2010s Giants were a dynasty. They had a bizarre pattern, winning every other year for five seasons. But for reference, the trend of declining winning percentages continued with these title teams as well. Specifically, they were .568 (2010), .580 (2012), and .543 (2014), for a .564 average.
Now, in the scheme of greater baseball analysis, judging teams by winning percentage is an exceedingly simple approach. Yet it illustrates the point quite well. A team with a winning percentage closer to .500 is by definition having a harder time distancing itself from the pack. And over the decades we’ve seen even some of the most successful teams slowly descending toward that mark. Where a dynastic run in the ’40s and ’50s meant a .635 winning percentage, that number seems almost ludicrous today. That isn’t to say individual teams can’t reach or exceed it by any means. But the idea of a club staying at that kind of level for multiple seasons in a short span seems less likely with each passing year. And that in turn makes the idea of another dynasty seem far-fetched.
For that reason, it may just be that Olney’s Last Night Of The Yankee Dynasty may truly have been the last night of MLB dynasties, period.
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