Here's a debate that happens, well all the time. Who plays in the best division in baseball? Generally when you have these discussions people talk like but they have the two best teams in the majors! This of course brings people to say “but you are not including those low market teams! They have great talent!”. These arguments can sometimes be resolved (to some degree) with numbers.
After running a Spreadsheet including wins and losses for every team in every division I feel confident in this statement:
Through Friday, June 18, the NL EAST statistically by wins and losses is the best division in baseball. However not by much. They beat out the AL EAST by .002 points. It ended up being really close. Anyway here are the numbers in order from best to worst:
AL East: .5266
NL West: .5223
AL West: .4982
AL Central: .4864
NL Central: .4480
These numbers are not so surprising when you think through them. Once you establish that the NL has the leagues best division, then it is expected that league will also carry baseball's worst etc. What was surprising was how geographically (almost by markets) the list breaks down. The East is the Best, followed by the West and finally the Central. That pattern is well very interesting.
Food for thought I guess. Well now when you have this discussion you can bring up these numbers.
East East East, that is all the media knows. Let's talk West for a few seconds. As of 7/10 the NL west has 4 teams within 4 games of each other with one throw out team (AZ). The East has two throw out teams. The West beats up on each other with 4 quality teams, the east 3 teams. Last of all, the second place team in the east would be in 4th place in the west…Best division in BB = NL West.
While that may be true when your comment was written, it wasn't true when this article was written. When I originally wrote this article, I was looking strictly at the numbers of every division. Frankly, I was surprised by the result.
The problem with the best division in baseball argument is that it is extremely hard to balance the objective numbers with the subjective notion of good teams, media pressures, and known commodities