Two-and-a-half months into the season, no club in baseball owns a division lead larger than five games. And teams aren’t just bunched up at the top of the division.
Parity exists throughout baseball in 2015. It’s bordering on rampant.
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Look at it this way: Entering games on Thursday afternoon, 18 of MLB’s 30 teams were in the range of 33 to 39 wins, and only the Cardinals, at 43 wins, were above 39.
Or, look at the parity this way: 12 of the 15 teams in the AL entered Thursday within 5.5 games of a spot in the playoffs, and 11 of the 15 NL squads were within six games.
That’s pretty much everybody, which should make September fun. And the wheeling-and-dealing rumors will be flying as the July 31 non-waiver trade deadline approaches.
“I’m just gonna go ahead and say there are maybe five teams right now that have no chance at postseason baseball, and that’s saying something when we’re getting close to July. Really,” MLB Network analyst Dan Plesac told Sporting News. “The Reds, the Brewers, the Rockies, the Phillies and maybe the Athletics have buried themselves. Other than that, everybody has a chance at the division or wild card.”
But are the Cardinals, the team with 43 wins and a five-game lead in the NL Central, a great team? They’re the only squad with a winning percentage over .600 at the moment.
“The best team in baseball right now is the Cardinals, but as I say that I think they’re kind of a flawed team,” Plesac said. “They’re playing great, they’re the only team 20 games over .500, but they’re doing it without Adam Wainwright, without (Matt) Adams, without (Matt) Holliday, without Lance Lynn, and you just wonder how much longer can they keep playing at this pace with all these big guns down, right?
“My concern for them is August and September. They’ve got two guys, in Michael Wacha and Carlos Martinez, who have never logged big innings before. We’re in that day and age right now when you want to limit innings. I’m not sure the Cardinals want Wacha or Martinez near that 200-inning plateau. And if they do, they’re going to space their outings out in August and September so they don’t go much over that, if it looks like they’re going to be in the postseason, and it certainly does now.”
So if the Cardinals aren’t a “great” team, does that mean 2015 won’t have a great team?
The Dodgers were supposed to be in that conversation, and they are in first place in the NL West, but they’re only eight games over .500. That’s good, not close to great. The Nationals were the prohibitive World Series favorites, but they’re only two games over .500 and in second place in the NL East.
ESPN had 88 MLB experts predict division winners. In the AL, the overwhelming division winners were the Red Sox, Indians and Mariners. Those three teams are a combined 21 games under .500. Yikes. So there might not be a great team in 2015.
That’s an fun question to discuss, but does it really even matter?
“I mean, listen. It’s damned if you do and damned if you don’t,” Plesac said. “We want to see these great teams, right? But then they’ll have this 15-game lead in September and the national media says, ‘This is what’s wrong with baseball and why people start watching college football and NFL in September, because none of the races are compelling.’ You can’t have both. What I think we’re going to see in 2015, we saw it in 2014, we are going to see so many meaningful games in the month of September.”
And that’s not such a bad thing.