There are many theories about what makes a team good.  Most of the meaningful analysis looks at the performance of the individual players and then attempts to see whether a team is playing up to snuff.  However, there are many individuals: sportswriters, fans, analysts, whomever, who focus on the results a team achieves in particular situations.  There are two adages that you hear about all the time that have particularly intrigued me:

1. You’ve gotta win the games versus the bad teams, and
2. You’ve gotta win games versus the teams in your division.

I don’t per se disagree with either of these two things.  Namely, you are always better off winning a game than losing it. Results though are merely the culmination of all the little things that happen within a game and just dumb luck.  However, I still wanted to know: Is there real truth that winning games in these two categories is somehow more important than the rest of the games? Can a mediocre team overcome their mediocrity simply by looking like the 1927 Yankees versus the bad teams?

With these questions in mind, I set out to look at the Braves performance versus these categories of teams during their epic 14 year division run and then compare it to the “modern” Braves of 2006-present day.  At the end of everything, I don’t think there’s much to the mantras.  I present to you the data from this period as an empirical look at the Braves performance from 1991-2009 though so that you can make your own conclusions.

A couple of things to point out up front.  First, when examining #1 (“You’ve gotta win the games versus the bad teams), I chose to define this category as teams that finished with a record at the end of the year below .500.  It seemed to me, the teams you should handle the best are the teams that were in fact beat more often than they won over the course of an entire year.  If a team finished with exactly a .500 record, I excluded them from the data which I present.  Additionally, I did not include the Braves performances in interleague play.  Many times, the Braves might only have played 3 games versus such a team.  Additionally, if that interleague opponent had a below .500 record, it resulted primarily from games versus dissimilar opponents. I acknowledge that there probably were a few N.L. teams that finished with below .500 records which might be traced to their record in interleague play, but the majority of their games were played versus N.L. opponents, so I didn’t mind including them.

With respect to #2 (“You’ve gotta win games versus the teams in your division”), the analysis was somewhat complicated by the Braves switching from the West to the East and Major League Baseball’s switch to 3-division leagues and unbalanced schedules.  With those considerations in mind, I did not sort the data by team.  In other words, you won’t see the Braves record versus the Mets or versus the Marlins listed explicitly.  Instead, I simply list their performance versus inner-division opponents based on the where their opponent finished in the standings.  Thus, you’ll see the Braves record versus the “2^nd place team” or the “5^th place team” without reference to who exactly that team was.

Some like to point out particular troubles certain teams gave the Braves through the years. Most prominently, the Marlins come to mind. However, looking at the actual stats, I’m not convinced there was any real pattern there to begin with (more likely just selective memory winning out), but also, teams are not static. Regardless of how the Braves faired versus the Marlins, since there is little value in trying to make comparisons between the1997 World Series Champion version and the 1998 fire sale version, any struggles the Braves may have had versus a particular team will only be reflected by a diminished win percentage versus a particular “place.”

Finally, I should admit that I did not include data from the 1994 strike cut off season. For the Braves “dynasty” run, it provided just a strange outlier situation since that would be the sole season from 1991-2005 that the Braves would have any sort of record versus a team that finished “first” in the division. It all seemed fair that since the season was cut off arbitrarily it would be difficult to know exactly which teams were sub-.500 teams versus those that may have just hit a bad stretch right before the strike.  1995, despite the strike shortened season, is included since there was a pennant race and playoffs.  The only place that the 1994 data is included is as part of the benchmark for the Braves overall record and win percentage from 1991-2005.

My charts are split into two time periods: 1991-2005 and 2006-present.  The “present” data includes results through Wednesday August 5, 2009.  I acknowledge that the same “incomplete set” problem occurs with 2009 that I used to omit the 1994 results, but since 2006-present is a much shorter period of time with fewer results to work from, I wanted to expand the results I could use as much as possible. 

Phew, with all of that said, I’ll now present the various charts, and then discuss what I could and could not glean from all of this:

Table 1:  1991-2005 Braves results versus sub-.500 teams:  The label is fairly descriptive.  What you’ll see is the year, the Braves’ overall record by year, the Braves’ win percentage for the full year, the Braves’ record versus sub-.500 opponents, and the Braves’ win percentage versus those opponents.

I’ve bolded the highest totals for each category for ease of use.  Also, the reason the win percentages are a bit further developed for the sub-.500 teams is that I calculated all of those percentages myself while the overall percentage was just the win percentage as listed on baseball-reference.  Thanks to baseball-reference generally for providing all of the numbers which I used.

Table 2: 2006-2009 Braves results versus sub-.500 teams:  This sets forth the same data as Table 1, but for the “Modern” Braves as opposed to the “Dynasty” Braves.

Table 3: 1991-2005 Braves Win Percentages vs. sub.-500:  Table 3 is going to present the same data as Table 1, but in a slightly different format.  I’m doing it to give everyone a different way of thinking about the numbers as well as to help me demonstrate a point.

Table 4: 2006-2009 Braves Win Percentage vs. sub.-500:  And finally, here is the same numbers as Table 3 for the “Modern” Braves:

Observations:  I had no idea what I was going to find when I did this, but I think the results really speak to the fact that teams do not make up for deficiencies merely by playing “better” versus sub-.500 teams.  There were very few seasons in the entire data set that demonstrated the Braves upping their performance by “beating up” on the bad teams.  Instead, in most seasons, regardless of whether you’re looking at the “Dynasty” Braves or the “Modern Braves,” the performance versus the sub.-500 teams tended to mirror the team’s overall performance. 

For the entire period of 1991-2005, the team played basically 48% of its games versus sub-.500 teams and got basically 51% of its wins.  In other words, while the team did slightly better versus those teams, they by no means “beat up” on the bad ones in order to improve their record. 

The only thing that really is certain, is there’s no way before a season is over to even have an idea about how many games a team will have versus the “bad.”  This is reflected in Table 3.  The Braves played anywhere from 62.96% (1991) of its games versus the “bad” to just 29.63% (2005). It’s a bit ironic that the bookend years also bookend the difference in chances.  The chances are just unpredictable meaning the best strategy would, as one might expect, play every game to win it. 

So what about comparing the “Dynasty” Braves to the “Modern” Braves?  Is there any real difference?  “No” is the answer I come to.  Though the Braves as a whole were more mediocre or plain bad, their performance versus the “bad” teams still reflected their overall performance.  The major difference between the two is the number of chances the Braves seem to be getting versus the “bad” teams.  From 2006-2009, the Braves have played roughly 8% fewer games on average versus the “bad” teams.  This got me to thinking about why this is.  As best I can tell, there are three possible explanations for this phenomenon: 1) The National League being more even with fewer dominant teams meaning fewer teams finishing below .500.  However, looking at my hard data set, this does not seem to be the case.  The Braves have played roughly the same number of teams per season with a losing record, they’re just getting fewer chances. 

So, maybe it’s explained by 2) The N.L. East in particular has been better, and with unbalanced schedules the Braves are playing more games inner-division versus better opponents.  This might explain some of it, as the N.L. East does seem to be a little bit better in recent years.  To be fair, that’s merely an impression rather than a fact.  However, it then struck me that the simplest answer might be the right answer:

The Braves as a worse team in the time period both lose games versus an opponent of their own caliber in the analysis, AND they don’t beat the teams in the East as consistently to provide more games versus sub-.500 opponents.  While it’d take a lot more work to really know whether that’s true, it’s undeniable that the Braves beating everyone less over the “Modern” period plays a role in the number of chances they get versus sub-.500 teams.

To conclude this segment, let’s take a brief look at the one team from the “Dynasty” that did appreciably beat up on the lesser teams to beef up its own record:  The 1997 Braves.  Here for your consideration is the team’s record versus the individual bad teams they played that year:

That, to me, is amazing that they just whooped all of the bad teams winning at least 8 games versus every one of them and losing no more than 3 games to any of them.  The problem is…..teams just don’t do that on a regular basis (or at least the Braves) to make the mantra true that “you gotta win the games versus the bad teams.”  Instead good teams win, bad teams lose….no matter who the opponent.