This was originally supposed to go up on Sunday, but a bum knee and Mom’s Weekend got in the way…so now these post go up on Thursdays, YAY!

One of the major topics of discussion that pops up every baseball season is which division is the best division in baseball? Normally, analyst and fans look at win totals/number of playoff teams to answer said question.  In other words, they do a quick search of the standings and decide what division is the best; and if you ask me that’s a little ridiculous.

So how do we answer this question, and actually have a more detailed picture of how the divisions actually stack up? Well, we use sabermetrics and point totals of course to create power rankings of the divisions in the MLB.

To create this power ranking we are going to take a look at three advanced statistics (wOBA, K/BB, UZR) and then assign point totals based on which division is the leader in that statistical category-1^st place gets six points, 2^nd gets 5-points, 3^rd gets 4, etc. The higher the point total, the higher that division is in the power rankings! So here we go;

wOBA

“wOBA, or weighted on-base average, is batting statistic set on the scale of on-base percentage, meaning that if you think the number would make a good on-base percentage, it’s a good wOBA. For instance, as of 10/1/2012, Joe Mauer leads MLB with a .419 OBP, and Ryan Bran leads MLB with a .419 wOBA. wOBA takes into account established run values of each type of baseball outcome (non-intentional walks, singles, doubles, triples, homers, reaching base on errors, and times hit by a pitch), and uses them to find out how good a player has done at the plate that year.”-West Coast Bias

K/BB

K/BB is pretty easy to understand; it’s the number of Ks by a pitching staff divided by the number of walks issued.

 UZR

“There are many different defensive statistics out there today, but UZR is my favorite simply because of its accessibility online. UZR stands for Ultimate Zone Rating, and takes into account a player’s range, throwing arm, and amount of errors committed. It then converts these into an amount of runs “saved”, letting you know if the team helped his defense with a positive score, or hurt his defense with a negative score. One year of data may not tell you about a player’s true talent level, but it will tell you what he did specifically that season. For true talent levels, we like to have at least three full seasons worth of UZR data.”-West Coast Bias

Point Totals

So here is the fun part!

In this section we add up the points that each division has accumulated through their performance so far, and that will give us our power rankings. We are going to be working with a running point total throughout the season and it will be interesting to see how these divisions move around throughout the season.