Effect of Interleague Schedule Difference

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Originally Posted by Reds/Flyers Fan

In seven words: I don't agree with that ... at all. And neither, apparently, does Brewers manager Ron Roenicke. Somehow he was able to land a job managing a big league ballclub without knowing quite as much as Internet message board posters. :rolleyes:

http://www.jsonline.com/blogs/sports/124383708.html

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Well I certainly don't want to disagree with Ron Roenicke about it's impact, but really we're talking a game difference, at most.

First to grant your point, the Reds interleague schedule this year was the hardest by a hair.
The Reds opponents are a combined .5282 winning %, the Brewers interleague opponents are a combined .5278, the Pirates opponents are a combined .517, and the Cardinals opponents were a soft .4593.

I'll admit, that seems like a huge gap. And if over the course of the season, the Cardinals opponents were that much softer than the Reds opponents, it would result in a significant advantage. However, over the course of 15 games, a team with a .459 winning % would expect to win 7 games. Over that same stretch, the .528 winning % equates to 8 games.

The Reds went 6-12 against AL teams, the Brewers went 6-9, the Pirates and
Cards went 8-7.

Really the Reds and Brewers have no one to blame but themselves.

If the Reds played 15 games against the Yankees, and the Cardinals played 15 games against the Royals, that still only equals out to roughly a 3 game advantage. Since we're never going to be playing at that extreme, it's just not a big deal in the context of 162 games.

I think it is about as fair as it can get, if that is the goal. They rotate the matchups by division, so its luck of the draw in any given season. Of course, the Brewers could volunteer to go back to the league from whence they came since that discussion has started :)

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Originally Posted by traderumor

I think it is about as fair as it can get, if that is the goal. They rotate the matchups by division, so its luck of the draw in any given season. Of course, the Brewers could volunteer to go back to the league from whence they came since that discussion has started :)

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The other thing that throws things off is the extra series with the rivalry game. The Brewers have the Twins which is usually really tough but not so much this year. The Cardinals have the Royals which has almost always been easy, but that may not be such an advantage in the future.Royals team of the future since 1995 :) The Reds have the Indians which has been alternately really easy or really difficult. The Pirates don't seem to have one rivalry for a home and home series. I guess they maybe play one against the Tigers and one against the Indians every year.:confused:

I don't see interleague play being any different than the rest of the season: It's not who you play, but when you play them. Because of the various factors playing into a long season, like injuries, callups, streaks, rotation timing, matchup issues (some teams strengths exploit another's weakness to skew head-to-head results) etc., it is very difficult to build any "strength of schedule" argument. About the only one that holds at least a little bit of water is the strength of division that a team finds itself in since that is the greatest frequency of games.

But still, more than anything, performance against any one team is highly contingent on how the opponents are playing at a particular point in time. If any MLB team is on a hot streak, it will not matter who they're playing, and likewise for the cold team.

I'm sorry, but six games against the Royals gives a team more than a one game advantage over everyone else. And three games each against the Yankees and Red Sox is more than a one game disadvantage.

Plus, the win loss records against the AL this year assumes that the talent of all the teams in the Central is even, which is kinda begging the question.