At the start of the decade, eight franchises had never been to the World Series. Now there are only three: the Texas Rangers, the Washington Nationals and the Seattle Mariners. The Diamondbacks and the Los Angeles Angels won in their first appearances; Houston, Colorado and Tampa Bay lost.This comes in the middle of a Kepner article in which he subtly tells us that he’s becoming the national baseball writer for the NY Times, no longer just a Yanks beat writer. As a Yanks fan, this is a loss for our daily coverage. We lost Pete Abraham (whatever you might think of him; some were rubbed the wrong way) this Fall and now Kepner’s lens is widening. We still have a slew of great beat writers, but we’re a bit short without Pete and Tyler giving us the daily nuggets. Kepner’s not-surprising-low-key notice:
I am eager to learn and share more of their stories the hopeless, the hopeful and all the rest in my new role as a national baseball writer. I have worked the beats here for 10 years, two with the Mets and eight with the Yankees. Every season was its own mystery, dozens of parallel story lines building to a conclusion, and it was fun, at the finish, to write a happy ending and not a post-mortem.
Picture from Harvard Sports Analysis Collective, who has a nifty review of parity in baseball from 1901 through 2009. They note: Basically, the way to interpret the graph is that the smaller the standard deviation, the greater the parity in that year.
