Who's the best? Part 2

After a long break, I'm finally back with the second installment of many. I wanted to continue with the divisional winning percentage from the last post because I think there is something to be found there. Possibly. So for this one I compiled the divisional winning percentage for the last 5 years for each division and then computed the '5 Year Winning Percentage.' Which is simply all the games won divided by the total games played over the last 5 years. The full sheet of computations can be found here. Because there is a lot of information I'll just pull out what I need to and make the needed informational reference.

First off I want to look at the divsional win percentages over the last few years. Let's start with the American Leauge. A quick scan of the Win %'s we see that over the last 5 years the divisional percentages from the AL West have slowly declined while the AL East has seen a steady increase over the last 5 years. This is the same for the National Leauge albeit not as sharply as is seen in the American Leauge. While in both leauges the Central division has seen 5 years of pretty steady win percentages:

National Leauge Central:
2001 - .484
2005 - .508
American Leauge Central:
2001 - .481
2005 - .496

In trying to figure out why the winning percentages would flux as such with the West declining and the East incling over the last 5 years only one reason came to mind as to why this would happen: trades. For an example lets look at the Oakland A's to define this:
The Oakland A's were in possesion of two of the higher echelon players at their posistion; Jason Giambi and Miguel Tejada. In 2002 Giambi found himself shipped East to the Yankees ( as Mike Lewis, author of Moneyball, put it "never to hurt the Yankees again ) and Tejada found himself in the same posistion a year later being shipped to Baltimore. Granted the Yankees were already pretty darn good before Giambi got there, but he was able to solidify a posistion in the line-up and make his mark known. Whereas Tejada had a little bit more of an impact in Baltimore. He was the start of Baltimore's "Offensive Build-Up" bringing a decent bat to the line-up and an above average glove to the middle of the infield. Now this is only one example and could be a freak happening, but the fact that it's happening in the other leauge as well brought this question to mind: Is the talent being formed out in the Western Divisions then being shipped East? Now i know there is the whole farm system aspect, but that only accounts for a small part, farm system talent can take a few years to develop well and if there is already the talented player you're looking for in the Bigs, it would seem logical that you would make the trade for that player.

Secondly, lets face the "AL East and the NL East are the best divisions" argument. As I said in the last post the AL East seems to always , always being to what i can remember, coming down to between Boston and New York and the NL East has seen the Braves win it 14 times in a row, that streak coming to an end this year, but always has been filled with tight races and great divisional play. Looking at the 5 year percentages the latter can be said to be true, where as the former, the AL East being the best division hasn't always been true. Maybe for the last two years but not always. And conincidently when did we see the biggest fall for the AL West and the biggest gain for the AL East? Between the 2002 and 2003 seasons? There could be nothing there, certainly one would have to go through all the trades between the West and the East and try to quantify that trade and see how the player is performing/impacting the new team, but I found that a little odd. Again, the information is there for you to look at and take what you want from it. All I'm trying to do it start a discussion and I'm giving my points of view.

Hopefully the next post won't be so long in coming, but with what I'm planning to talk about I feel it might be a while again.