Welcome to the new MLB Season! Last year’s champs were the Los Angeles Dodgers, who won their division along with Phillies, Brewers, and Guardians. Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge won MVPs, Tarik Skubal dominated his way to a Cy Young, Stephen Vogt and Pat Murphy were manager of the years and Paul Skenes had a 1.96 ERA. Oh no wait, these were my notes from last year, let me try this again; Welcome to the new MLB Season! Last year’s champs were the Los Angeles Dodgers, who won their division along with Phillies, Brewers, and Guardians. Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge won MVPs, Tarik Skubal dominated his way to a Cy Young, Stephen Vogt and Pat Murphy were manager of the years and Paul Skenes had a 1.97 ERA. There we go, I would’ve missed it if not for Skenes +0.01 ERA regression.
This is not to denegrade the excitement of the 2025 season, which featured more twist and turns than an Apple TV series, but there is a sense of institutional inertia that’s creeping into our expectations. Thomas Nestico introduced a prediction game where users can post their predicted 2026 standings for the upcoming season. Looking at results he posted after 200 predictions, 11 of the 30 teams had a record that were within ±2 games of their 2025 results;
Meanwhile at our staff prediction picks posted this week, 76% of the staff predicted a Ohtani MV4-peat, 64% picked Skenes back-to-back Cy Young, 32% Skubal Cy-3peat, and finally 28% picked Judge MV3-peat (much less cool). Just to put these perdictions in perspective, Ohtani was the second ever back-to-back-to-back MVP winner after Barry Bonds, and currently Aaron Judge is the betting favorite to join this historic list. What’s happened here? With opening week arriving Hope Springs Eternal has turned into Groundhog Day.
There are two questions that need to be answered. A) Are we in baseball Groundhog Day? and B) Is this different from what baseball history has been? To answer these questions I’m going to look at team W-L since 1901 and looking at change in W% season-over-season (in either positive or negative direction), from there we can average the W% delta across the league to calculate a Stability Coefficient. I’m also going to look at award history to see if we’ve had this level of award homegeny.
First looking at the stability coefficient, here is the graph of each season’s since 1901 (with the red dot on the left representing this year). Remember that the lower number means there was less change in each team’s record:
Some observations; We’re coming off an era of pretty high volatility between 2020 to 2023, one big reason being the COVID shortened 2020 season causing a lot of funny business not just to the results of 2020 but also the following season, but also we had some team experience big ups and downs following covid like Astros and Giants, who bounced between great and bad seasons before settling at 80/81 wins or Giants and 87/88 wins for Astros the past two seasons.
However, in terms of the Stability Coefficient 2025 was the 12th lowest all time (out of 125), and the lowest since 2003. So in terms of “this season felt like a repeat of last year” there has only been 11 seasons that felt more like a re-run than last year-
Moving over to division winners, 2025 had four repeat division winners (Brewers, Guardians, Phillies, Dodgers) and two new winners (Mariners and Blue Jays), but those divisions with new winners had the previous year’s winner as the runner-up (Yankees and Astors finished 2nd). Since moving to six divisions in 1994, this was the third time that every division was either a repeat winner, or had a new winner where the runner-up was also a champion from last year.
Awards wise, before 2025 there had never been a season where 3 out of the 4 major awards (MVP/Cy Young) were repeat winners. There were seasons with two repeat winners (last being 2009 with Lincecum/Pujols) but this was a first for having three repeats, and also the first time the American League had repeat MVP and Cy Young. Add on top of that the one non-winner being Paul Skenes who was 3rd for the award already in 2024, and both AL and NL Manager of the Year being repeat winners (Stephen Vogt and Pat Murphy), we had unprecedented levels of award homogeneity.
Okay so we well established that the sense of Gounndhog Day was well deserved, from a Win% change, division winner, and awards standpoint (and World Series winner) we had a very repeat season going from 2024 to 2025. Moving onto the future however, does the deja vu doom us to relive 2025 in 2026? This is where the good news comes in. Analyzing the Stability Coefficient by franchise since we moved to 30 teams in 1998, the “flat-ness” of team record has no correlation to a team’s record staying flat or swinging the following year. While 2025 seemed like the indication of a path setting trend for all 30 teams, it was more coincidental than anything that so many records and standings were similar.
So a team that wins 72 games then wins 92 games is as likely to experience a big swing as a team that won 82 games the last two seasons. The point is, do not fear that that your bad team is stuck in a rut, and don’t assume that your good team is entitled to glory (unless you’re the Dodgers).
