Jim Caple writes today on ESPN.com attempting to debunk the myth that the NFL has parity and Major League Baseball does not:

Does football have more parity than baseball, as our friend at the bar contended? No. If you judge parity based on how many different teams reach and win the championship, baseball and football are roughly the same, with baseball perhaps somewhat better in this regard.

Caple is right: they have roughly equivalent levels of parity (”equality, as in amount, status, or value“).

But I think what most people are really getting at when they talk of parity in professional sports leagues is meritocracy. In other words, if an organization in a small market does things better (scouting, free agent signings, coaching, retaining key players, etc.) than an organization in a large market, do they truly have a better chance of being successful and winning championships. One way to get at this is to compare Super Bowl teams over a span of time with World Series teams over a span of time and compare the size of those cities. Here are those results, over the past 10 years:

The cities of World Series winners have almost 8 times the average population of Super Bowl winning cities. The overall Super Bowl participant average is a population of 913,636, while the overall World Series participant average is 3,544,861. Population figures are from the incomparable City-Data.com.

But maybe that’s not really fair since football is more able to draw from an entire region than just within a city since there are fewer games and played on Sundays when most people can dedicate a day to traveling for and seeing a game. And since media rights fees (especially television) are so important to franchise revenues, let’s look again, this time using Nielsen’s Designated Market Areas:

Again the MLB results are stacked much more heavily in favor of larger cities (which has a strong positive correlation with higher revenues). World Series winners have roughly 3 times the number of TV homes in their metro region than do Super Bowl winners. Super Bowl participants have an average of 1,932,461 while World Series participants have an average of 3,997,838. MLB more than double.

Perhaps these numbers are skewed due to the frequent participation of the Yankees in the World Series over the past decade. Perhaps they’re skewed because a sample of 10 years is too small. But I don’ t think so. I think Caple is off base and these numbers prove it. Head over to WorldSeries.com and SuperBowl.com and check out the teams from the past 20 or 30 or 40 years. I think if the analysis is expanded to include those results the picture painted will remain the same. For example, New York, LA, and Chicago have appeared in a combined 18 World Series in the past 30 years; the same cities have appeared in a combined 6 Super Bowls. Add the combined Super Bowl appearances over the past 30 years by cities like Minneapolis, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, etc. and I feel confident the results above will hold.

If anybody wants to extend or play around with the data, here’s my Excel file.

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