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The Joe Sheehan Newsletter: Parity
Vol. 18, No. 49
June 22, 2026
We’re about a week away from the exact midpoint of the 2026 season, 1215 games played, and the overarching theme is mediocrity:
-- Just ten teams have outscored their opponents.
-- 13 teams, almost half the league, are separated by four games from 40-37 down to 37-42.
-- 11 teams, more than a third of the league, have exactly 37, 38, or 39 losses.
Even some of the best teams don’t feel like it. The Braves, who have the best record in baseball, are loaded with waiver bait like Rowdy Tellez, Joey Bart, and Ha-Seong Kim, and have a bottom-ten starting rotation in June. The Dodgers are on a 100-win pace and, as is their wont come summertime, seem bored. The Rays have the fifth-best record in baseball with a +8 run differential and three MLB-caliber hitters. (Chandler Simpson has a .333 OBP...no, excuse me, that’s a 333 OPS, in June.)
At the other end, after a number of seasons in which the worst teams in baseball made runs at being the worst teams ever, the bad teams are competitive. Just one team, the Rockies, is playing less than .400 ball. Teams that recently lost 107 (Nationals), 112 (A’s), and 121 games (White Sox) are all in the wild-card mix.
Today, the gap between the best and worst teams is 247 percentage points. How does that stack up to recent June 22nds?
The Spread (range of records on this date in recent years)
Pct. GB
2026 .247 19.0
2025 .394 30.5
2024 .394 30.5
2023 .425 32.5
2022 .402 27.5
The change is mostly happening at the low end. The five worst teams in baseball have a combined .403 winning percentage. That’s miles ahead of where they were at the same point in recent years.
Closing the Gap (worst five teams through June 21, recent years)
Pct.
2026 .403
2025 .345
2024 .353
2023 .339
2022 .354
Those gains are coming at the expense of teams at both the top and middle of the league. Things aren’t quite as dire as they were a month or so ago, as we now have 16 teams at .500 or better, but as noted above, there’s a logjam right around .500. There is still some chance the American League’s last playoff spot, currently held by the 38-39 Blue Jays, is taken by a sub-.500 team.
The NL’s advantage in interleague play, currently a .551 winning percentage that equates to an 89-73 full-season record, means their middle consists of teams a bit above .500, and a whole lot of them. No second-place NL team is within five games of the division leader, but the NL wild-card chase includes nine teams separated by 4 1/2 games for three spots. Just three NL teams are more than 2 1/2 games out of a postseason berth. (Two of those have payrolls of more than $200 million.)
This is the future MLB has been trying to create for decades. Expand the playoffs. Punish teams for getting too good. Expand the playoffs again. Change the draft rules, change the international amateur rules, change how money gets distributed. Expand the playoffs again. Chase the standings-pileup the NFL achieves simply by playing one-ninth the number of games. Eliminate pennant races of thoroughbreds and replace them with playoff races of mutts. The standings on June 21, 2026, whatever I think of them, are the product of 30 years of concerted effort by MLB.
I don’t want to get sidetracked on the way these changes affect labor relations. What I will say is that these standings reflect what MLB owners want, which is less competition -- for wins, for money, for players. They want rules that guarantee profit irrespective of team performance, that lessen the need to invest in a team both on and off the field, that remove the need for greatness, that lead to a tournament in which the title hopes of the top seed and the last seed aren’t that far apart.
More than 30 years since he exercised a coup to become acting commissioner, more than a decade since he left that role, Bud Selig’s vision for baseball has finally come true.
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