I don't recall seeing this specific question raised before. So I asked bases.chat, the AI program created by fellow SABR Ted Ingram. If there is a way to search this easily on Stathead or somewhere else I don't know what that is.
In almost every year I looked at, the teams that have a higher OPS than their opponent in games when the other team had a higher AVG win at least 66% of the time and sometimes over 70%. The lowest year was just 64%.
I had it check several different years (At first I just did 2021-25 but Jessica Brand suggested I look at earlier periods to see if there was a trend). The table below has the results. After that will be a table summarizing the three periods.
|
Season |
Divergent Games |
Wins |
Win % |
|
1982 |
298 |
218 |
73.20% |
|
1983 |
270 |
185 |
68.50% |
|
1984 |
270 |
183 |
67.80% |
|
1985 |
279 |
197 |
70.60% |
|
1986 |
304 |
203 |
66.80% |
|
2001 |
321 |
206 |
64.20% |
|
2002 |
313 |
212 |
67.70% |
|
2003 |
335 |
229 |
68.40% |
|
2004 |
328 |
233 |
71.00% |
|
2005 |
344 |
227 |
66.00% |
|
2021 |
311 |
218 |
70.10% |
|
2022 |
313 |
225 |
71.90% |
|
2023 |
347 |
239 |
68.90% |
|
2024 |
289 |
205 |
70.90% |
|
2025 |
301 |
203 |
67.40% |
Divergent games just means how many such games happened in each year.
Now the summary table.
|
Season |
Divergent Games |
Wins |
Win % |
|
1982-86 |
1421 |
986 |
69.39% |
|
2001-05 |
1641 |
1107 |
67.46% |
|
2021-25 |
1561 |
1090 |
69.83% |
|
Total |
4623 |
3183 |
68.85% |
Earlier I said I did not know how to search this without bases.chat. But I did ask it which team in 2025 played in the most games like this and it said it was the Orioles and that they were 14-3 in those games.
I called up the batting game logs for the Orioles at Baseball Reference and then used Stathead to find the same logs for their opponents. By sorting, matching games and finding differentials I could see that the Orioles were 14-3 in such games. So that helps show that bases.chat was doing this right.
