who would win between the

j-man

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98 Yankees vs 18 red sox
99 Yankees vs 04 red sox
96 yankees vs 07 red sox
00 yankees vs 13 red sox
01 yankees vs 08 red sox
 

BuellMiller

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Mar 25, 2015
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98 Yankees vs 18 red sox
99 Yankees vs 04 red sox
96 yankees vs 07 red sox
00 yankees vs 13 red sox
01 yankees vs 08 red sox
Really good thought experiment (I may have to get a more recent OOTP to try this out):
I think both of the first two series would go 7 games. That first one features probably the two best teams in the last 50+ years (other than maybe the, sigh, 86 Mets or 75 Reds). Obviously the 2004 Red Sox were special, but the 99 Yankees were also really good (they only lost one game in the playoffs, to Pedro). The 07 Red Sox would probably win 4-2 or 4-1 over the 96 Yankees. The 13 Red Sox would destroy the 00 Yankees. The last matchup would probably go 7 games...I'd lean Red Sox, but neither of those teams did well in 7th games.
 

StupendousMan

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I decided to look at the first of those proposed matchups: the 1998 Yankees against the 1918 Red Sox. Two teams separated by eighty years. Before looking at the stats, I wondered -- would the more recent team be so much bigger and stronger than the earlier team that it's not worth the trouble? After a few minutes with baseball-reference.com, I made the following little list of starters:

Code:
                1918 Red Sox                     1998 Yankees

C     Sam Agnew          5-11  185           Jorge Posada        6-2   215

1B    Stuffy McInnis     5-9   162           Tino Martinez       6-2   205

2B    Dave Shean         5-11  175           Chuck Knoblauch     5-9   175

SS    Everett Scott      5-8   148           Derek Jeter         6-3   195

3B    Fred Thomas        5-10  160           Scott Brosius       6-1   200

LF    George Whiteman    5-7   160           Chad Curtis         5-10  175

CF    Amos Strunk        5-11  175           Bernie Williams     6-2   180

RF    Harry Hooper       5-10  168           Paul O'Neill        6-4   200

P     Babe Ruth          6-2   215           Andy Pettite        6-5   235
So, yes, on average, the modern team is both taller (3.5 inches) and more massive (by 26 pounds) than its early counterpart. Are those differences large enough to make the contest unfair? Hmmm. I don't know.

Two particular features of the lineups grabbed my attention: first, the pitchers are in each case both the tallest and heaviest players on each team. And second, Derek Jeter was 6-3? That's only 1 inch shorter than Cal Ripken, Jr., who was considered by many to be too tall to play shortstop. I suppose that some people might say that explains a lot about Jeter's prowess in the field, but he did remain at the position for a long time.

Alas, I don't have time to do any real statistical analysis, but I thought some might find this brief peek at the relative sizes of players from different eras to be interesting.
 

TeddyBallgame9

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I decided to look at the first of those proposed matchups: the 1998 Yankees against the 1918 Red Sox. Two teams separated by eighty years. Before looking at the stats, I wondered -- would the more recent team be so much bigger and stronger than the earlier team that it's not worth the trouble? After a few minutes with baseball-reference.com, I made the following little list of starters:

Code:
                1918 Red Sox                     1998 Yankees

C     Sam Agnew          5-11  185           Jorge Posada        6-2   215

1B    Stuffy McInnis     5-9   162           Tino Martinez       6-2   205

2B    Dave Shean         5-11  175           Chuck Knoblauch     5-9   175

SS    Everett Scott      5-8   148           Derek Jeter         6-3   195

3B    Fred Thomas        5-10  160           Scott Brosius       6-1   200

LF    George Whiteman    5-7   160           Chad Curtis         5-10  175

CF    Amos Strunk        5-11  175           Bernie Williams     6-2   180

RF    Harry Hooper       5-10  168           Paul O'Neill        6-4   200

P     Babe Ruth          6-2   215           Andy Pettite        6-5   235
So, yes, on average, the modern team is both taller (3.5 inches) and more massive (by 26 pounds) than its early counterpart. Are those differences large enough to make the contest unfair? Hmmm. I don't know.

Two particular features of the lineups grabbed my attention: first, the pitchers are in each case both the tallest and heaviest players on each team. And second, Derek Jeter was 6-3? That's only 1 inch shorter than Cal Ripken, Jr., who was considered by many to be too tall to play shortstop. I suppose that some people might say that explains a lot about Jeter's prowess in the field, but he did remain at the position for a long time.

Alas, I don't have time to do any real statistical analysis, but I thought some might find this brief peek at the relative sizes of players from different eras to be interesting.
Pretty sure the OP was referring to the 2018 Red Sox.
 

BaseballJones

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98 Yankees vs 18 red sox
99 Yankees vs 04 red sox
96 yankees vs 07 red sox
00 yankees vs 13 red sox
01 yankees vs 08 red sox
Ranking these teams...

Red Sox
2018: 108 wins, 11-3 in the playoffs
2004: 98 wins, 11-3 in the playoffs
2007: 96 wins, 11-3 in the playoffs
2013: 97 wins, 11-5 in the playoffs
2008: 95 wins, 6-5 in the playoffs

Yankees
1998: 114 wins, 11-2 in the playoffs
1999: 98 wins, 11-1 in the playoffs
1996: 92 wins, 11-4 in the playoffs
2001: 95 wins, 10-7 in the playoffs
2000: 87 wins, 11-5 in the playoffs

1. 2018 Red Sox - Sox get the edge here because they could have won probably 115+ games but clearly took their foot off the gas the last month
2. 1998 Yankees
3. 2004 Red Sox
4. 1999 Yankees
5. 2007 Red Sox
6. 2013 Red Sox
7. 1996 Yankees
8. 2001 Yankees
9. 2000 Yankees
10. 2008 Red Sox
 

Red(s)HawksFan

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To throw a wrinkle into the discussion... '03 Red Sox vs '08 Red Sox? The two that got to Game 7 but didn't get over the ALCS hump. I think the '03 offense was superior but pitching might be a push.
 

jon abbey

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1. 2018 Red Sox - Sox get the edge here because they could have won probably 115+ games but clearly took their foot off the gas the last month
2. 1998 Yankees
I don't think you can really compare teams in this way because the level of competition changes from year to year but for the record, the 1998 Yankees took their foot off the gas at a ridiculous 92-30 in the regular season (22-18 after that to end up with 114 wins). The 2018 Red Sox lost their 31st game almost a month earlier, they were 69-30.
 

BaseballJones

ivanvamp
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I don't think you can really compare teams in this way because the level of competition changes from year to year but for the record, the 1998 Yankees took their foot off the gas at a ridiculous 92-30 in the regular season (22-18 after that to end up with 114 wins). The 2018 Red Sox lost their 31st game almost a month earlier, they were 69-30.
Fair points, Jon. That Yankee team was insanely good.
 

jon abbey

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Them and the 1986 Mets and the 2018 Red Sox are the best three teams of my baseball-watching lifetime, wouldn't want to order them but if I did, I think I would put them in that order. The 1986 Mets barely won the NLCS (because Mike Scott was untouchable) and of course got pretty lucky to win the WS, but they're still right up at the top for me.
 

tims4wins

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Interesting the 98 Yankees won their last 7 games of the year.

Through August, the 2018 Sox were 93-43; the 98 Yankees were 98-37. They were a better team, that seems about right.
 

billy ashley

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The boring answer is probably the best answer. The level of play is probably better on whole year after year. The differences in how the game was played in 18 versus 13 is probably far greater than most of us realize. Advancements in scouting, better technology improving bio-mechanics, etc.

The 98 Yankees as amazing as they were, are probably not a historically great team in 2018. Like wise, the 18 Sox would probably not perform nearly as well 20 years from now, either.

There are probably some outlier cases, in which a "bad" team won. The 06 Cardinals were pretty meh, for example. They might have not been better than an elite 96 team, for example.
 

bankshot1

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J-man poses an impossible question answerable only by the certaint roll of Stratomatic dice and perhaps the unwaiverable faith and loyalty of Red Sox and Yankee fans.

I'm not sure who would have won between the best of breeds, the 1998 Ys or the 2018 RSox, but as a Sox partisan, I will note perhaps no other team ever beat teams as formidable and as fucking good and as decisively as the Sox did to the 100-win Ys, 103-win Astro's and then NL Champ 92-win Dodgers. Including the post-season records that is 3-100 win teams the Sox beat. I'm not sure that had ever been done.

As an impartial observer I can say pretty definitively that neither the Sox nor Yankees could beat the 1975/1976 Reds, which may have been the best team pre-1998 Ys, I've seen.
 

PrometheusWakefield

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I have complete confidence that the 1918 Red Sox would get destroyed by any modern baseball team, even the 1988 Orioles. I also think that if you put Babe Ruth in a time machine from 1920 and brought him to 2020 he'd have a hard time cracking a major league roster.

That may seem obvious but I believe the same principle applies to the comparison between 1998 Yankees and the 2018 Red Sox. THere's a generation difference between those two teams. The training, the pitching, the scouting is all just so much better today, even with HGH helping the 1998 team. The 2018 team would destroy all competitors.
 

tims4wins

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The 98 Yankees gave up 9 more runs than the 2018 Sox (656 vs. 647)... but they scored 89 more (965 vs 876). So their run differential was 80 runs better at 309 vs. 229. That's a half run a game over 162 games. It's 35% better than the 2018 Sox. They were absurdly good.
 

BaseballJones

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One thing about modern baseball versus the game even 10 years ago....back then every bullpen had like one or two really hard-throwing guys who could get into the mid-upper 90s. When the Sox won it in 2004, their hardest throwing reliever was Timlin, or Embree perhaps, though he had lost a lot of steam by then. Timlin topped out at 94. The 2018 Red Sox pen had these guys throwing this velocity (average fastball speed):

Kimbrel: 97.5
Hembree: 94.9
Barnes: 96.9
Kelly: 98.5
Brasier: 97.0
Eovaldi: 97.5 (averaged about 99 when he came out of the pen)

I mean, it's night and day from not that long ago.
 

bankshot1

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runs scored by the average team in the AL 1998 (5.01) v 2018 (4.53) basically accounts for the half-run .difference in run differential between the 2 teams.

offenses in general declined over the past 20-something years

Roids
 

tims4wins

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runs scored by the average team in the AL 1998 (5.01) v 2018 (4.53) basically accounts for the half-run .difference in run differential between the 2 teams.

offenses in general declined over the past 20-something years

Roids
Uh no. Because the Yankees gave up the same amount of runs as the Sox. So relative to the 2018 Sox, they pitched a lot better in comparison to the league. The difference in runs scored in 1998 v 2018 explains the difference in the offensive runs scored. It does not explain why the 1998 Yankees gave up the same amount of runs as the 2018 Sox in a much more hitter friendly environment. C'mon.
 

bankshot1

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Uh no. Because the Yankees gave up the same amount of runs as the Sox. So relative to the 2018 Sox, they pitched a lot better in comparison to the league. The difference in runs scored in 1998 v 2018 explains the difference in the offensive runs scored. It does not explain why the 1998 Yankees gave up the same amount of runs as the 2018 Sox in a much more hitter friendly environment. C'mon.
The point was, using data, in this case run differential, from two different era, and one (the late 90's) that was notable for extreme offensive production was not the best stastical indicator that one team was more dominant than another.
 

BaseballJones

ivanvamp
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1998 Yankees vs. 2018 Red Sox

Team OPS+
1998 NYY: 116
2018 Bos: 112

Team b-ref OWAR
1998 NYY: 36.9
2018 Bos: 31.6

Team ERA+
1998 NYY: 116
2018 Bos: 118

Team pitching bWAR
1998 NYY: 23.4
2018 Bos: 28.4

So using these metrics, it would seem that, with ballpark and era in which they played all taken into account, the Yankees had a better offense and the Red Sox had the better pitching staff. Combining them (like ops combines OBP and SLG)...

OPSERA+
1998 NYY: 232
2018 Bos: 230

bWAR (pitching/offense)
1998 NYY: 60.3
2018 Bos: 60.0

Looks like the slight edge goes to the 1998 Yankees.
 

tims4wins

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The point was, using data, in this case run differential, from two different era, and one (the late 90's) that was notable for extreme offensive production was not the best stastical indicator that one team was more dominant than another.
You completely are missing the point. They scored more due to the offensive era, so the offenses were comparable. But they gave up the same amount of runs despite the offensive era. Therefore their pitching was roughly a half run better per game than the Sox. Run differential is run differential. It might have been inflated by ~10% due to the different era (5 vs 4.5), but that would only explain like 8 runs out of the 80 in variance. This isn't a difficult concept.

Edit: by pythag, using the 1.81 coefficient, the 98 Yankees were a 108.2 win team vs. the 2018 Sox at 102.7. So the same ~5-6 game difference that showed up in their actual records. Purely by runs scored and runs allowed, the 98 Yankees were a better team.
 
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bankshot1

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I don't think I'm the one who missed the point.

Comping teams with stats from markedly different eras is an apples and oranges exercise and generally why I don't bother with it. But feel free.

What it (run differential/pythag) might prove is the Ys were more dominant in 1998 (against arguably inferior teams) than the Sox were in 2018.
 

tims4wins

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I don't know what your point is. Obviously it is an apples and oranges exercise. That's kind of the fun in it. But how else are you going to compare? If you don't want to discuss how the 2018 Sox stack up with the 1998 Yankees why are you even in this thread?
 

bankshot1

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Don't get upset that I pointed out the apples and oranges nature of your 1998/2018 comps. The comps are misleading at best to draw the conclusion of inter-era supremacy. But If you want to make apples and orange comps, that's fine, fresh fruit is good, just bring enough for everyone.
 

tims4wins

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Don't get upset that I pointed out the apples and oranges nature of your 1998/2018 comps. The comps are misleading at best to draw the conclusion of inter-era supremacy. But If you want to make apples and orange comps, that's fine, fresh fruit is good, just bring enough for everyone.
Ok how is this.

League average RS in 1998 was 5.01. The Yankees averaged 5.96, or +18.9% compared to league average
League average RS in 2018 was 4.53. The Red Sox averaged 5.41, or + 19.4% compared to league average

League average RA in 1998 was 5.01. The Yankees averaged 4.05, or -19.2% compared to league average
League average RA in 2018 was 4.53. The Red Sox averaged 3.99, or -11.8% compared to league average

My point stands: similar offenses compared to the era, much better pitching for the Yankees compared to the era. I don't see how this is an apples and oranges comparison. Please enlighten me.
 

bankshot1

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I did those #s too out of curiosity.

You're comping teams 20 years apart. Its irrelevant using run differnential stats to determining which team, both excellent and among the alltime great teams, might fair against one another.

What I found interesting and not sure how to attack it, or just let it lie, was in '98 the Sox were the 2nd best team in the AL with 92 wins, (26 games behind the Ys). no other AL team had 90+ wins. The competitive balance was whacked relative to 2018, where in the AL, the Astros (103 wins) Ys (100) As (97) were all legit WS-worthy teams. How if at all would that impact run differential?
 
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tims4wins

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I did those #s too out of curiosity.

You're comping teams 20 years apart. Its irrelevant using run differnential stats to determining which team, both excellent and among the alltime great teams, might fair against one another.

What I found interesting and not sure how to attack it, or just let it lie, was in '98 the Sox were the 2nd best team in the AL with 92 wins, (26 games behind the Ys). no other AL team had 90+ wins. The competitive balance was whacked relative to 2018, where in the AL, the Astros (103 wins) Ys (100) As (97) were all legit WS-worthy teams. How if at all would that impact run differential?
It’s an interesting question. There were far more “good” teams in 1998 and far more “horrible” teams in 2018. So while the top tier of competition was better in 2018 - reflected in the playoff run against 100+ win teams - the regular season may have been a bit easier. Does b-ref have historic strength of schedule anywhere? There’s no doubt the Sox 2018 playoff run was way more impressive than the Yankees 98 run (I think the Yankees beat teams with 98, 89, and 88 wins vs the Sox with all 3 teams over 100?).
 

j-man

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J-man poses an impossible question answerable only by the certaint roll of Stratomatic dice and perhaps the unwaiverable faith and loyalty of Red Sox and Yankee fans.

I'm not sure who would have won between the best of breeds, the 1998 Ys or the 2018 RSox, but as a Sox partisan, I will note perhaps no other team ever beat teams as formidable and as fucking good and as decisively as the Sox did to the 100-win Ys, 103-win Astro's and then NL Champ 92-win Dodgers. Including the post-season records that is 3-100 win teams the Sox beat. I'm not sure that had ever been done.

As an impartial observer I can say pretty definitively that neither the Sox nor Yankees could beat the 1975/1976 Reds, which may have been the best team pre-1998 Ys, I've seen.
u are right but the 84 tigers couild give the 75-76 reds a game
 

bankshot1

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u are right but the 84 tigers couild give the 75-76 reds a game
Yup, they certainly could. They had that unreal start, I wondered if they'd ever lose 2 in a row. The 69-70-Orioles could also give anyone a game(except maybe the '69 Mets), the Os were also an alltime great team.