stoopidstats 2024: baseball's cumulative win totals

 Before I start, a couple housekeeping items:

1) This post is very late. There are various reasons for this that I'm not going to get into.
2) When presenting information of this sort, it would be good form for me to make my file accessible to the reader. I have been trying to figure out how to do that, but I have not been successful yet. Sorry. If anyone wants to see my data file, please contact me and I can email it.

That having been said, here are the relevant changes in terms of wins/losses and games over .500.

New Wins Plateaus

Several franchises, locations, states and nicknames reached new win plateaus in 2024. These are summarized below:

Ranks

The Philadelphia Phillies had 95 wins in 2024, as compared to the Boston Red Sox' 81. On the strength of that, Philadelphia moved up to the fourth-highest ranking location and Boston moved down to fifth. 

Meanwhile, the Cleveland Guardians, in their third year since changing their nickname from "Indians" to "Guardians," won 92 games. "Guardians" as a nickname is now moving up the ranks, passing nicknames that have been long out of use. It gained 15 places in the rankings in 2024.

These changes are summarized below:

Since there is no longer a franchise called the Indians, "Indians" is likely to get passed by "Dodgers" and "Braves" over the next couple of years.

2024 was, apparently, The Athletics' last year in Oakland. They're slated to play in West Sacramento for three years before moving to Las Vegas. While in West Sacramento, they will simply be The Athletics without indicating any location. Not counting the Negro Leagues, the only other time a team franchise did not have a location in front of its name was in 1877, when the team that had (from 1874-1876) been the Hartford Dark Blues became known as the Hartfords of Brooklyn. No other franchise has used the nickname "Hartfords of Brooklyn," though it does remind of "Angels of Anaheim" of recent memory. The Athletics will be the first Major League franchise in Nevada. So it'll be fun watching Nevada climb the ranks.

A Final Note

For something like this, it's necessary to have one source of truth. Mine is Baseball Reference. In their ongoing effort to get things right, they often revise information. What I noticed this year was that a lot of historical information regarding teams' nicknames. I won't try to provide a list of changes. But one example is the franchise now known as the Minnesota Twins. They played in Washington from 1901 through 1960. Until recently, BR indicated that they had been The Senators that whole time. Now, it shows them as having been The Nationals for most of the span. There are other changes, but that seems to be the biggest.