People say this, but leagues all over the world use playoffs.
No team is "setup to win a World Series" because the whole postseason is little more than a coinflip. (For that reason, I don't really know what a pitching staff that gives them a "predictable outcome come October" means.) But, regarding the lineup not being deep, literally every hitter 1-9 in their projected 2024 lineup had an OPS+ of 100 or better in their most recent season, so what exactly is your definition of "deep"?
Is it?
The regular season has a variance that washes out over 162 games. Winning 4 of 7 games takes a team designed to have a small standard deviation on performance. Stud pitchers are significantly more important in the post season because you’re not saving them for another 161 games, they can pitch on short rest. Your bench in the playoffs needs to be much more situational than the regular season. If you have streaky hitters you can catch them at peaks….or you can catch them in valleys. Defense is massively more important - your teams will be more equal in the postseason and booting a routine ground ball makes a bigger difference because the margin of error is much smaller.
(A) "The team that plays better wins" isn't even actually true, the most famous example being the 1960 World Series, which the Yankees lost despite outscoring the Pirates 55-27. And (B) I presume you've seen enouch of baseball to understand that a ball can be hit on the screws only to end up in the third baseman's glove, while another one can be mishit only to land safely in between the second baseman and right fielder, yes? Random chance is a significant factor in every baseball game, and the short series of the postseason only give it more importance.
Things like this get repeated ad nauseum, and none of it is true. There have been many, many attempts to statistically determine whether a particular type of baseball team is more likely to succeed in the postseason than another type, and all of these attempts have failed, because, ultimately, the postseason is random as shit.
Would you care to link that study?
A) Sounds like the Pirates played better.
(A) You read that two teams played each other 7 times, with one team scoring 55 runs and the other scoring just 27, and you really think that the team that scored 27 runs outplayed the other team? Like, you really, actually think that? Not that you're just trying to win a dumb argument on the internet -- you really, really, actually believe that the team that scored less than half as many runs as the other team played better?
Here's one. Here's another! Here's one more!
At no point did I say that that random chance was the only variable. What I said was "Random chance is a significant factor in every baseball game, and the short series of the postseason only give it more importance," which, now that I think about it, kind of sounds exactly like "In a smaller sample size random variances will be more pronounced." So, unless you're arguing in bad faith, I have no idea what you're trying to say here.
A) Yes.
Yankees screwed up by not pitching Whitey Ford three times in that series. Doesn’t really matter whether they won his starts 2-0 or 12-0.Their problem was that there were only two of them.
the first article is from 2010. The game has changed substantially since then, I don’t think the other two articles really support your theory.
So in your opinion, the third article -- which was published last year and which explicitly states: "In the end, I looked at about 60 team-related variables, and they all did almost nothing to explain better which teams won playoff games" -- doesn't support the statement "There have been many, many attempts to statistically determine whether a particular type of baseball team is more likely to succeed in the postseason than another type, and all of these attempts have failed..."
Game strategy has changed dramatically over the past many years and continues to do so. The way pitchers are used now is quite different from even two or three years ago, so, no, I don’t think you can make a general rule about teams in 2024 based on results from any large period of time.
You may have a point, but the example above is not helping you at all. Using your evidence, if one team blows out another 100 to 1 in one game and loses the other games 2 to 1, then that team played better? Don't you realize how ridiculous that sounds?
Yet, I kind of feel that if the Yankees had won game 7 they would have been completely deserving champions. The Dbacks had a flaw — they couldn’t protect late narrow leads. They almost got exposed for that flaw, but did the other things well enough that it worked out. There are kind of several different arguments happening in this thread, but I view that series as a great example of why games matter, not cumulative scores.
No, but the second stage keeps changing its structure, and the current version (last two years) seems to introduce more randomness than we've ever seen before.
Right, the regular season is flawed. IMO, the point of the postseason ought to be to help iron out the imperfections with the regular season. But that the regular season is flawed doesn't excuse the postseason from having a coherent format.
I agree that it should be a combination of the two, but as AF said, the different formats matter. If they made the whole baseball postseason single elimination, I don't think anyone would take it very seriously, as an extreme example.
An NBA-style in-season tournament, scheduled so that you can use your best starting pitcher the whole way through, would be fun. Maybe. But totally not practical with baseball.
Yeah, I think we see this in all sports. If you want a playoff, anything other than 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 or 64 teams is going to be imperfect and have unintended consequences.
Well, for some definitions of "random", those for which the definition would encompass nearly every event in human life that contains variation. My job performance is random, my driving route to work is random, my kids' willingness to eat their vegetables is random, my length of my SoSH posts is random. We can choose a colloquial definition of "random" that deprives us of any ability to analyze or discuss competing merits or angles on something.
Thanks - I think it's an interesting topic.
A truly excellent post.
It’s not a coin flip. There are 12 teams, so assuming everyone has an equal shot, your probability of success is about 8%, or roughly equal to rolling a 4 when throwing a pair of dice. You have an approx 40% chance of going 0-11 on something with an 8% probability of success. So it’s not really a crazy outlier. Even if you use the old 8 team format, it’s still about 1 in 5.
The A's won the ALDS in 2006 against the Twins, and won the 2020 Wild Card game against the White Sox, before losing in the next round each time. So there's been a lot of futility there, but they have won the first round a couple times.
And that leads to even a bigger consideration - managing a regular season team to make the playoffs and managing a regular season team to win the playoffs can drastically differ. If management knows the team you're not having your closer close every other game, you're giving your key players time off during the season, you don't pitch your starting pitchers as deep. Managing IN the playoffs is super different as well. The teams, in practice, become smaller. Situational management is much more important. Tito may be the best example of this in that it differed so much and he was so successful doing it.
