April 11, 2007
Slate explains how even quite good baseball teams don't wind up at the World Series. This article is nothing new to leroy or valatan or flip, or people who pay attention, but was a wakeup call to me.
I mean, according to my dad, who knows everything, a baseball team is gonna win 1/3 of the games and lose 1/3 of the games no matter what. It is the middle third that makes the difference.
But, when a third means 54 games, but playoffs are decided in 7 games, then that little rule doesn't matter anymore, because the win margin is just experimental noise (7< sqrt 54, or more appropriately, 4 < (7/3 + sqrt 7), which means that statistically, it is perfectly within the experimental noise and the 1/3 rule for an inferior team to beat a superior team). (This seems to indicate the playoffs should have more games, if fairness is a goal).
And sure enough, the article mentions several teams that did outstanding by the old metric, winning 2/3 of their games (seattle for instance), making them about the winningest teams ever (by percent), and yet they didn't make the WS.
Just interesting. But maybe it explains why baseball is frustrating to me, because, as it mentions, a bad basketball team will usually not beat a good one, whereas for baseball it is somewhat expected to happen a certain fraction of the time.
Or, even more than quite good teams not making the Series, is the prevalance of Not Quite Good teams making the Series. Hooray for making money!
The answer for why they moved from that system is simple--more teams making the playoffs = more fans watching baseball in october = more overall playoff games = more cash for team owners. Bud Selig, the commissioner of baseball, and the architect of the current playoff format, just happens to be a former owner.
A five game series with a wildcard is and always will be stupid. But whatever. It creates a lot of fodder for people analyzing poor sportswriting.
And another thing that annoys me about these articles about the 2006 Cardinals winning is that they ignore that the super-awesome 2004 and 2005 Cardinals got completely screwed by the system that benefited the 2006 model.
Actually, I think baseball is the only major sport with a well-designed playoff system. In baseball, only good teams can make the playoffs -- the regular season is incredibly important -- as opposed to basketball, where half the teams make the playoffs, which last for like three months. In football, with necessarily n=1, the error is large.
It's true that 7 games could allow for a lesser team to beat a better team, but I don't think it will let a lesser team beat a great team -- in fact, I challenge you to put forth a better operational definition of greatness.
There are also a couple things that make the picture not as simple as Reid laid out above. In the regular season you pitch your #5 starter once every 5 days, and you rest players, and you beat up on Kansas City, and you don't pull it all out, and players get injured and your team dynamic shifts. For these reasons I think a short playoff series against a strong opponent is a MUCH better indicator of quality than a full season.
I think that playing 162 games against average competition is a reliable test of goodness, while playing 7 high-leverage games against a high-quality opponent is a reliable crucible for determining greatness. It's hard to avoid reasoning circularly, but I don't know of a team that's considered "great" that didn't advance far in the playoffs.
Most people would agree that the last two years' playoffs have been surprising (you may read this as "produced low-quality victors") because none of the teams involved were great. Three years ago, there were four teams that looked like they had legitimate claims to greatness -- one of them won, more of them may have been. You can make an argument that the '05 White Sox were great but there were many flaws, highlighted in their late-season swoon. I think, however, that the Cards won last year because they were good, and lucky, and played well at the right time, and had pitching/defense/managing/Pujols (and for all these reasons deserved to win) but that they were simply the one that prevailed among several good-not-great teams. Therefore, I don't see either of the past two years as any kind of indictment on baseball's playoff system.
You can also skip that dope and instead read what one of the all-time great baseball writers has to say about baseball's playoff system. (Note that this article was written right *before* two of the best 7-game series the game has ever seen).
Boswell's latest article also touches on the balance between allowing an underdog to rise up and ensuring greatness prevails.
So, the season in which the Mariners won 116 games, you would not have considered them a "great" team? Just a team with a really, really outstanding record?
I suppose that it is confusing/frustrating to me that a team with an extremely high winning percentage that plays a lot of games (unlike in the case of football) would not be considered "great", even relatively.
Ok. So while all the baseball experts are paying attention, maybe someone can answer me this: why is it ok for some teams have a 1 in 4 chance of automatically making the playoffs, but some other teams have only a 1 in 6 chance?
This is not just my being a bitter cubs fan. Ok, who am I kidding? It probably is my being a bitter cubs fan, but I really want to know. And as a follow up, can we nominate the cardinals to join the AL west?
That Mariners team would be the one of the ones you'd start with if you were going to make a list of "great teams that didn't win it all." However, they folded 4-1 to the 2001 Yankees, who themselves lost to the Diamondbacks -- and if it weren't for the ridiculous drama of the three games won by walkoffs, that series would have been a drubbing of the Yanks by the Diamondbacks. The dbacks won 3 games by scores of 10-3, 5-3, and 15-2, and lost games by 2-1, 4-3 (9th inning comeback and 10th inning walkoff) and 3-2 (9th inning comeback and 12th inning walkoff) -- the deciding game 7 was won 3-2 when Arizona (playing at home) got the tying and winning runs off Mariano Rivera in the bottom of the 9th.
I go into so much detail because it shows why most people wouldn't file the Mariners under "great" teams. The goal of baseball is to win the World Series, and one consistent element of teams that do so is to have one or more dominant pitchers. That year, the Yankees had Mariano Rivera, Mike Mussina, Andy Pettite, Roger Clemens and El Duque: all in the all-star to HOF range, including the best reliever of all time and one of the five best pitchers of all time. When the Yankees needed to win four specific games, they had the weapons to do so. The Mariners had a pitching staff that may look close on paper (compare the ERA+ of each staff), but their staff ace (Garcia) appeared in 7.3 innings during the ALCS; and when the Mariners faced an elimination game they lost 12-3. (Garcia did not appear in that game). Another thing that may not be immediately apparent is that with the exception of Garcia their pitchers were 'finesse' types rather than power types -- baseball lore says finesse eats up weak teams but fares poorly against strong teams. Their relief ace (Kaz Sasaki) appeared in 1 game and lost, earning a 54.00 ERA; Rivera pitched 4.7 innings in 4 games with 1 win, 2 saves and a 1.93 ERA.
As it turns out, to beat the Yankees team all Arizona needed were Curt Schilling and Randy Johnson. They won 22 and 21 games resp during the regular season, which is why the Diamondbacks got /into/ the playoffs. There's an almost laughable differential in W-L of games started by Schilling and Johnson vs. the rest of the staff. In the World Series, however, the two of them started five games, with Johnson famously appearing in relief during game 7; their combined pitching line was 38.6 innings pitched (out of 65), for a combined 21 hits, 5 walks, 45 strikeouts and a 1.40 ERA. Each of these metrics is somewhere between great and mind-blowing -- and it came against a high-quality opponent sparing no effort.
If Arizona, NYY, and SEA went through a 30-game playoffs, spread out over a month -- long enough to necessitate regular pitching rotations and rest schedules -- I think the Yankees would probably have won, but it's possible the Mariners consistent hitting would have prevailed. The Diamondbacks would win precisely 2/5 of their games and come in a clear third.
However, though the playoff system has evolved over time, this simple fact hasn't changed: to win the World Series, you have to have the endurance to make the playoffs and then the concentrated strength to take a high-stakes series against a premier opponent. When I look at the 2001 Mariners, I see a team that excels at the first but is clearly inferior -- in many ways, and in the empirical outcome -- at the second and more difficult test.
The asymmetric divisions, and especially with the asymmetric schedule, is unfair... but not so unfair as to keep a good team from making the playoffs. In the 13 years of the wildcard system, the NL central has produced 4 wildcard teams, including your Cubs. If they want to make the playoffs, they can win 60% of their games.
What's really unfair is making the Devil Rays and Blue Jays play in the same division as the Yankees, Red Sox and Orioles.
I don't really see your point about the NL central producing 4 wildcard teams over 13 years. That is less than 1/3, despite the central division having more teams than the other divisions. Yes, another team can make the playoffs, but it doesn't seem to balance out the inequality.
Out of curiosity, why do you lump the orioles in with the yankees and red sox? Amount of money the teams can spend on players?
Why the hell they put the Rockies in the NL and not the AL west baffles me. They could have done that and kept the Astros in the NL West, and there would have been no problem with the asymetric divisions. I think the main goal there was to keep division rivals as close to being in the same time zone as possible. It is obnoxious having to wait for a 7:10 west coast first pitch.
I also think that it's really unfair that teams don't have to use their #5 starter in the playoffs. That fifth starter is a pretty critical thing in determining whether or not a team actually makes the playoffs, but is wholly irrelevant as to how the team performs in the playoffs.
As for the playoff system, we can't talk about it as if it were developed in a vacuum. We had a playoff system in 1993 that balanced the regular season performance with the postseason proving grounds much more effectively. It had much more exciting pennant races (these days, the only exciting 'race' is the wild card hunt, or I guess last years' near total collapse of the Cardinals), and it produced a postseason roster of awesome teams that then had a chance of duking it out for a title. All of the things that mrflip said about the current system could apply to the old system just as well.
I think I really would like to go back to four playoff teams, perhaps with a 7 game LCS, and a nine game world series. This, of course, will never happen. But I think it would have a postseason consisting of better teams, and would test those teams' depth much more than the current system.
As for 'power' vs. 'finesse' in the postseason:
Roger Clemens, postseason: 3.66 ERA in 33 starts
Greg Maddux, postseason: 3.34 ERA in 30 starts and 2 relief appearances
I would have never thought that the two would perform so closely, or that both had such a middling (for their awesome selves) postseason record
You want to have even # of teams in each league for schedule making purposes; Milwaukee would be the team to switch back, as it used to be in the AL. I guess I'm arguing that 4 out of 13 is statistically 1 in 3 (insufficient to reject the null hypothesis "teams from any division have equal chances at the wildcard"). How often have the Cubs had a good enough record to win a different division yet failed to make the playoffs?
The current playoff system has produced some of the most exciting outcomes in any major sport. If you made a list of the greatest playoff battles in the history of baseball, the 2004 ALCS, the 2001 WS and the 2002 WS go right into the pantheon; with (off the top of my head) the 2002 WS, 2004 NLCS, 2003 ALCS, 2001 ALDS, 2003 NLCS, 2003 WS, 1999 ALDS the recent era is overrepresented. These were fantastic back-and-forth battles that became instant classics. This system doesn't need fixing -- basketball's interminable and foreordained playoffs do, and hockey's would if they still played that in the US.
If you're cataloguing recent playoff series, I think you should also include the 2001 NLDS betwen the diamondbacks and cardinals, decided, like the world series that year, by a bloop single by Tony Womack in the decisive final game
No one is arguing that baseball go in the directon of basketball or hockey. I would argue that the Selig realignment moved baseball toward a system more like that of basketball or hockey. I also think that it's really hard to rate these series objectively, since we really can't remember quite how exciting the 1968 series was, much less the 1932 one.
Vetting the teams a little better would only improve the postseason--and we wouldn't be stuck with a yawner like the 2005 series.
And my complaint about the uneven teams has a lot more to do with the unbalanced schedule than anything else--if you are going to have a wild card, you can't have wildly disparate schedule strengths like we do in our current schedule structure--those AL west teams see each other way more than the NL central teams do, thus allowing the A's to beat up on the Rangers and Mariners repeatedly. The NL central was pretty weak last year, but in past seasons, it has been a relatively deep division, and the unbalanced schedule hurt all of the teams involved.
Really, either the wildcard or the unbalanced schedule have to go.
And just in our ability to remember, could you really call the 2002 WS more exciting than the 1985 or 1986 series?
I'm with NanoCindy on lumping the orioles in... they've been pretty competitive with tampa bay and toronto for well over the last decade. I won't try to enter the stats-analysis debate, but wrt to the bad, bad devil rays, unexpected outcomes and good pitching vs hitting... one of my saddest baseball memories is being in Fenway for a game in which Pedro had 17 Ks, only to lose to a Jose Canseco solo home run in the 8th. 1-0, Tampa Bay.
(And to further derail the topic, my favorite so-sad-it's-laughable moment was leaving this game when the score hit 12-1, only to arrive home to find that we'd missed EIGHT more runs (with the Yankees still at bat). Sigh.)
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If my earlier analysis is correct, that winning a majority of the games in a playoff is not statistically significant until it rises above the noise AND is more than 1/3 of the games, then the lowest number of games to satisfy this criterion is _31_. Wow!
So, pretty much, no playoffs at all, just the two teams with the best records overall duke it out in the WS. Why did they move from that system?
posted by reid at 10:57AM CST on April 11