The July Juggernaut Effect

As exciting (and necessary) as today's win was, it got me thinking about some of the more established tenets of sabermetrics and how I feel that some of them are conceptually flawed. Now, I'm as big a believer of stat based decision making as anyone else here, but there are few of these ideas that I find faulty, or at least not worth the weight we all put on them. I'll talk about the first in this diary, and I'm curious about what people think.

1. Run Differential as a means of measuring the quality of a team

I understand that over the course of a year, the best teams will score far more runs than they will allow. I also understand that some teams will get a bit lucky and win more games than they should. However, this Royals series got me thinking about a problem I've had with this idea as it has pertained to the A's of the last three or four years.

During this series, we outscored the Royals 18-14. However, we only won 1 of 3 games. That happens sometimes; three games is a small sample size. But anyone who watched those games knows that we played like crap during games 1 and 2 (causing AN to go into a tailspin) and then played abnormally well in game 3. You could argue that this was an ugly series, or at least 2/3 of it was. You could also argue that our 7-0 win today is more indicative of the quality of this team than were the ugly losses, but would that be true?

If we continue to play like this over the course of the year, we will likely end up with a good run differential, and we might even make the playoffs by winning some of these series, but are we then a good team? I mean, a really good team?

This series to me is a microcosm of what the A's have been doing for years. Lose heartbreakers by one or two runs (due largely to an inept offense/bullpen) and then blow out bad teams, often during torrid summer runs. This creates for us a good run differential, but does it make the A's a legitimately good team? Does it make the A's a great team? Again, the numbers suggest yes, but our eyes would tell us a different story.

Could this be why we flamed out in the playoffs every year? Do we artificially inflate our statistics during games like this while losing games that a better team would win? Do we puff up our stature as a team by becoming a July juggernaut and beaing up on the KCs and Tampas of the world?

What do you all think?