"Good Teams Don't Play A Lot Of Close Games"

Due to his poor grammar, I thought he meant the A’s “haven’t played poorly; (we’re) just not good enough to win.”

Beane praised Geren for working with a young, inexperienced team. But the team isn’t that young just because there are no 35-40 year old LOOGY’s in the bullpen, and it isn’t that inexperienced, at least not beyond most teams. He talked about the injuries, but most of the injuries were compensated for with players doing similar things (i.e. Crisp = Davis, Cahill = Duke).

But for a second let’s assume that Billy Beane no longer watches games, but simply looks at box scores and has chats with Bob. Then he sees something different. He sees close games that were ALMOST won. And he sees that his entire strategy of trading players in June and July because of depth was thrown off due to injury. From a GM’s perspective, those injuries were killer. From a playing perspective, not so much.

Beane’s comment was stat-oriented, at least in terms of solely looking at numbers. So the age aggregate looks young and the budget is fairly minimal - but not so minimal as to take a $4 million dollar hit on Taveras, or a $10 million contract for Sheets, or a decent deal for Crisp, or a $2 million flyer on the oft-injured Duchsherer. Or earlier large offers to Beltre and Scutaro. The close games could have gone the other way - but as Nico notes, and let’s be more realistic about it, what the whole pythagorean equation is about, is how many games you blow away your opponents and how few games you get blown away in. Lots of close games say .500; add a few blowouts and the pythagorean experience goes completely awry.

I remember, during the first two months of this past Warriors season, that the Warriors looked to be ALMOST a good team. They kept losing in the last seven seconds. After a while, in basketball, you start realizing that the good teams almost always win those close ones. It’s not luck. It’s the ability to make the plays when they count. It’s different for baseball, which relies on luck to a far greater degree. But still, good teams always show you how good they are, and bad teams show you how bad they are…last night, the A’s didn’t show us how good they were (I mean, Ben Sheets gave up a lot of hits to a miserable offense). They simply played a completely inept team. They got most of their early runs with the usual array of pop-ups and grounders that have been rally-killers throughout the season, that the Pirates booted. Even when the A’s booted a play, early on, Barton made a perfect throw to third to get an errant baserunner. I mean, I loved the score - but when a team plays as badly as the Pirates, nearly any other team will beat them, and beat them badly.

Not knocking the A’s for last night at all. I mean, for Chrissake, Edwin fucking Jackson no-hit the Rays, so anything’s possible. The A’s won, and won big, and put the game away with a delightful seventh inning. But I want to see that fire when the game’s on the line, not simply because your opponents couldn’t beat the Marymount girls’ squad.

about a fascinating concept. This is exactly the type of “take a step back” analysis that is pretty much nonexistent in the mainstream sports media; sure, they throw all sorts of stats at you, some of which are interesting, but they’re usually more of the “Johnny Sunday has hit a home runs on 7 straight Sundays” type than “The Yankees have played fewer close games, not won more.”

It’s just not something that really jives with notions of grit, endurance, etc. People would much rather believe that a good team wins close games all the time because they “want it more” than the much-less-romantic idea that yes, they’ll win close games, but it’s because they’re more skilled at playing baseball, and furthermore, they won’t play a lot of close games (because they are skilled at playing baseball and therefore have higher run differentials).

If you go to MLB.com standings and click the 1-Run category to display, the numbers don’t match up. Rangers, for example, have played 25 such games for a 15-10 record. A’s, on the other hand, have played 19 such games for a 12-7 record. Overall the trend doesn’t appear; maybe you don’t consider the Rangers a good team (I think they’ll swoon in the heat of summer, as usual) but the only “good” team that hasn’t played many 1-run games is the Yankees (13 total, going 7-6).

I don’t know that Nico isn’t off the mark though; it would be interesting to see how this applies to 2-run or even 3-run games. Also, just because a team wins 5-1 doesn’t mean a walk off grand slam ended things after it was 1-1 in the 9th.

In short: it’s really hard to judge if this effect is real or not, based on the information available.

I can’t remember when the A’s did not struggle, but in the past we were winners. It seemed that we somehow were able to win in spite of ourselves and with pretty mediocre field managers. For the past several seasons the struggle has become more painful because we have not posted a winning record. Baseball strategy is really not very complex and the situations presented in a major league game are no different than game situations at any level. Geren’s decisions seem suspect, and we have lost our winning edge. It is truly disgusting to me to see us lose our proud and winning tradition. We have gone from finding a way to win to consistently losing. Geren must be held accountable for at least some of this downturn. Throwing strikes and timely hitting would also be a step in the right direction. I will be watching more of the struggle late tonight if my dang comcast extra innings does not freeze up again.
“Lets go Oakland”