FanPost

The Playoffs are a Crapshoot

Some time ago, I read some comments by Nation members along the lines that Mr. Beane's infamous assertion that the playoffs were a crapshoot was something of an excuse. Something about the comments really bothered me, such that I've been kind of stewing on them since, and I think I've got a handle on it now.

I have to preface this by saying I might be wrong (in fact, I'd like to preface everything I ever say by saying I might  be wrong), because, far from being a stathead, my quantatative reasoning skills are really sub-par (I don't even know what a regression analysis is). I studied philosophy, but to get through the program I had to take a basic logic class and struggled mightily.

But it seems to me that people are missing BB's point. The playoffs aren't a crapshoot because they're the playoffs; they're a crapshoot because they're a short series, and every short series is a crapshoot.

Imagine flipping a coin 160 times. There are methods that allow you to predict with reasonable accuracy over this series of trials how often certain events - say, three heads in a row - should normally occur. But there are no methods available that allow you to predict exactly where in the sequence of trials these events will occur.

Now imagine breaking the baseball season down into a sequence of short series, say five game chunks. The models available allow us to predict with reasonable accuracy how many of these short series a team should normally win, but again, there is nothing that allows us to predict precisely which of these series a team will win. Each short series is, as it were, a crapshoot.

Teams that make it to the playoffs are simply adding another short series to the sequence of trials. Unless you're like Joe Morgan and believe there is something mystical about the playoffs - and if there is, no amount of quantatative analysis is going to help you, anyway - the only real difference is that these last short series are suddenly elimination rounds.

The only thing a GM can do is build a team that is projected to win as many short series as possible, thereby increasing the teams chances of winning any given short series, including those last, crucial ones. It's just not possible to design a team to win a particular short series.

And Billy has done a terrific job of building teams that have won a ton of short series during his tenure. I think everybody on AN would agree that we might have won any one of those elimination round short series. We just didn't.

It still hurts, but quantatative reasoning is of no help with that. That's what booze is for. For those members who are responsible and of legal age, of course.