Myth: Baseball Teams Should Be Measured By Postseason Success

Listen, this might be a really difficult one to convince you on. But it's so true. Ever since 1969 - when the four-division system was introduced - and 1995 - the first year of six divisions and two Wild Card teams - what a baseball team does in the regular season has no relationship with what they're going to do in the postseason.

Therefore, I'm here to say that the postseason is practically a crapshoot. It doesn't mean it's not fun, it doesn't mean we should stop watching, but let's stop kidding ourselves people. If a team makes the postseason, it's a good team. Period. It doesn't need to succeed in the playoffs to be considered a good team.

It takes 162 games to accumulate all the statistics that we base all our postseason predictions on, and then we're taking the teams that accumulate those statistics and thinking that over the next 13-19 games, they're going to perfectly transfer to the postseason? That's not how it works, and it's not how it has worked for the last 36 years (throw out 1994, there wasn't a postseason that year).

Hear me out: The difference between a .300 batting average and a .275 batting average is 15 hits over a 600-AB span. The difference between a 3.00 ERA and a 4.03 ERA is 23 runs - only 23 runs!! - over 201 innings.

My point? If there's only a tiny difference between the stats in the REGULAR SEASON, how the heck are those stats going to perfectly predict the postseason, which has a much smaller sample size? A guy who pitches 201 innings in the regular season is only going to pitch 50 innings (tops!) in the postseason, and probably not that many. If he gives up 20 runs in 39 postseason innings, his ERA was over 4.50. If he gives up 13 runs in those 39 innings, his ERA was 3.00.

The same goes for teams themselves. How many 5- and 6-game winning and losing streaks do teams go on during the regular season? A lot! And guess what? That can happen in the postseason too! The only difference is, if you go on a four-game losing streak in the postseason, you're OUT of the postseason, and we’re all talking about how that team wasn’t “built for the postseason.” Shut up!

Not that they read my blog, but this should make the Oakland Athletics, Atlanta Braves, and post-2001 New York Yankees feel much better about themselves. Of course, Billy Beane already thinks that the postseason is a crapshoot, and he's totally right. Here are the numbers, as compiled by yours truly with some help from really big books and really deep Web sites:

Since 1969, there have been 36 World Series contests. The team with the best record in all of baseball has won EIGHT of those World Series.

I’m not even going to get into the number of postseason series that were won by the “inferior” team, but believe me, it’s about dead-even. What a shocker, a team that wins 94 games in the regular season has a reasonable chance to beat a team that won 98 games in the regular season. This isn’t rocket science.

It all comes down to one thing: The difference between a 95-win team and a 102-win team is so minute that it makes me sick. I mean 7 games? What if those were the seven games that your ace reliever was pitching with a sore elbow? What if those seven games all happened to be one-run games in which a blind umpire made a terrible call?

Get my point? It all comes down to who’s hitting well, who’s pitching well, and who’s getting a little bit lucky, for a 13-19 game period at the END OF THE SEASON. That’s the postseason. And yes, the games mean more, there’s a different atmosphere, it’s good to have experience under pressure, and all that stuff. But really, the regular season does not accurately predict the postseason in baseball. You might actually know that.

What I’m really saying here is this: The best team in baseball does not always win the World Series. The hottest team in baseball wins the World Series.

So I introduce a new way to measure a baseball team. We measure a team based on whether it was able to win 91-plus games, give or take a few wins. That means the team was at least 20 games over .500, and in good position to win or fight for a playoff spot. That’s a good team. If you think about it, only eight teams make the playoffs. Eight out of 30. In the NBA, 16 out of 30 make the playoffs. In the NHL, 16 out of 30 make the playoffs. Even in the NFL, 12 out of 32 make the playoffs.

Now, please do not get me wrong. if a team is able to win a few World Series, that DOES matter, and experience PROBABLY had something to do with it. The goal in baseball is to win the World Series, and it takes a lot - usually some combination of a good bullpen, patient hitting, powerful hitting and a dominant starter or two - to win the World Series. But, just because one team won the World Series, does NOT mean the other teams choked.

Let’s get that straight.

Myth: Most of the Numbers We Care About Matter

A long time ago, I wrote on this blog that so many statistics are meaningless, but I was only really scratching the surface of the real problem. I was talking about the "win" statistic. Well, it ends up that most most baseball statistics we care about really mean nothing, because they're based on too small a sample size to point to anything but pure luck.

I had always mildly suspected this, reading Bill James baseball books before I was 10 years old, but never really pursued it. For some reason, I had never read Moneyball by Michael Lewis until this week, and so I never really pursued my belief about the bullshitidness of statistics until now. Call me a Billy Beane convert, call me whatever you want, but let me tell you, the arguments in Lewis's books aren't just arguments: They're the truth.

I'll do this slowly, but I'm going to try and start taking a different kind of look at baseball, a look that puts a low Earned Run Average on par with a winning lottery ticket. My last blog entry, which talks about aces going against other aces, is still typical of something I'll write about. You know why? Because most of the crap we've learned about baseball, we've learned from uninformed, babbling sportscasters. Think about that for a second.

Think about that for a while, actually, because I'm done here.