THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Thursday, October 02, 2008

How can we “predict” which teams will do well in the post-season?

Here is an SI,com article by John Donovan (I don’t know who he is).  In it, he says:

Still, there are smart ways to pick the teams that will fare best in the playoffs. Nate Silver and the hard-thinkers over at Baseball Prospectus have looked at tons of data and come up with a formula that identifies the three main characteristics of a successful playoff team. They are:

You might notice there’s no mention of home runs or the ability to squeeze a guy to second with one out against a left-hander. There’s not anything in there about crafty managers or experience or a versatile bench, either. Momentum? History? Don’t even bother. Speed? Pssh. Clutchness? Please, save it.

I say, “Poppycock!”

Unless I am somehow living in an upside down universe, the last time I looked, a post-season series was 5 or 7 games of two teams playing 9 innings of baseball.  There is a starting pitcher, 8 more fielders, 9 batters in the lineup, right?  3 outs per inning per team?  Or are there a different set of rules that I am not aware of?

I have no doubt that if you ran various regressions on playoff success and team parameters you might come up with all kinds of goofy things.  Without getting into a discussion about the merits of using regression analysis for this type of analysis (of which I am woefully not qualified to do anyway), the team that has the best chance of success in the playoffs is the team that has the best team!

Duh!

And how do we determine the best team?  Uh, let’s see, the same way we do it for any other game or games.  The team with the best expected run differential is the best team.  Period.  How do we estimate or determine that (the team with the best expected run differential)?  Well, the starter goes 6 or 7 innings.  Then 2 or 3 relief pitchers come in.  Then we throw in the defense.  That comprises the runs allowed.  Yes, I know that the closer tends to pitch more in the post-season.  That shouldn’t be too hard to model in our “runs allowed” formula should it?  I also know that the closer has a leverage of around 2.0 so we have to “double” his contribution.  The setup guy or guys might have leverages of 1.5 or so, so we adjust their contribution accordingly.  And yes, I know that they only use 3 or 4 starters per series and that each starter pitches more than the next one in line.  Thank you for reminding me, though.  I might have accidentally added up the contributions of 5 equal starters per team.

Now the offense, Let’s see.  Hmmmm.  RC or lwts (or OTS if you must), including base running and base stealing for each player on the team, prorated by their expected playing time?  Did I miss anything?

Done.  We now know which teams have the best chance of winning each game and thus each series.  Oh, and home field advantage for each game.  Thank you for reminding me again.

Pitchers who strike out the most batters?  Well, no duh they tend to be the best pitchers. How about pitchers who walk the fewest batters?  And pitchers who give up the fewest HR?  How about pitchers with the lowest BABIP?  Oops, no, that is mainly luck.

No, how about the team with the BEST pitchers. Maybe that will work in the post-season.  It tends to work in the regular season.  Oh, I forgot - there is magic fairy dust in the air in the post-season.

Best defense?  Again, no duh!  But would you want a +10 defense or a +15 offense.  Uh, I’ll take the +15 defense, thank you ever much.

A stud closer?  What, not a bad closer?

Here is my list:

Best offense (including base running)

Best defense (including pitching, closers, etc.)

Combined

This whole idea of what makes post-season teams good is pure nonsense (again, other than the fact that we know that a team only needs 3 or 4 pitchers and that they will use their closer more, etc.).  Did I say that it is nonsense?