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Apparently, it does:
But while a team’s record did not have much of an effect on its odds of winning a postseason series, its advantage in experience did. A team that had, on average, one more year worth of postseason experience than its counterpart, is expected to win their post-season series 54.2 percent of the time, which is nothing to scoff at.
Nate Silver and Dayn Perry came to the same conclusion in Baseball Between the Numbers. Parts of it can be viewed online and here is the chart of what factors actually correlate to winning the WS:
I agree with Patriot’s point. Postseason experience probably correlates positively with actual talent because good players are more likely to make it to the postseason than bad players. The teams without postseason experience are more likely to be flukes - their true talent level is probably lower than their pythag.
To really determine whether experience has an effect, you’d need to do the same basic thing that MGL did to create odds for this year’s postseason series - a projection for each player in the series (weighted by how much they played). Then, you’d be able to see whether the level of experience is able to improve the model’s accuracy.
Exactly like Patriot and cannatar say. You have to control for actual talent before you can say that experience matters.
Ditto everyone’s comments above. I was not buying David’s (or BP’s) conclusion, and I was disappointed he did such a crude analysis. I wrote this on Ballhype, in response to the article:
David, in your regression analysis, when you looked at the effect of experience, you held the pythag w/l records constant? i.e., you did a multiple regression? I ask this because we would expect that the players with more playoff experience would be better players.
Even if yes, I’m still not buying your conclusion until I see “why?” At the very least, I want to see how players with lots of experience did in the post-season relative to their regular season as opposed to players with little experience. The assumption (if you buy David’s conclusion) is that players with post-season experience will “outplay” their lesser experinced counterparts during he post-season. If they don’t, then I would want to see the “third-order” win expectancy of teams with and without post-season experience as compared to their actual winning percentage.
The reason I want to see that is that if players with more experience don’t actually perform better in the post-season, then the alternative explanation if we accept that their teams win more often, is that they are providing some intangible other than actual improved performance, that enables their teams to win more often than the team’s underlying performance would suggest.
I have always wanted to do a study looking at this “conventional wisdom” but I would have started, as I state above, with performance during the post season (as compared to performance during the regular season) regressed against prior post-season experience, and then gone from there.
For example, if it could be shown that players with more experience simply perform better than expected in the post-season, then our inquiry is pretty much over. If not, then we’d have to dig deeper on a team level, which has a lot more noise in it. David, you started with something very noisy (team-level win loss records, or series records, which is even more noisy).
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I would like to see what would happen if an estimated, regressed W% based not just on Pyth but on recent season W% (or better yet, based on a good preseason projection like PECOTA or MGL). Postseason experience should have a positive correlation to past team success.