Pirates 7, @Cardinals 1 — Put that in your RISP pipe, Cardinals — and look out, Tyler Chatwood! Counting today’s go-ahead RBI — the first such by a Bucs postseason pitcher — Gerrit Cole is 4 for 9 with runners in scoring position, 6 RBI. With a 6-1 lead after 6 innings (thanks, Pedro), Cole was lifted at just 86 pitches, perhaps with an eye to a potential Game 5 on Wednesday.
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Bartolo Colon allowed just 10 first-inning runs in 30 starts this year — but a 1.40 WHIP.
Watching Bartolo reminds that the real theme of the book Moneyball was not a triumph of sabermetrics as such. Rather it was about Billy Beane learning from his own MLB career that being a physical stud with boundless natural talent is neither necessary nor sufficient for success at the major league level, and that you can outsmart the competition looking for actual MLB talent in other ways. Bartolo Colon is not a five-tool athlete.
Post-season victory margins of tens runs or more, without a home run for the winning team:
Red Sox over Rays, today
D’Backs over the Yanks, 13-2 Game 6 of the 2001 World Series
Cards over Dodgers, 12-2, Game 4 of the 1985 NLCS
Yanks over Dodgers, 12-2, Game 5 of the 1978 World Series
Yanks over Pirates, 12-0, Game 6 of the 1960 World Series
Cards over Tigers, 11-0, Game 7 of the 1934 World Series
Athletics over Giants, 13-2, Game 6 of the 1911 World Series
Sean Doolittle has a younger brother pitching in Oakland’s system. Ryan Doolittle has just 163 IP in 5 seasons, with 157 Ks and just 20 walks. But it seems like he can’t stay healthy, and he hasn’t gotten past high A ball yet.
http://www.baseball-reference.com/minors/player.cgi?id=doolit001rya
In 2012, he had 43 Ks and 3 walks.
Massive relief. Benoit put away 4 straight power threats, with a 1-run lead. And the answer to the trivia question: Max Scherzer, Josh Beckett and Steve Carlton are the only three in MLB history to be the only pitcher with 20 wins in a given season — Carlton in 1982, Beckett in 2007, Scherzer this year. At least, that’s what my P-I search seems to tell me.
Nice pitching by Los Tigres! But I´m sure you´re missing Papa Grande on the late innings. 🙂
Regarding the trivia, I never would have guessed that. I checked the ASG year-by-year pitchers, and it wasn´t that. But while I was looking into the 20-win seasons I peeked to see if anyone got the answer right, and that was when I read it from you.
That’s what a scan of the Year-by-year top-tens seems to say as well.
In addition, there were 3 seasons where the leader(s) had 19 wins and 2 strike-shortened years where it was 17 & 14 wins respectively.
Go Tigers!
(But John, are you as worried as I am that they’ve only managed to score in 1 inning out of their last 24 and only managed to score 4 runs in 4 games against 2 teams that lost a combined total of 194 games? Those are not good trends,)
Hartvig — Although it’s not my true nature, I’m seeing the half-full portion of Detroit’s glass: — Miggy’s first-pitch RBI single felt enormous. He might not hit a HR this October, but if he hits .300 with a few clutch knocks, it could be enough. — Tacking on a 3rd run in that 1st inning, after 2 outs and none on, also seemed huge. V-Mart looked good to me. Avila drove in that run and had another hit, roughly equaling his prior postseason total. And while Prince remains frustrating, he hit a couple of balls well to left. (And honestly,… Read more »
We’re two years into the double wildcard single game playoff, and here’s a thought…
I love that there were six scrappy AL teams genuinely fighting for a playoff spot into the final week of the season. That’s fun.
But the SINGLE game playoff?
That feels too-lean for baseball.
Baseball is all about winning series’.
I’d like to see it two out of three, all in one ballpark.
How to compress time, and also make it fun?
The first day: A DoubleHeader
Voomo, I agree with you about a 3-game playoff. One-game playoffs are ok if the two teams have comparable W-L records, but when cases arise where the second wildcard’s record is far inferior, the value of the regular season 162-games will be severely undermined if a one-game upset occurs (which, of course, happens in baseball virtually every day).
But if we ever see MLB give up the revenue of a postseason game with a doubleheader, we’ll know that the True Millennium has come to pass.
With respect to the issue of the second wild card having an inferior record, discussion over at Tom Tango’s blog explains why the better of two wild card teams has a higher probability of winning a one-game playoff at its own home park than it does a three-game playoff in which it has two home games. http://tangotiger.com/index.php/site/comments/one-game-play-in-is-more-fair-than-3-game-play-off
Tom is one of the most brilliant sabermetricians around and his blog is well worth reading, if you can take his style, which tends toward the arrogant.
Well, Tango is a certainly a legend in his own mind and to many of his followers perhaps, wrt his statistical conclusions. So many mistakes in that piece that I don’t know where to start, but here goes. First, he states: “The Pirates finished the regular season with 94 wins. The Reds finished with 90 wins. If those records represented their true talent level (it doesn’t, but everyone else behaves as it does)….” This is no doubt a reference to the Pythagorean Expectation (PE), and the supposed “fact” that actual W/L record doesn’t represent the “true talent level”. Well, no,… Read more »
Wow. I understood Tango to be saying that a team with “true talent” level of 94 wins a season (.580 winning percentage) will defeat a team with a true talent level of 90 wins a season (.556 winning percentage), over a large sample of games at a neutral site, 52.5% of the time. That has nothing to do with pythagorean expectation but instead relies on the log5 formula (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log5). To then add the home field advantage complexity to the neutral site assumption, he adds into the log5 calculation the standard average home field advantage of abut 54% that has proven… Read more »
birtelcom, the reference to the PE comes via Tango’s phrase: “If those records represented their true talent level (it doesn’t, but everyone else behaves as it does)…”, not his subsequent reasoning on what expected winning percentage the Pirates would have at a neutral site. That statement’s definitely a reference to the PE concept because the PE is almost always interpreted as being a type of “true talent” estimate, in the sense that it is better (“truer”) than the actual WL record; that was my point. It’s not at all clear to me whether he’s talking generally or specifically, but if… Read more »
Jim @43: Tango is surely referring only partially to the P.E. in his reference to true talent. Reading Tango regularly suggests that he means a lot more than just pythag when he refers to true talent not being equal to win-loss percentage — it means not just pythag, but also sampling limitations, changing talent over time during a season, etc.. But the more important point is that it is irrelevant to the entire rest of the discussion, because he then assumes for the sake of argument that the win-loss record is the true talent level. The entire rest of the… Read more »
birtelcom, theoretical questions very much interest me–that’s not the issue. The issues that I see revolve around a set of questions that include: (1) what do we consider to be theoretical (and why), (2) how do we best address such questions (i.e. what methods and data do we use), and (3) how do we relate theoretical (and/or generalized) findings to specific instances and what is the logical justification for so doing. Whenever we attempt to apply a general finding to any particular, specific situation, there are a number of questions that need to be raised and examined, because it is… Read more »
Not being an angel, I’m going to rush into this discussion, or maybe meander in, whatever. 1) A 52.5 % chance of winning is basically a coin flip, except to an obsessive gambler. This isn’t an election where majority rules. 2) As far as I can tell, the Pythagorean whatsis is absolutely no good at accounting for such things in an individual game as field conditions, teams on a roll, the particular matchups, especially involving pitchers, and other less obvious particulars. 3) What does Pythagoras have to do with it anyway? Schoolboy math brings to mind the right triangle theorem… Read more »
Interestingly counterintuitive, birtelcom. But note that Tango’s formula holds for teams within 5 games of one another, like the Pirates and Reds. But the problem of fairness with the one-game formula arises when the teams are not comparable – when the teams are 7 or more games apart, the odds that the format contributes to an upset grow increasingly greater, and that’s the issue that concerns me. To state the obvious, a top wildcard team can have the second best record in the league – and be as strong as, say, the ’93 Giants (103 wins, not a divisional leader),… Read more »
epm: You are quite right about the limits of the advantage of the one-game over three-game system. The points you raise about the spread of the difference between the two wild card teams, and about the impact of starting pitchers, are both good ones, and also come up in the disucssion at Tango’s site. The main reason I like the one game system is precisely because it is such a crapshoot. The better wild card team could have controlled its fate with respect to such a risky proposition by winning its division title in the first place. If it can’t… Read more »
Well, I can switch to your view as easily as keep mine, birtelcom, since both have the same basis and the competing arguments seem to me about equally strong. I can add in favor of yours that the postseason already is too long, detracting from the Series. In last night’s Braves-Dodgers game, one of the announcers referred to the ’56 Series as the final time Brooklyn “was in a playoff game.” No fan would *ever* have confused the Series with a playoff in 1956. There’s a lot to be said for the quantity of TV entertainment the current format offers,… Read more »
I’d back the Voomo Plan for a best-of-3 wildcard round, played in 2 days. I’d have no scheduled off day from that round to the next. And I’d add this twist: If one WC team wins at least 5 more regular-season games than the other, that team needs just 1 win to advance through the WC round.
Lost in the wild card discussion is the fact that the #1 WC team will not infrequently be penalized under the 2-WC system. We’ve already seen that happen with last years Braves, who were a full six games better than the Cardinals, but lost the WC game. With a single WC, 3 divisions, and a balanced schedule, that WC team will frequently (78% of the time) have a better record than one on the three division winners. Now the unbalanced schedule plays some havoc with that number, but the principle still holds. An interesting upshot of this is that when… Read more »
Jim, what’s this about “finally” adding two more franchises? They added two in 1998, and two in 1993. At least two current franchises would not survive (at least in a competitive sense) without revenue sharing. What markets do you think are clamoring for a MLB franchise — given that there won’t be a 3rd team in either N.Y.C. or L.A.?
Good point John. I guess I just assume that sooner or later, two more teams will be added. Could well be later than sooner though, and who knows what the next Commissioner will want.
A couple of more specific thoughts though. I think there are several cities that could support an MLB team, including Nashville, Salt Lake City, Portland and Vancouver, and either Oakland or Sacramento if the A’s move to San Jose, (which admittedly seems as far away as ever).
Re: the wild-card format — What about a weighted system, in the case of large difference in records of the two wild cards? If one WC has at least, say, 5 more wins than the other, then the lesser WC must defeat the greater WC twice, while the greater needs just one win to advance. Second game to be played the same day, if necessary.
I’ve always advocated using a weighting system of some type, and applied not just to WC teams, but to playoff teams generally (whenever leagues have divisions and division winners are automatic qualifiers, especially under an unbalanced schedule).
I really think though that since a team’s probability of winning on any given day is so strongly dependent on the starting pitcher (generally), that you can never get around forcing a team to demonstrate it’s team-wide strength over several games, preferably best of seven. I don’t even like best of five, where an ace like Kershaw can start 40% of the games.
My assumption was that any talk about large differences in the records of the two wild card teams was overblown, as such discrepancies are rather rare. I was right… as long as we’re talking about the NL. In the nineteen seasons since 1994 the mean gap between the two wild cards (using today’s rules for all years) was 2.63 games in the NL, but 4.97 games in the AL. The mode gap was 1 and the median 2 in the NL, but 6 and 5 respectively in the AL. Ten times in the AL the gap was 5 games or… Read more »
