1. Welcome to SportsJournalists.com, a friendly forum for discussing all things sports and journalism.

    Your voice is missing! You will need to register for a free account to get access to the following site features:
    • Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
    • Access to private conversations with other members.
    • Fewer ads.

    We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!

Cubs fire Jim Hendry

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by Dick Whitman, Aug 19, 2011.

  1. LongTimeListener

    LongTimeListener Well-Known Member

    But in not wanting to overspend for one, you're probably not going to get a good one (unless you develop him yourself), because it's an inflated market. So it's a specialist position that couldn't be justified in payroll terms. Maybe that's not terrible because, as was noted above, it didn't end up having a ton to do with that particular run. But when you're going into the playoffs without a top-flight closer or a defensive replacement in the outfield or a base-stealer/pinch-runner or a specialty hitter to get the righty/lefty matchup you want or an infielder who can play three positions, you're going to be at a disadvantage in a tight series against a team that does have all those things.
     
  2. RickStain

    RickStain Well-Known Member

    That's definitely possible. Remember, the point of Moneyball was never "This is the best way to build a baseball team." It was "this is the best way to build a baseball team on the cheap, and it works because other teams are so inefficient."

    (Unfortunately for Beane, the other teams are no longer all that inefficient and he's never proven he can come up anything new).

    But as I said at the beginning, being at a "disadvantage" in a tight series still doesn't entirely explain a 1-9 record in decisive games. Even if pinch runners and defensive replacements were wildly important, it wouldn't turn a team that was essentially 50/50 with another playoff team into a .100 proposition. Some amount of negative variance has to be accepted, even if there were other factors at work.
     
  3. LongTimeListener

    LongTimeListener Well-Known Member

    That nine-run outlier came in a game started by Joe Mays, who was 4-8 with a 5.38 ERA that season. I have no idea why he was starting Game 2 of a playoff series, but the fact that they scored nine runs in five innings off him and Tony Fiore -- drawing four walks in those five innings -- would not seem to disprove my hypothesis that they feast on crappy pitching.
     
  4. RickStain

    RickStain Well-Known Member

    That's a fair point. It definitely didn't cost them the 2002 series, but the 2002 series doesn't disprove the idea that they performed worse against good pitching.
     
  5. RickStain

    RickStain Well-Known Member

    A's playoff games against starters with at least a 125 ERA+ that season:

    2000
    Score 4 runs in 6 innings off Clemens, win game
    Score 6 runs in 5 innings off Clemens, win game

    2001
    Score 2 runs in 4 innings off Clemens, win game
    Score 0 runs in 7 innings off Mussina, lose game
    Score 3 runs in 4.1 innings off Clemens, lose game

    2002
    Faced no such pitchers

    2003
    Scored 3 runs in 7 innings off Martinez, won game
    Scored 3 runs in 7 innings off Martinez, lost game

    2006
    Scored 2 runs in 8 innings off Santana, won game
    Scored 4 runs in 5.1 innings off Verlander, lost game

    So they went 5-4 against pitchers with at least a 125 ERA+ that season, and all of them are names that should be recognizable as legit aces.

    In those 9 games, the scored 27 runs in 53.2 innings, equal to a 4.52 runs per game pace, surely more than the average offense would expect against pitchers of that quality.

    Looks like they hit the aces just fine.

    Obviously this doesn't prove that there weren't other factors that caused their team to lose by being built in a flawed way, but that's one hypothesis down.

    (Edit to fix error, they didn't beat Verlander)
     
  6. LongTimeListener

    LongTimeListener Well-Known Member

    OK, as I said, a hypothesis, and you've disproved that part of it to my satisfaction. Kudos.

    But I still think there's a large clue in the fact that they were 25-3 against the truly horrible teams and below .500 against the other playoff/almost-playoff teams. What has been called choking is really, and I know you'll appreciate this, simply meeting the expected outcome by being a little worse than those other good teams.
     
  7. RickStain

    RickStain Well-Known Member

    My main point here is that this is the way you find the truth: by systematically testing hypotheses. It's human nature to want to look at things and say "That's what it looks like so that's what it is," but especially with baseball that doesn't work.

    Ultimately, they are 11-16 in the Beane era in playoff games. Given that their first four playoff series losses were all against teams with inferior regular season records, that's maybe five or six wins under expectations for that time period. I'm inclined to dismiss that as negative variance, but if someone wants to search for reasons, that's reasonable too. It's definitely toward the outer edges of what can be explained as variance.

    But the fact that a 41% winning percentage translated into a 17% series win percentage? There's really only two options:

    1) There was something about the A's that made them really good at winning playoff games early in a series but not late in a series.
    2) Negative variance

    Back on subject, I've never been comfortable with the "negative variance" explanation for the Cubs' current playoff problems. They've lost 8 consecutive playoff games, and they've lost all eight by multiple run margins. In theory, playoff teams should be close to evenly matched, so the odds of that sort of result over even an eight-game sample has to be pretty staggering. But maybe I'm just too much of a fan to be able to view it properly.
     
  8. BB Bobcat

    BB Bobcat Active Member

    Guys, there really is no "Moneyball." hate to break it to you, but that's the truth.

    Look at the A's rosters over the years. Most of the players were selected in essentially the same way that the other 29 teams selected players. They looked in the draft for "good players."

    The book is about the way the A's tried to find lightning in a bottle with the complementary players: Hatteberg, Bradford, etc.

    But those players are not why they won. They won because of Hudson, Mulder, Zito, Chavez, Tejada, Ramon Hernandez. They won because they struck gold with Cory Lidle.

    You can't look at the base running miscues of Tejada and Eric Byrnes and say: "See! Moneyball doesn't work!" Those were two isolated incidents. I'm pretty sure every team in baseball would have used Tejada and Byrnes exactly as the A's did (as a starting shortstop and a fourth outfielder).

    You can't look at Jeremy Giambi's non slide because a) he may have been out anyway b) his run would have only tied the game and c) that's a once-a-lifetime play.

    Singing out the called third strikes to Melhuse and Long is also silly. Long was not a patient "Moneyball" hitter. Melhuse was the backup catcher. They were just two bad at-bats by the 7th and 12th best hitters on the team. Besides, they were already losing in the ninth. Those guys had both grounded out, then what would you say?

    All of this is not to "defend Moneyball" or say that "Moneyball works," but to point out that it's really a small component of what made those teams what they are. It's an interesting component, which is why it made an interesting book, but it hardly defines the way the teams were built.

    Those teams were built on good, young players that any team would have loved to have: Hudson, Mulder, Zito, Chavez, Tejada, Hernandez, Street, Swisher, Haren, Harden.

    I think the A's of 2000-2006 were good because they hit the jackpot on a lot of young players. Period.
     
Draft saved Draft deleted

Share This Page