The 2023 Running Baseball Thread

Oddly enough “bbwaa” is the sound I hear when Chris Wusso talks.

 

I've been asking myself if I would be this disgusted had a male reporter done this.

I would hope that would be the case.

 

Charlie Brown's teacher couldn't have said it better.

 

Brandon Woodruff just had shoulder surgery. Likely to miss most if not all of next year.

 

Dumb question gets dumber answer.

 

I think the short series has a lot more to do with it than the byes, and even then I think the nature of any tournament rewards the best team right now over the best team.

It's been a busy week at work so I haven't been paying a lot of attention to the Division Series other than the Twins-Astros, but I think we're looking at some small sample size here. Doing some back of the napkin tabulations, this is the 29th postseason of the Wild Card era. Of the 58 teams that had the best record in their respective leagues in that span, they fared as follows:

21 reached the World Series (12 won, 9 lost)
12 reached the LCS
25 lost in the Division Series.

So that means that the mythical pennant winner went 33-25 in the Division Series and 21-12 in the LCS.

The following World Series featured both mythical pennant winners: 2020, 2013, 1999, 1995. The team with the better record is 1-2 (2020 Dodgers won, 1999 Braves lost, 1995 Indians lost and in 2013 the Red Sox and Cardinals had identical records).

When there was only one round of playoffs from 1969-1993, the division winner with the better record was 29-20, 10-7* when the LCS was a best-of-7 from 1985-1993 and 19-13 when it was best-of-5 from 1969-1984.

*There was a season in the early 90's in which both AL champs had the same record.

So the rundown by winning percentage:
Pennant winner's success rate when they had to win 7 games to get to the World Series: 56.9%
Pennant winner's success rate when they had to win 4 games to get to the World Series: 58.8%
Pennant winner's success rate when they had to win 3 games to get to the World Series: 59.3%

Now the difference between a .569 win percentage and a .593 is about four games over the course of 162, but the more playoff rounds, the more chances the 40-44% gets to hit and someone else goes in their place.

 

This is good stuff, thanks for doing the research.

Baseball's also built so that even the worst teams can win two of three or three in a row at any point in time. The Athletics took two of three from the Braves from May 29-31 and then won seven in a row--a stretch that included a sweep of the Brewers and two straight wins over the Rays--from June 6-13. The Royals took five of six in September from the Astros, who were battling just to get into the playoffs. But this is a little more jarring when it happens in October.

 

Agreed. It's also been noted here that the Dodgers' pitching was a raging dumpster fire, the Orioles were pretty clearly not ready for prime time (and the Rangers would probably had won their division if not for a single bad week) and as for the Phillies beating the Braves, I'm really starting to get a vibe from Bryce Harper et al that his particular brand of red-ass seems to help in these settings. Castellanos has now played in 28 postseason games (surprisingly, only three of them with the Tigers -- I thought he had come up earlier than that). I don't think anyone is going to consider this year's World Series champion to be one of the legendary teams of the game but with the Tigers' season long since over, I'm just hoping that the last two rounds are much more entertaining than the first two.

 

Great work.

Too much math, though. My eyes glazed over like it was a Ragu post.

 

I have made this point before, but the Diamondbacks' season has been insane.
The Diamondbacks went 9-27 from early July to early August. Obviously, that's a pretty considerable stretch of any season. Hard to overcome such bad baseball for so long. Finishing 84-78 -- never mind the postseason run -- is pretty tough when you immolate as they did.
The 2023 Arizona team is one of 43 MLB clubs to have won exactly nine games in a 36-game stretch in the past 10 full seasons. Of those 43, this is the only one to finish with a winning record. It's one of 0nly six to have won as many as 70 games in a season in question.
Collectively, the 43 teams have posted a .391 winning percentage, which equates to a 63-99 single-season prorated record.
As you might imagine, this is the first team in history to make the playoffs after losing 27 or more times in a span of 36 games.

Welcome to the NLCS.

 

Using a layoff as an excuse for a playoff series loss is just lame in extremis. Take care of business and stop making excuses.

I like the current format just fine. If the teams with the best record won in the playoffs every year people would bitch that it's predictable and boring.

Baseball ... America's Bitchtime.

 

The new thing is to rob the Dominican Republic's baseball academies:

Cardinals' Dominican Republic facility robbed by group of armed thieves.