MLB 2014 season thread

https://twitter.com/hashtag/EvenYear?src=hash

 

The best part is even after all this, I'm rooting for the Giants. I hope they don't lose the rest of the way.

I like Sabean, I can't stand the way people are going to jock the Royals, and fuck the Cardinals.

I guess I have no opinion on the Orioles.

 

The Royals are fun. I think I'd try harder to fly to KC for a Royals-Giants game than I would to drive up to one here. I want to see the ball in the gap that they can't catch. It's out there somewhere.

And Ned. It's Tebow-like.

 

It's a good team to watch. Big boppers with a good all-around vibe.

 

Me in the offseason and regular season: The great thing about baseball is that not-great teams can give themselves a chance to overperform, get in the postseason and get hot.

Me in the postseason: #@$%#! I hate when not-great teams get hot and everyone suddenly loves them.

 

The expanded format has made the post-season less of a true championship and more like a 10-team tournament whose results don't reflect the rigor of the entire season.
The Giants have shown the winner of the World Series is now simply the team that made it through all the rounds of the tournament.
With an unbalanced schedule and randomized interleague matchups, you could argue the teams aren't even seeded correctly to begin with.
Let them have their fun. No one will care about their titles 10-15 years from now- when some other average team is doing it.

 

You do realize you head into this discussion with every bit the bias that you accuse others of having, right?

Sorry, but just because the statheads haven't found a way to measure clutch production doesn't mean it does not exist. They haven't found a good way to measure good defense yet, either. Does good defense not exist?

 

Defensive metrics are way better than you think. You're relying on a 5-year-old argument to a degree.

You can never, ever prove something doesn't exist. But you can look for it in every logical way possible and not find it. And that's what we've done with the kind of clutch performance you're describing in baseball.

Of course clutch can be measured. It's not even hard to measure it. LTL has been proposing ways to measure it repeatedly in this thread: referencing stats and records in clutch situations.

It's just that the people who want to believe it exists use very shallow analysis of the measurements and don't like what deeper analysis tells us.

 

The format also leads teams to underachieve intentionally in the regular season too, so I don't know how much you can say their inferior record means they were worse.

Once the Giants lost two of three to the Dodgers in mid-September, they spent the final two weeks getting healthy and rested and going 6-7 with a steady diet of 40-man roster guys. They even punted the chance at a wild-card home game to make sure they had Bumgarner rested. I don't think they could have caught the Dodgers for the division, but they would have won between 90 and 92 games if that's what it took. You could say the same for the A's.

Pirates and Royals seemed a bit different as they were fighting for division titles until the last day, but even they weren't going to go hog-wild and wear down anyone physically to win an extra game or two.

 

From April 23 to June 8 this year, the Giants went 31-11 (.738)

Were they just wired to play especially well on those dates? Or were they a good team that got hot for an extended period?

 

They had Morse, Pagan and Cain; and they played the great majority of their games against non-playoff teams. (Against future playoff teams, they were 7-4.)

 

Underachieve intentionally? The Giants can play with themselves for four or five months- competing in the junior varsity NL West- and give Brandon Hicks/Joaquin Arias 400-plus ABs (along with a Dan Uggla tryout and Marco Scutaro audition at 38) ... and still know they will get into the playoffs. That's what the reg season means to the Giants.