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2014 Playoffs Division Series gameday thread
ericmvan
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Supposed to be working on something more important
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Post by ericmvan on Oct 6, 2014 9:44:13 GMT -5
I added the post-season results so far to my strength-of-schedule-adjusted standings spreadsheet, and the O's are now ahead of the Angels, and the Royals are 3rd.
Somebody should re-do the old playoff "Secret Sauce" studies that were disavowed as being not significant enough. I still think defense and relief pitching are more important than they are in the regular season.
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Post by dominicansoxfan on Oct 6, 2014 10:11:35 GMT -5
Tigers reportedly pulled back their offer of Robie Ray for Miller, and the Orioles ended up with him for Rodriguez. Do you think they wished they had him in their bullpen? Who between the two would you rather have Rodriguez or Ray?
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Post by jmei on Oct 6, 2014 10:36:33 GMT -5
I don't know that Robbie Ray was for sure the headline of that package-- the report you're alluding to just says that the Red Sox asked for "a package of players" and that the Tigers eventually acquiesced, but not before the Orioles agreed to give up Rodriguez.
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Post by jrffam05 on Oct 6, 2014 10:40:46 GMT -5
I added the post-season results so far to my strength-of-schedule-adjusted standings spreadsheet, and the O's are now ahead of the Angels, and the Royals are 3rd. Somebody should re-do the old playoff "Secret Sauce" studies that were disavowed as being not significant enough. I still think defense and relief pitching are more important than they are in the regular season.I agree that relief pichting is more valuable in playoffs, or in higher leverage situations because you loosen the inning management of better relievers in high leverage situations. To make up numbers, I would think that a late inning reliever who projects between 60-70 innings per regular season is probably used at a prorated 110-120 IP frequency in the playoffs. That's just a swag on my part, but I would say the use of the better relievers in the playoffs are probably not sustainable at that rate over an entire regular season. The defense part I can't wrap my head around, or at least I can't understand it yet (maybe someone can explain it to me). My thinking is that a player will have X defensive value, which is only part of the equation that would also include offensive value, baserunning value, other value that would give him an overall value as a baseball player. Now in a broad, general sense, I would say defensive is undervalued, not completely understood, or mis-evaluated(I'd also say similar things about baserunning) but that isn't my argument. I would say that to field the best team is by playing the guys with the best overall value (best per the whole team fielded, not one position). The player who would provide the best value over a large sample size should be the the player who provides the best value over a small sample size. The exception to this is defensive replacements, which I am not trying to argue against. That is because you would have more opportunities to save runs per at bats than you would normally, or in a situation where you are leading a game, preventing runs are just as valuable as scoring runs. Same could go for pitch running.
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Post by pedroelgrande on Oct 6, 2014 15:59:57 GMT -5
Tigers reportedly pulled back their offer of Robie Ray for Miller, and the Orioles ended up with him for Rodriguez. Do you think they wished they had him in their bullpen? Who between the two would you rather have Rodriguez or Ray? I Don't think the Tigers had anyone of Rodrguez' caliber. Pretty sure that's why when the Orioles agreed to give him up the Red Sox went for that.
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Post by James Dunne on Oct 6, 2014 17:31:17 GMT -5
I added the post-season results so far to my strength-of-schedule-adjusted standings spreadsheet, and the O's are now ahead of the Angels, and the Royals are 3rd. Somebody should re-do the old playoff "Secret Sauce" studies that were disavowed as being not significant enough. I still think defense and relief pitching are more important than they are in the regular season. I agree totally. And batting average, too. Playoff teams are generally there because their pitchers do a good job preventing walks and home runs, and there are definitely a class of players who lose less against higher caliber pitchers while others feast more on poor pitching. In general I think those hitters are players with excellent contact skills and bat control, but not always - Mike Napoli is a player I remember you identifying as excelling against high-level pitching and he doesn't really fit that profile.
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Post by jmei on Oct 6, 2014 17:44:21 GMT -5
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Post by soxfanatic on Oct 6, 2014 17:55:54 GMT -5
Again a nail biter in SF.
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Post by philsbosoxfan on Oct 6, 2014 18:06:19 GMT -5
Runners on 1st and 2nd, bunt, just the way they drew it up.
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TearsIn04
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Everybody knows Nelson de la Rosa, but who is Karim Garcia?
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Post by TearsIn04 on Oct 6, 2014 21:41:54 GMT -5
Watching Lackey mow down the Dodgers reminds me why I hated that trade.
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ericmvan
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Supposed to be working on something more important
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Post by ericmvan on Oct 7, 2014 10:46:02 GMT -5
There's no question that, historically, the vast majority of post-season upsets have been by pitching and defense-oriented teams beating more well-rounded teams with a considerably higher RS and only somewhat higher RA. In fact, in regression analyses I did about a decade ago, I had trouble finding a significant effect for regular-season offense. And this is easy to explain by the way quality pitching levels the field or compresses the dynamic range between elite hitting talent and ordinary talent. So I'm also pretty sure that it's not pitching in general that gets favored, but pitchers who have flat splits across the batting order -- but they do tend to be good pitchers with good K rates. With all the data available today, it wouldn't be hard to get those splits for the pitchers who actually started each post-season game in a regression analysis. You could then use the splits of the expected starters, weighted by expected number of starts, in a Special Sauce formula. It also seems to be true that there are hitters who are relatively immune to this effect. If you wanted to factor that in to your Special Sauce formula, it would help to identify them as a group. James' guesses are solid ones, and IIRC are consistent with some examples given by Vince Gennaro at SABR two years ago. A great research project would be to take all the data available (batted ball and plate discipline, etc.) and try to see what predicts regular-season splits by opponent opposition quality. But first we should probably get the latter splits to begin with!
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Post by jmei on Oct 7, 2014 11:16:32 GMT -5
The idea that there are players who feast on bad opponents and struggle against good ones (and vice versa) is certainly is a plausible one, but I've yet to see enough analysis demonstrating that this is a stable skill (stuff like this is a start, but so far it's mostly been descriptive rather than predictive). It's obviously a very complicated and difficult proof (inherently small samples, tons of confounding factors, etc.), and so that may be asking too much, but I'm still slightly skeptical.
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Post by redsoxfan2 on Oct 7, 2014 12:43:22 GMT -5
I guess just pitching doesn't win championships.
Lester got smoked and Detroit got swept trotting out the last three Cy Young award winners in a row. Not to mention Kershaw got hit pretty hard.
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Post by James Dunne on Oct 7, 2014 13:38:44 GMT -5
Except for the times when it does, like with San Francisco in '10 and '12, Chicago in '05, Atlanta in '95 and basically the entire late 1960s and early '70's. Maxims like "X wins champsionships" are never true in baseball. It is a sport that requires many inputs and skills, and you can't win if you do only one of those things well.
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Post by DesignatedForAssignment on Oct 7, 2014 13:40:39 GMT -5
The Mattingly-Grady effect is imaginary? Elbert is an outlier?
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Post by ray88h66 on Oct 7, 2014 15:45:04 GMT -5
I've seen a lot of talk about what this years playoff results mean. Manager's in game skill or lack there of, defense, pitching ect. I think this year shows you do anything you can to get in the playoffs because anything can happen.
Some say they'd rather be really bad than just miss the playoffs. I'll take being in the hunt and just missing out any year. Because some years you will make it and both are better entertainment.
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ericmvan
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Supposed to be working on something more important
Posts: 8,931
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Post by ericmvan on Oct 7, 2014 15:56:43 GMT -5
To change the topic slightly ... I am so looking forward to tonight's broadcast by the crack Fox production team. I love the way that their FoxTrax box looks like it was done by a third grader (with baseballs at least twice the size they would be if drawn to scale) and that the broadcast director apparently knows it's so bad that they almost never use it, even when the batter is complaining about a call. That restores a lot of the mystery that is missing to games broadcast by, say, NESN (who have far deeper resources since they don't have to budget all that time and money to mixed martial arts broadcasts). And Harold Reynolds is some kind of a genius, continually forcing us to reconsider whether the most obvious platitudes or alleged insights that might pop into the brain of the casual fan sitting in a bar are true or not. The cognitive workout that he incites is, IMHO, far more valuable than the mere production of actual facts and insights that are favored by more conventional color men.
Last night's game threw in two new wrinkles that I adored. Twice they just about missed the first pitch of the inning -- how cool is that! Those of us watching the game on delay, and fast-forwarding over the commercial breaks, got a lot of practice with the remote control; I'm sure my button-pressing skills have been permanently sharpened. And I have to toss out kudos to last night's center field camera operator -- I don't know what was up with that, but the picture looked like crap compared to shots from all the other cameras and to the center-field shot of the 5:00 PM game. Too many people take for granted that the quality of their HD picture is entirely the result of their TV and the way it's set up, so I can't tell you how useful it was for me to have just ponied up a wad of cash for a new Samsung plasma and spent hours (with help from AVSForum) calibrating it to the point where the picture is usually jaw-dropping, and nevertheless to have sat there wondering why everything somehow looked both too sharp and lacking in detail.
I also note that Comcast does not carry FoxSports 2, so that if today's 5:00 PM broadcast runs past four hours, many of us won't be able to see the start of the 9:00 PM game. Again, a reminder of how good we used to have it that, well, makes you appreciate just being alive. Ebola victims can't see any part of either game.
I was so impressed by the job Fox is doing that I went and Googled the status of their TV contract with MLB. It's great that they'll be doing the WS through 2017, because ... I guess, because we're all bad people and deserve to be punished. I just in fact spoke to the Pope, who confirmed that Catholic baseball fans who are not immediately going to one of the two other places will have their time in Purgatory significantly reduced. How about that!
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Post by DesignatedForAssignment on Oct 7, 2014 16:56:27 GMT -5
IN game 1, Mattingly had Kershaw at 66 pitches coming to the plate to bat in the 5th after 5 innings of work. Up 6-2, he could have PINCH HIT and planned for game 4 on short rest. Woulda been gutsy. But he stayed with Kershaw ... and stayed ... for 110 pitches, including 29 in that fateful 7th.
And still, Kershaw comes back on short rest.
How will it play out in the next 90 minutes?
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Post by FenwayFanatic on Oct 7, 2014 18:18:01 GMT -5
IN game 1, Mattingly had Kershaw at 66 pitches coming to the plate to bat in the 5th after 5 innings of work. Up 6-2, he could have PINCH HIT and planned for game 4 on short rest. Woulda been gutsy. But he stayed with Kershaw ... and stayed ... for 110 pitches, including 29 in that fateful 7th. And still, Kershaw comes back on short rest. How will it play out in the next 90 minutes? As others have pointed out though, the Dodgers bullpen isn't that great.
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Post by jmei on Oct 7, 2014 18:28:58 GMT -5
UNBELIEVABLE!!!
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Post by James Dunne on Oct 7, 2014 18:37:41 GMT -5
Mattingly deserves to lose for benching Puig, who is a great matchup for Miller and was the Dodgers best hitter all season.
I'd have brought Kershaw out for the seventh though. Absolutely crazy.
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Post by Gwell55 on Oct 7, 2014 18:41:44 GMT -5
Well those "better then Pedro post season Kershaw fellers" better be worrying now as his record can only be worse in the post season not better.
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Post by Oregon Norm on Oct 7, 2014 18:56:48 GMT -5
Just came in from painting on the house. 2-0 when I left, now St. Louis is ahead. I'd ask what happened, but I have a feeling I know the general details.
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TearsIn04
Veteran
Everybody knows Nelson de la Rosa, but who is Karim Garcia?
Posts: 2,835
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Post by TearsIn04 on Oct 7, 2014 19:14:20 GMT -5
Rooting hard against St.L and SF in this PS.
21st century World Series Championship scoreboard:
Boston, 3 SF, 2 St.L, 2
Damn, there's the final out. Dodgers gag it up again. Let's go Nats.
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Post by ethanbein on Oct 7, 2014 19:19:30 GMT -5
I was rooting for Oakland, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Anaheim, Los Angeles, and Washington. It has not been a good postseason for me...
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