DISTRIBUTION OF POST-SEASON RESULTS: ISOLATING THE "CRAPSHOOT"...

SO you've heard the complaints this year about the playoff system going off the rails because many of the teams with more wins than their post-season competitors wound up losing (raise your hands as we call your names: Braves, Orioles, Dodgers, Rays). 

And you've heard the countervailing comments that have been in force for many years before the further "wilding" of the Wild Card team had produced a general feeling of chaos matching what many feel about the world at large. Namely: "the playoffs are a crapshoot." (Joe Sheehan, crusty Baseball Prospectus renegade, is especially vehement--and numbingly repetitive--with respect to this mantra.)

WHAT's missing in all of this, of course, is some kind of empirical data with which to actually assess the situation. (A condition that is shocking but not surprising in the still-blinkered and more-than-occasionally embedded world of baseball media.)

So--as is usually the case--here we are, in Atlas mode, carrying the worldly weight of such tasks squarely on our shoulders...and providing some answers never seen before. Let's get to it...

FIRST, note the summary total (for all post-season games of all types, since the invention of the World Series in 1903). It shows that teams with better records than their opponents (column marked "B") only hold a slightly better than 50% success rate. That percentage was higher in the "pennant era" (1903-68) and the first era of division play, which we call "the championship series era" (1969-93), but has dropped since.

Note that since 2000 this percentage is less than 50% (all such occurrences on this distribution table are shaded in blue).

WE then go on to break down the World Series by length of games. Note that as the number of games in the World Series increases, the likelihood of the team with the better record being the winner declines (from 65.5% in sweeps to just 43.3% in seven-gamers). But note also that this trend is reversing itself  for seven-game series since 1995, which kicked off what we call "the wild card era."

SWEEPS are where the better teams do best at holding their own (with one exception, that we'll look at it later). The World Series sweeps (4/0), now somewhat mixed in with ALCS/NLCS  data, and the old CS format and Division series sweeps (3/0) yield an aggregate success rate for 71% for teams with the better won-loss record. 

When we get into the Division Series' 3/1 and 3/2 subgroups, we see a stark decline: the 3/1 series are only 50/50 for the better team, and the 3/2 series, fueled dramatically by the changed dynamics in the "wild card" era, have been on an excoriating run against the better teams, who've won barely one-fourth of those series since 1995. This is the hidden story of how "the playoffs [became] a crapshoot."

And similarly, in the best-of-3 series (the variants of the more recent "wild card era" approach), the "sweeps" (the 2/0 series results) have thus far pushed against the team with the better record. In the old "one and done" variant of this approach, you can see that the results when broken out in the three categories--better (B), the same (E), and worse (W)--are virtually random.

All of these shorter series are currently running against better teams, who've won only forty percent of the "one and done" and "best of three" series. 

SO this is the structural anatomy of the post-season, and how it's changed as the post-season itself has changed. How this might look in twenty years absent any better system (and readers here know by now that we have several of those, including a new one that we'll discuss here after the World Series) is really anyone's guess, but there's no reason not to think that it will remain reasonably similar to what we see here.

It can be argued that we should break these categories (B/W) into smaller units that show the range of difference; while the sample would be smaller, it might provide some additional nuance. It can also be argued that we should use Pythagorean Winning Percentage for this breakout--and if that data were readily available, we'd do so...but none of the reference sites has seen fit to compile this in an easily accessible framework, and until they do so, we are constrained by time issues from doing so. (If someone provides it to us, however...)

21ST CENTURY POST-SEASON STANDINGS...

YOU may not have seen the data posted below...we'd not thought to retrieve it from the trusty folks at Forman et soeur, but the light bulb finally flickered a bit and managed to stay on. 

It's a summary display form that's probably new to most of you, but don't let it throw you off.

Note that this covers the 21st century only (just in case you're not ready the titles of the posts!) all the way up to this year's Championship series.

Interestingly, the Phillies are still the team with the best overall WPCT amongst teams with a sizable number of post-season games. They're slightly ahead of the Giants and Red Sox, the two franchises with the most World Series wins since 2000. The media has noted the long post-season losing streak of the Minnesota Twins, but we're not aware of anyone posting their overall record, which might actually be more astonishing....

The Yankees have still played in the most post-season games (161), but haven't had much to show for it since 2009. Behind them are the Cardinals (142), Astros (130), and Dodgers (126). 

The Royals remain the great outlier, destroying literally everything in their path whenever they manage to make the post-season, but mostly operating as baseball's resident iceberg. Still, they're not the franchise with the fewest post-season games since 2000: that would be the Pirates (8), followed by the Reds (11), Orioles (17), Rockies (20), Mariners (24),  Padres (25), and White Sox (26). 

We added a few basic rate stats to add a little more spice to things. Note that the Rays are the homer-ingest team by the HR/G measure, but also note that it's not done them much good (no World Series win, and a very middling .438 post-season WPCT). 

HR/G for post-season games since 2000 (1.12) remind us that "launch angle" was with us even before it was a "thing"... but note that the Giants did manage to buck the trend, winning three titles with significantly lower-than-average HR/G rates. (Much of the reason for that would be more evident if we were to run these standings again, but with pitching data--something we may just do after the World Series.)

Both of this year's participants in the World Series have burnished their post-season records sufficiently with their respective run-ups to the Fall Classic to currently be .500+ for their relatively limited number of playoff games (54 for the Rangers, 48 for the Diamondbacks). Odds are high that they'll both still be over .500 after the series, unless someone gets hot and sweeps the other one. 

But let's kibosh that thought and root for a seven-game series, shall we? While the game still has many problems to overcome, it's still far worse when there are no games at all. Let's savor what remains...

MONTHLY PITCHING DATA SPECIAL EDITION: STRENGTH/WEAKNESS INDICATORS FOR POST-SEASON TEAMS

WE'll publish the full season's worth of the monthly team pitching performance data (for both starters and relievers) after the World Series. A smidge of it will appear in this special report, where we look at the best team months for starters and the worst team months for relievers.

Some of this is prompted by the dogged distortions still being compiled by dear old John Clay Davenport, the original mastermind of the Baseball Prospectus "statitude adjustment cadre" (as we used to call it back in the day of BBBA). We recall being temporarily impressed with Davenport's efforts, but a closer look confirmed that it was just another form of reverse engineering that had no added value to our understanding--a feature that, for the most part, has continued in the field of "neo-sabermetrics" as practiced from ca. 1995-2005, then codified with new ideological fervor once these folks had penetrated into the mainstream, and finally overbaked thanks to the monomaniacal brigade marching to the chowdery chiliasms of the Tango Love Pie™.

In this instance, Davenport was quoted by Joe the P. for his eye-rolling "third order standings," which, in this instance, purported to tell us that Clay's centripetal engineering of the Pythagorean Winning Percentage (PWP) contained heretofore hidden insight that the Texas Rangers were the second best team in the AL and really should have won 97 games.

As is almost always the case with Clay, this sounds very impressive until you realize that the original PWP projected the Rangers to win 96 games. But this didn't stop Joe from giving it a ham-fisted place of prominence in his attempt to explain why the Rangers were doing so well in the playoffs, while teams with more actual wins (and fewer "projected" wins) were not.

IT was all "expiration date" glibberish that happens in the baseball media's silly season, but it made us realize that our monthly data--customarily derided by the lock-jawed lock-steppers in the (post)-neosabe world, could give us some actual insight into potential vulnerabilities that might crop up in the short-series mode that defines (and often makes strange) the post-season.

AND so we present the best starting pitching months based on the stat breakouts collated from Forman et soeur's team pitching splits data for 2023. First up is the AL data, which shows us that six playoff teams in the league--O's, Astros, Twins, Rays, Rangers and Jays--all had a least one month where their starters were collectively ten percent better than the league OPS (as measured by OPS+, which here is annotated by bb-ref as sOPS+; remember that since it's pitchers we're examining here, the higher the OPS+ the worse the pitching performance is). 

Oddly, the best team month occurring in the AL in 2023 is the one turned by the Detroit Tigers' starters in September. That could be a harbinger of things to come in 2024, or not--one of their main contributors, Edwin Rodriguez, is a free agent and is unlikely to stay with the Tigers. 

The O's, Twins and Rangers had three "top SP months," while the Rays had two. The Rangers took out the Rays, the Twins took out the Jays, and then the Rangers took out the O's while the Astros--with only one top SP month on us list--eliminated the Twins. (Remember that the Rays were missing their top three SPs in the playoffs due to injury.)

Overall top SP months produce close to a two-out-of-three WPCT for their teams (.656). The embattled Red Sox, who finished last in AL East, had the bad luck of having the only top SP month where the pitchers had a sub-.500 record.

NOW to the NL. Five playoff teams--Braves, Dodgers, Marlins, Brewers and Phillies--had at least one top SP month; the team with the most (Padres, with four) had spotty hitting and a surreal lack of success with their bullpen and missed the playoffs entirely. The Marlins and the Phillies had the best single months from their starters, but the Fish were missing several of those folk in the post-season and Philadelphia prevailed easily. The Brewers' SPs did not carry them in the post-season, and the Diamondbacks (no top SP months at all) pushed past them in the ultra-short Wild Card series. 

The Dodgers, with only one top SP month all year, were also betrayed by their starters, and the Diamondbacks dispatched them as well. After frying the Fish, the Phillies then scalped the Braves (whose pitching was shakier than what its offense-driven 104-win season suggested) thanks to galvanic performances from their 1-2 punch of Zack Wheeler and Aaron Nola (and a widely ballyhooed bullpen ambush in Game One).

So weak/thin SP for the Braves and Dodgers masked by other compensating performances during the regular season spiraled out of control quickly in the post-season. 

NEXT up: the worst relief months. Let's begin with the AL, where we'll see that the large majority of bad bullpen months are found amongst also-rans (seven of the ten teams shown here, with just half of the playoff teams--Astros, Rays and Rangers--represented. 

And so the teams with the most vulnerable bullpens--Rangers (three bad months) and Astros (two bad months) managed to bypass that problem until they met for the right to be in the World Series. 

Bad bullpen months don't always produce catastrophic won-loss results: all three playoff teams were at or above a .500 WPCT from their bullpen in those months where the performance was rough. Astros, Rays and Rangers relievers went 33-32 in those months--the sign of good offensive teams that can overcome bullpen meltdowns.. (But the also-rans combined for a 60-98 record from relievers in bad bullpen months.

Moving to the NL, things are more random in nature. We see five of the six playoff teams with at least one bad bullpen month (Diamondbacks, Braves, Rodgers, Marlins and Brewers. The Fish, who won a ton of one-run games and who had a PWP for the year under .500, did the high-wire act with two bad months that still managed to produced a 21-8 record from their relievers!

That anomaly helps to account for the fact that bad bullpen months show an aggregate WPCT for relievers at not that much under .500 (.474 to be exact).

Ironically, the Phillies, with no bad bullpen months, have started to struggle against the Diamondbacks in the Championship Series because several of their relievers have coughed up leads since the series moved to Arizona.

So in short series, starting pitching seems to track well with success, but even teams with a rock-solid bullpen can turn victory into defeat at a moment when it can be most costly--in a short series where one squandered game make all the difference. 

(That said, we're not quite ready to write off the Phillies. They will, no matter what, get to return home for at least a Game Six; they are very hard to beat at home. The Diamonbacks did pick up a solid closer in Paul Sewald, however, and their bullpen had its best month in September: so things look as though they could remain very unpredictable as we lurch our way to the Fall Classic. Stay tuned...

KERSHAW'S LESS-THAN-AUGUST OCTOBER COMPANY

The word on everyone's lips after watching the Dodgers-Diamondbacks game Saturday evening: Ouch. 

Prescriptive Hall of Famer Clayton Kershaw came out throwing clay pigeons instead of pills, and seven batters later he found himself being wrapped in gauze in the dugout. He did manage to get one batter out, but the other six Arizona batters crossed the plate: it was a macabre continuation of the intermittent horror movie that has so often taken over when Kershaw--so dominant in the regular season--tiptoes into the playoffs.

We're not here to pile on, despite what some might be expecting. We'll just say that the ways of kryptonite are more mysterious than any of us can fathom. Instead, we provide solace and something akin to comfort by placing Kershaw's unfortunate meltdown in historical context.

You are invited to feast (or shield) your eyes from the chart below, which lists (with thanks, as usual, to Forman et soeur) all 39 post-season starts in which the pitcher recorded either no outs or one out...

You may be surprised to discover that the record of the teams whose pitchers made such quick and unceremonious exits isn't quite as catastrophic as one would expect: 10-29, which is just as respectable as the 1962 New York Mets. (So: horrible, but not unmentionable.)

Pitchers in the 21st century with such ultra-short starts (eleven in all) are shown in red type.

There are some extremely short starts here, and it's possible that some enterprising expert on the post-season has documented why such pitchers as Curly Ogden, Wade Miley, John Thomson and Johnny Cueto were such spectacular first-inning blips. (Injury is, of course, the most likely answer.)

As you might have suspected, there are no other Hall of Fame pitchers on the list aside from Kershaw. Arguments could be made on behalf of Dwight Gooden having possessed Hall of Fame-level talent, but Gooden's early flameout in the 1998 ALDS occurred long past the time when folks talked about him in hushed tones.

The worst first-inning performance that a team was able to overcome and win the game anyway: the Pirates' Vic Aldridge, in Game Seven of the 1925 World Series. 

The worst start from an ethical standpoint: Lefty Williams' infamous tank job in Game Eight of the haunted 1919 World Series.

The only time that there were two such first-inning flameouts in the same World Series happened in 1960, when the Yankees' Art Ditmar and the Pirates' Vinegar Bend Mizell swapped stinkeroos in the early stages of one of the most wild & woolly Fall Classics ever. 

[ODD NOTE: Bill James' Game Score method, shown in the second-from-left column, goes a bit goofy with such short starts. Recall that it starts off with a score of 50 and moves up and down from there: it just doesn't get enough data to move the needle as far as we might think. Let's note, however, that Kershaw's score--14, which should probably be translated to -36 for the purposes of its actual game impact--is the worst out of all the 39 "brief encounters" shown here.]

Let's close with some small amount of solace for Kershaw. His six runs allowed in a third of an inning was not the absolute worst performance of its kind in the post-season.  In 2019, Mike Foltynewicz and Dakota Hudson each allowed seven runs in the same brief but brutal span. In their cases, however, there were errors behind them that contributed to their early demise.

Will we see another of these meltdowns in the current post-season? As we just saw, there were two in 2019, and two last year (Aaron Civale and Mike Clevinger). Remember, the post-season is still just getting underway...stay tuned.

SWEEPS SWEEP AWAY MEDIA BRAIN CELLS...

THE silly season is upon us again: the dopey, overwrought, amped-up post-season as brought to you by folks who are (heh, heh...) supposed to know better. 

It only took two days for the media to whip itself into "mid-season post-season form," getting all fluttery about the cluster of two-game sweeps in the four best-of-three series that came, saw, and conquered the vanquished before the folks who blather at you for a living could get their wind machines up to eighty percent capacity...

Of course, right in the middle of all this, with blather left over from his ceaseless, tedious, tiresome, tendentious (...) plugging of his new book, was Joe the P., making large out of small (sometimes a good thing, but rarely in his hands...). Ol' Poser Joe was mesmerized by the collapse of the Rays and the Brewers--as if these teams haven't shown some propensity for quick exits in the post-season in their recent appearances. (You forgot to make those windmill noises when you look things up, Joe baby: you were too busy hyperventilating.)

Likewise for the Toronto Blue Jays, who have made a career of late out of underperforming--why the heck wouldn't they extend such a tradition into the post-season? 

Let's make large out of small just like the paid idiots...during the regular season, the Rays had trouble with the Rangers, losing four of six from them. Add to the fact that the Rays were missing their two best starting pitchers and their starting middle infield, and one could figure that they might be vulnerable in such a situation. The irony here, not reported on in the media--all too busy hyperventilating, natch)--is that the Rangers' #3 and #4 starting pitcher pickups in terms of name and reputation--Jordan Montgomery and Nathan Eovaldi--are the ones who throttled the Rays, not Jacob deGrom and Max Scherzer. (And let's be honest--a best of three series is a lousy idea to begin with--teams deserve a bit more latitude than that after churning away for six months.)

Likewise with the Brewers, who lost four of six from the Diamondbacks. The Jays split six games with the Twins--but, just like the Rays, they left their bats elsewhere. 

And the Marlins were fishy from the get-go, with their bizarre success in one-run games and long possum-play in the middle of the season. Even though they'd held their own against the Phillies during the regular season, the world of baseball was hardly surprised when the Fish were washed up on the shores of the Delaware River.

SO what else is behind the rejoinder in our title, anyway? Just how out of touch with the nuances of the post-season are these guys (and gals), anyway? Let us count the ways for you...

First, no one in blowhard media mode bothered to research the history of the post-season to see just how prevalent sweeps actually are. Here, of course, we abhor a vacuum just as much as the next guy (and gal), but we actually do something about it. And so the chart at right tells you what you need to know about three-game sweeps in the pre-World Series portion of the post-season. As you can see, three-game post-season sweeps were fairly common in the early years of divisional play (36%).

THEN there was a caesura (you can call it a "gap," we don't mind...) for a little while when baseball decided to make all of the post-season series into best-of-7 affairs. That lasted until 1995, when the three-division format finally made it into a post-season (thanks so much, Budzilla, for the travesty of 1994...) and another layer of post-season play was created. Sweeps started to decline percentage-wise as a result, and they became scarcer still once the winner-take-all wild card game was introduced in 2012.

So...baseball fans and media folk alike became subliminally conditioned to fewer three-game sweeps, and this is part of why the clustering we just witness has them agog (yes, we've been waiting for a long time to drop that word into play here)...

EXCEPT--we've left out something...something significant that destroys, obliterates, mutilates (even spindles...) that explanation. And what is that shiny, quivering piece of significance?

It's the fact that we've already had twelve best-of-three post-season series during this decade. We had eight of them in the chaos of the 2020 (post-)season: perhaps all of that overkill just collectively wiped away the media's normally elephantine memory banks. For out of those eight best-of-three series, six of them were two-game sweeps.

And it was likewise last year, during the first implementation of this funky new format. There were four best-of-three series played this time last year (i.e., 2022)--and three of those were two-game sweeps.

OK, kiddies, let's add that up, shall we? We've had twelve best-of-three post-series, and nine of them were two-game sweeps--that's 75% of them for those of you playing along at home--and the pundits are (yes...) agog when we have four such two-game sweeps to start things off this year??

So now, let's add things up again, shall we? Now we've had a total of sixteen best-of-three post-game series, of which thirteen have resulted in sweeps. That's 81%.

Why are these chuckleheads so surprised? Is it because they're chuckleheads? 

Or are we just being too kind...we'll let you decide.