WORLD SERIES TEAMS WITH SUB-.500 ROAD RECORDS...

THIS is most likely our last post for 2023, with the early part of '24 certain to bring us the chess/checkers machinations of present-day GMs and the ongoing loopiness of the Hall of Fame voting process.

And for a swan song we have something relevant from the '23 season itself--the seventh occurrence of a phenomenon that, in this instance at least, is overlain with irony (fear not, we'll explain that reference eventually)...

Just what are we talking about--seventh son of a seventh son, or something like that? No, it's not some antediluvian mumbo-jumbo: it's simply the seventh time that a team winning the World Series did so despite having a losing record in road games during the regular season.

A total of twenty-three teams have won league pennants while playing sub-.500 baseball on the road, as the chart at right will show you. Only 21 of those are relevant to the World Series, however, since the 1902 A's and the 1914 Indianapolis Hoosiers (Federal League) had no World Series in which to participate.

So that means that one of every three teams to win a pennant with a sub-.500 record in road games has gone on to win the World Series.

AND the most recent team to do so: the 2023 Texas Rangers--who, in the height of irony, achieved their post-season feat by winning all of their post-season road games.

As you can see, most of these teams were just barely "in the red" with respect to their road record--14 of the 21 teams who played in the WS had a road WPCT of .481-.494. The two WS champs who were truly sub-par road teams are shown right up at the top--the 1987 Minnesota Twins (29-52) and the 2006 St. Louis Cardinals (34-47). 

We've never had teams face off in the World Series who both had sub-.500 road WPCTs, but we came close this past year: the Arizona Diamondbacks had a 41-40 record in road games. That combined road record of 81-81 isn't the lowest of all time for World Series opponents, however: such would be found in 1987, thanks to the woeful road record of Twins. Combining their 29-52 with the 1987 Cardinals' 46-35 mark, we get a combined road won-loss record of 75-87 for that World Series--which was the first World Series where the teams won all of their home games.

One last graphic on this--one of our TimeGrid™ charts (at left) showing the evolution of this phenomenon. As you might expect, most of these occurrences have happened since divisional play began, with an added acceleration during the Wild Card Era.

The greatest preponderance for this (thus far, at least) occurred during the 2000s, when it happened six times, including four in a row from 2005-08; it's also the only decade where two sub-.500 road record teams won the Series.

OTHERNESS & THE OMINOUS IN OHTANI OMNIVOROUSNESS...

THANK God (or whatever "otherly" being you choose to employ...) that the Great Ohtani Sweepstakes farce is over...we call it "farce" because it seems abundantly clear that all of the other teams involved in the process were always on the outside looking in at a done deal with the Dodgers that, in truth, was mooted for many months. 

As a left-coast denizen, BBB is cheered by the notion that the East Coast media will continue to have to genuflect in a "pacific direction" for as long as Ohtani is the "Great Other" in all the dimensions that he's come to embody for baseball and for the roiling rodomontade that is American culture in the 2020s, the most repercussive decade in America since the 1960s and the 1850s. 

We are not particularly sanguine about the Dodger deal and its overall outcome, however. It's clear that the LA brain trust is looking to create the Greatest Team Money Can Buy (GTMCB), an endeavor as unwieldy as its acronym is unpronounceable. Ohtani's pent-up desire for "world domination" (aka a World Series win) has created a bowling alley worth of lanes for the Dodgers to "de-tax and spend" in pursuit of a lineup that should not only win 120 games but also manage not to slip on that bar of soap in the "October shower" that has mostly drowned their hopes since 2017.

Brilliant (and lucky) trading and painstaking farm system development used to be the way that teams became competitive over a long period; that model still is viable, but the Dodgers are attempting to turn the clock back to the late 90s and be a left-coast version of the "Evil Empire." Their actions may rouse the sleeping dotards in the Bronx to respond in kind, as they've already begun to do with their acquisition of Juan Soto.

The impossibly chipper and sadly doomed Sarah Langs gave us a great stat that reflects the danger involved in stockpiling seeming insurmountable concentrations of talent, however. She mentions that fact that the 2024 Dodgers will have players who finished 1-2-3 in MVP voting from the previous year (Ohtani #1 in AL, Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman #2 and #3 in the NL). And, indefatigable researcher that she is, she also notes that four other teams had such a situation going for them previously. 

Those teams: 2004 Yankees, 1967 Orioles, 1960 White Sox, 1942 Dodgers.

What Langs fails to note, however, is that while all of these teams were in the World Series during the previous year (only the 1966 O's actually won the World Series), none of these teams made it to the World Series in the years shown above.

The 2024 Dodgers would be the first of such teams to do so--assuming that they can. 

But most of us know, however, what happens when you "assume."

What we have here is a variant of the "unstoppable force" (the Dodger brain trust's pursuit of glory via creative financing and hubris) and "immovable object" (the odd wrinkles in the fabric of the game as played on the field) that will collide head-on next year. There is an ominous undercurrent at work here, a fault line that is waiting to emerge--will it manifest itself and foil the aspirations of the would-be empire builders? Or will the game's variant of the teetering concept of "no one is above the law" fall in the dominoes threatening the degraded form of democracy that still hangs by a thread here in the "land of the free"...? And who of us will be "happy" with whichever outcome prevails?

Stay tuned...

2024 HALL OF FAME BALLOT: TEN (MINUS TWO)

IT was a very hectic non-baseball month here once the "final fizzle" came and went like a leaky balloon: we've spent much time on our non-baseball book and the now-ongoing French noir festival (capped by the anguish of Bernard Blier as he stares into a slowly-evolving abyss in THE SEVENTH JUROR, which plays on December 4 as the last salvo in this year's lucky thirteen shots in the dark: should you be interesting in learning more, go here).

We did notice, however, that there are rumblings underway about the upcoming Hall of Fame election: ballots are out to all of those "eligible voters" (may several of them rest in peace...) and the results, such as they will prove to be, will be announced on January 23rd. Two high-profile candidates (Adrian Beltre and Joe Mauer) will make their first appearance on the ballot: we'll discuss their respective chances for induction shortly.

At the social media swamp formerly known as Twitter, the HOF Tracker crew posted a ballot sure to provoke widespread derision, as it contains only two selections from the (mercifully anonymous) voter--who is nothing if not "up to date," since he/she has voted only for the two "hot-shot" new candidates. 

Since we know that folks these days want their information compressed (folded, spindled, etc.), we seized upon this opportunity to use the image to convey our picks--if the BBWAA was reckless enough to grant us a vote, that is.  

Note that we are indeed voting for Beltre and Mauer, who represent high-quality players at positions which remain under-represented in Cooperstown. 

We are also not voting again this year for either Carlos Beltran and Andruw Jones. The former is, in our estimation, a worthy candidate, but we're voting tactically here, preferring to send votes to Bobby Abreu, whose case is (in our minds at least) at least as deserving and who is not drawing the type of support he warrants. We can only hope for a stall in the "quant quackery" driving the voting surge for Jones, who is to the "silly saberist" cabal what Jack Morris was to the dying curmudgeons of the old BBWAA. Morris was subsequently shoved into the Hall via the side door, and that should also be the case for Jones as well. 

Meanwhile, three far more deserving candidates--Alex Rodriguez, Gary Sheffield and Manny Ramirez--will continue to struggle on the thorny vine of non-objective voter behavior, with Sheffield needing a serious boost in his final year on the ballot to make it in via the front door. 

We continue to cast votes for Todd Helton and Billy Wagner, hoping that both of them will get over the line in January, after which we suspect they'll accompany Beltre to the dais during 2024's induction ceremony. We expect Mauer to come up a bit short in his first time on the ballot, but we figure he'll likely make it in either 2025 or 2026. 

Folks might raise eyebrows over a pick for Andy Pettitte, but this is a solid choice when we consider that this is someone who pitched much of his career in an era of heightened offense. 

And finally, our tenth pick is another first-timer on the ballot, Chase Utley, who needs votes to stay in contention over the ten-year ballot period. Utley stands in for fellows like Lou Whitaker, Bobby Grich, Larry Doyle and Jeff Kent, all of whom should be in the Hall of Fame but aren't. We figure he'll get 20-25% of the vote this time, and then the question will be if some interest group decides to turn their neon crowdsourcing shenanigans loose for him--in this case, such tactics would be fully warranted.

SO there you have it. We have fifty-six days to wait for the official results, but we'll do what we can in that time frame to distract you...stay tuned.

SNAKES RATTLED, FALL INTO 5-GAME WORLD SERIES GHETTO

AN unorthodox World Series featuring two Wild Card teams began with great promise in Texas last week, with the Rangers and the Diamondbacks splitting two games with intriguingly different tonalities and setting up what appeared to be a compelling "punch-counterpunch" rhythm. 

But then the teams moved to Arizona, and that scenario swiftly fell apart, with the Diamondbacks' pesky offense suddenly sputtering in Game Three, followed by a catastrophic "bullpen game" whose 11-7 score was lucky only for the Rangers, and then...

AND then a Game Five where the Snakes were clearly rattled by their inability to score anyone despite five consecutive innings in which they had runners in scoring position. Their ace starter Zac Gallen was pitching a no-hitter, but Arizona's inability to take control of the game cast a pall over the proceedings that swiftly took on inevitable dimensions. The Rangers, working on a remarkable road winning streak, finally broke through against Gallen in the seventh, and the hissing sound that had become progressively more audible was not from the D-backs (no "snaking" back into the game forthcoming) but instead the sound of air leaking out of any and all receptacles--tires, balloons, and several orifices (not) to be named later.

Snakes' closer Paul Sewald, acquired in mid-season to reinvent the top end of the Arizona bullpen, delivered the coup de grace when he allowed four runs in the ninth, dooming the D-backs to a place in the lower depths of World Series history: the ghetto of the five-game series. 

IT is now an architectural archipelago with twenty-seven separate buildings, housing 135 games in all--108 of which were won by the World Champions, and only 27 by the D-back's luckless brethren--exactly one win apiece for 27 teams who simply fell on their swords. 

Very few five-game series are memorable, unless they are upsets: the ones that qualify include those played in 1969 (Mets over Orioles), 1988 (Dodgers over A's), and arguably 1942 (up and coming Cardinal dynasty shocks the Yankee dynasty). 

The sense of deflation that occurs in a five-game series can be seen in the results when we quantify wins/losses on a game-by-game basis. Simply put, an event horizon just clicks into place in Game Four which pushes things inexorably in the direction of the winning team. The aggregate record in Games Four & Five of a five-game series is as starkly dominating as you can get without an outright sweep: 54 wins for the eventual champ, vs. just three for the eventual chump.

THERE are some mildly interesting sub-patterns that emerge in the constricted world of the five-game series, which we'll briefly examine. The Snakes' pattern (splitting on the road, swept at home) has happened only three times previously, all of them involving the Yankees as the winning team (1941, downing the Dodgers; 1949, rinsing and repeating with Brooklyn; and 1961, ripping the Reds a new one in their home park). 

Another dramatic pattern--drop the first game and win four straight--has also happened only four times: in 1915 (Red Sox over Phillies), 1942 (Cards over the Yankees), 1969 (Mets shock the O's and the world), and 1983 (O's take to the Phillies). 

Rarer still is the "win first three, drop Game Four, win Game Five" scenario--shared only by the 1910 Philadelphia A's, the 1937 Yankees, and the 1970 Orioles. 

Nine teams have won the first two games, lost the third, and won the last two--we'll let you pick those out for yourself from the table above. 

BUT these sub-patterns don't really deflect us from the fact that the five-game World Series is just a collection point for an escalating (and simultaneously deflating) sense of lost opportunity. The teams that win and their fan base are, of course, extremely happy, but years later they're likely to have a much fuzzier sense of how and why their teams won. That's because the win came a bit too easily: the sense of competition has been stunted, leaving a mental wasteland that is inextricably intertwined with the desiccated landscape of the "five-game ghetto."

It's been five years since the most recent five-game series; the longest span of time between such series is thirteen years (1916 to 1929). That sounds about right: let's cross fingers that we don't see another one until at least 2036...

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.