This piece is from today's NYT. Enjoy, baseball fans.ON Oct. 3, the first day of baseball’s playoffs, a columnist for The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Bob Rybarczyk, wrote that he was looking forward to the St. Louis Cardinals’ impending postseason “much like a green-legged Civil War soldier watches the guy walking around with the saw.” He was hardly alone. The team’s September run to the postseason involved losing seven in a row, nearly completing the worst regular-season collapse in baseball history.
Sure, the epic scope of the implosion — if an implosion can have epic scope — was unexpected, but I, along with every other Cardinals fan, knew they never deserved to be in first place anyway. Plagued by injuries, poor roster decisions and an odd tendency to allow Sidney Ponson to pitch, the Cardinals were an average team.
When the Birds finally clinched their division on the season’s final day — fittingly, after a game they lost 5-3 — Cardinals fans found themselves dreading the postseason. I just hoped they’d at least lose quickly before anybody noticed they were there.
That was a mistake. The Cardinals blew past the Padres in the first round and have terrified the mighty Mets in a sloppy league championship series. But how? Did they learn new skills on the flight from St. Louis to San Diego? What happened? As it turns out, not much. The Cardinals weren’t good during the regular season, and they’re not good now. And — sorry, Mets fans — it doesn’t matter.
The frustrating beauty of baseball is that you can never trust what you’re watching. Any hitter can have a 4-for-4 day if everything breaks right; you have to build a team that ignores the daily randomness and simply compiles the raw numbers that lead to bulk wins over the course of the season. General manager Billy Beane of the Oakland A’s, innovator of the famously subversive “moneyball” method of building a roster, lamented that his approach “doesn’t work in the playoffs.” He was right, but not in the way most people understood him. It’s not that his approach in particular didn’t work; it’s that nobody’s does. It’s almost entirely luck.
Much is written by statistical analysts about “sample size” in baseball, and the playoffs are the most extreme example. If the Royals, one of the worst teams in baseball, played the American League champion Detroit Tigers in a 10-game postseason series, they’d win at least 3 — probably more. A bad team beating a good team is not particularly difficult, or unusual. Yankees fans can take some solace in this. The Yankees were an outstanding team this year. In the playoffs, though, they ran into three Tigers pitchers who pitched dominant games those particular days. The Yankees didn’t lose because A-Rod wasn’t “clutch” or because Joe Torre forgot how to manage a baseball team or because the Tigers had more “heart.” They lost because the Tigers happened to win three games in a row.
It happens all the time during the regular season. We just don’t notice. Sportswriters say the Tigers “got hot at the right time,” but they weren’t saying that one week earlier, when they lost three at home to the Royals to end the season. Did the Royals just have more heart?
The Cardinals are on the cusp of the World Series, and if they win it, no one will care about September losing streaks. (I know I won’t.) The World Series does not establish the best team; it just compacts 162 games into seven or so frenzied ones. This lottery nature is what makes it so exciting. Ya gotta believe, because you never know when your number’s coming up.
Will Leitch is the editor of Deadspin.com.
