MLB 2015 Season

Blitz

Blitz

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Love the Chapman filter!

Bird is the word,Yankees promote first base prospect Greg Bird to the?*majors - Pinstripe Alley. He has hit everywhere he has been, that's always a good sign. Yanks bats have definitely tired down the stretch... Was really hoping Iwakuma was going to be available for trade, for the exact reason he showed last night (although pitching hasn't been the issue).

On the 15 home teams win thing, only in baseball can you have a day go by and shit happens you haven't seen in the previous 120+ years.
 
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Pyratec

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Sterling_sl said:
Including sweeping the Yankees and winning 3 of 4 against the Royals. That's legit.
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Sweeping the Yankees in New York no less. Pretty hard not to get excited as a Jays fan right now, everything looks so good, but I'm sill waiting for the wheels to come off. First time the Blue Jays have been in first place past April since October 3rd, 1993, I'm just going to enjoy this ride while it lasts.
 
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Profundis

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If I'm any AL team, that Toronto line up is the last thing I want to see in the playoffs.

On an unrelated note, the KC bullpen sure picked a hell of a time to shit the bed. KC had won something ridiculous like 111 games in a row when leading after 7 innings until Wednesday night. I guess I can take consolation in the fact that the Angels have been just as bad as the Astros on the road.
 
Blitz

Blitz

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Jays are a really loaded team, and that division is going to be really hard for the Yanks to win with what they have added. Hope is that the bats wake up sooner than later, one game playoffs are great to watch, but not much fun being a part of.
 
Ritley

Ritley

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Profundis_sl said:
If I'm any AL team, that Toronto line up is the last thing I want to see in the playoffs.

On an unrelated note, the KC bullpen sure picked a hell of a time to shit the bed. KC had won something ridiculous like 111 games in a row when leading after 7 innings until Wednesday night. I guess I can take consolation in the fact that the Angels have been just as bad as the Astros on the road.
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To be fair, in the game that broke the streak it wasn't their bullpen. The starter was he one who gave up the runs in the 8th.

Yesterday was all bullpen however.
 
Muurloen

Muurloen

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Yeah those Giants teams over the last 5 years have been terrible at pitching when facing the likes of the Tigers, Royals, Rangers.
rolleyes.png
 
Slaythe

Slaythe

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Yes. World Series winning teams have good pitching. That wasn't what you said though.

Ben Lindbergh_sl said:
It's possible there's something to the "pitching wins pennants" hypothesis, but if so, it's hard to see it in the stats. In 2012, Colin Wyers - then the director of research at Baseball Prospectus, now a "mathematical modeler" for the Astros2 - and I looked for evidence that teams with strong no. 1 starters outperformed expectations in the playoffs. We identified the ace of each playoff team from 1995 to 2011, rated each one using a normalized measure of ace-hood, and then checked for any correlation between the strength of each ace and the difference between his team's regular-season and postseason winning percentages. There wasn't one, which suggests that once you know a team's regular-season record, knowing how good its best pitcher is doesn't add any predictive power. Nor could Colin find any evidence of an effect after rerunning the analysis using the entirety of a team's playoff rotation instead of its ace alone.

For this article, I enlisted the aid of Russell Carleton, a Baseball Prospectus analyst whom the Astros haven't (yet) hired, to perform a variation of the analysis Colin and I did in 2012. For each playoff series from 1969 to 2012, Russell calculated the probability (based solely on regular-season records) that each team would win a single game3 and, from there, the probability that each team would prevail in the series.4

Russell found that regular-season records were a significant predictor of postseason success.5 In other words, while playoff results are highly variable, they aren't completely random: In any given five- or seven-game series, the better team can easily lose, but over a large sample of such series, team quality does tend to win out.

The next step was to see whether, for the purpose of predicting postseason results, every .600 (or .580, or .560, or .540) team is alike, or whether having good starting pitching adds an extra advantage. Russell examined the first three pitchers who started for each team in each series.6 He also looked at Game 1 starters only. No indicator of the quality of those starters (strikeout rate, walk rate, home run rate, ground ball rate, linear weights) proved to be a significant predictor of a team's postseason success, after controlling for that club's regular-season record.7

So why doesn't the quality of a team's top three starters or its ace register as significant? For one thing, the differences between teams are compressed in the playoffs, relative to the regular season: Teams with terrible staffs don't make it to October, so the gulf between the best- and worst-pitching playoff teams isn't as stark as we're used to seeing during the season's first six months. Perhaps more importantly, there's more than one way to win baseball games, and even under an expanded playoff format, teams don't get to October without doing something well. A team with an inferior pitching staff often makes up for its weakness on the mound by being better on offense.
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I end up in this same argument in the NFL thread come playoff time every year too. Defense doesn't win championships, good teams do. It's the same in baseball with pitching. There's just nothing to back up the claim and the reason people think otherwise is complete observation bias.
 
Muurloen

Muurloen

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LOL the whole Divisional and National League Pennant dominance by the 90's-2005 Braves was all on the arms of Maddux, Glavine, and Smoltz. Get the fuck outta here.
 
Sterling

Sterling

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Muurloen_sl said:
LOL the whole Divisional and National League Pennant dominance by the 90's-2005 Braves was all on the arms of Maddux, Glavine, and Smoltz. Get the fuck outta here.
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And if it was just about pitching they would have won like 8 World Series with that rotation but they won 1. It's more about being balanced and getting hot at the right time. You can't be complete dogshit on the mound and win regularly, but the best pitching staff doesn't win every championship.
 
Muurloen

Muurloen

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I can agree with that, but if I had a choice of gambling with getting hot with the bats or having consistent good pitching through out a series, I will always choose good starting pitching.
 
Sterling

Sterling

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Muurloen_sl said:
I can agree with that, but if I had a choice of gambling with getting hot with the bats or having consistent good pitching through out a series, I will always choose good starting pitching.
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Sure. Balance is still better though. Compare those same Braves teams to the late 90s Yankees. Yankees rotation was good, but not as good as the Braves, but they hit a ton and the back of their bullpen was insane. Stanton, Nelson, Rivera. In a long series a pitcher will start generally 2 games sometimes 3 on short rest, but a hitter will impact every game.
 
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