Regarding the Esquire article, we were discussing the same thing at Purple Row. I think I'll just copy and paste my post from over there:

Well, the headline is 'Sox Win! Phillies Lose.'

I think that's all you need to read to know that it's going to be east coast centric. The next blog post is, 'Cubs lose a close one'. He mentions the outcomes in terms of the Phillies, Red Sox and Cubs; as if the Rockies, Angels and Dbacks had nothing to do with any of it.

Idiotic media. And now they get to pay, by having to watch an all-unknown NLCS.

DbacksSkins... I hail from here and here.
by SouthByTheBorder on Mon Oct 08, 2007 at 01:32:41 AM PDT
[ Parent | Reply to This ]

Let's go, Dbacks. Heck, now that the Rockies are the other NLCS team, we're still getting no respect.

We won the NL West for a reason, dipshits.

I hope to come back later and really go into more detail with this -- on Esquire.com, there is less opportunity to really go in-depth and get the nuance of some issues, both because of length and audience.  There is a very interesting debate in this -- though I hope you can drop the stupid "flip-flop" references.  I have not flip-flopped, and it's a cheap debating trick, beneath both of us.

For now, I just want to clear up a few misconceptions.

1. Scott and I are both from the Cleveland area.  You may enjoy dismissing criticisms as East Coast bias, but it doesn't make any sense in our case.
2. Scott and I are not the same person.  He's saying some stuff, and I'm saying other stuff.  It's clearly marked -- another sign that we have some "critics" who don't actually read what we wrote.  I won't defend everything he wrote, but I would defend some of it.
3. I picked the Rockies, even though I now live in Philadelphia and somewhat root for the Phillies.  (How's that for bias?)
4. Scott also picked the Rockies -- again, did the critics even read any of what we wrote?
5. I never said the D'backs were boring, even though the excerpt above makes it look like I did.  That part about feeling drowsy was not about the D'backs, it was about the constant, same-old national TV coverage of the Cubs that I expected to see.  (Again, go read the article, you'll see.)
6. Just for the record, I started talking favorably about the D'backs in my very next post.  I made a point of not making a pick, but I would have picked them.  It was, in fact, the first substantive thing I said about either team.

I like the Diamondbacks lineup. It's fun to watch a young, talented team, because there's an X-factor in not knowing if they're developing right there in front of you. (That also makes them harder to scout.) Young, Drew and Reynolds could all be great players, even if they're not yet, and they all showed signs of maturing as hitters over the course of the season. Granted, you kind of have to squint to see it in Drew's case, but it's there.

Maybe some other "mainstream writer" also made those observations, but I never saw them anywhere.

7. I hate big-payroll rent-a-player teams -- probably a lot more than you.  Geez, I'm an Indians fan, we're playing the Yankees, do you really have to ask whether I'd root for the D'backs or Cubs?  Think about it.

My final comment for the moment is that I know we have the best possible NLCS matchup ahead of us now, and as a fan, that pleases me a great deal.

Rockies, Dbacks see similarities (AP)
Dbacks, Rockies no strangers (Republic)
'Faceless' Dbacks glitter in spotlight (Republic)
Melvin has faith in rookies (MLB.com)

NLCS schedule, times TBD but Piecoro reports the time of Game 1 is 5/5:30 and Game 2 is 1pm (WTF?)

It depends what question you're asking, what you're  assessing; what level of measurable, reproducible "good" you're talking about. Jim, you often say the only thing that matters is the final W/L. And, at the most basic, important, recognizable, "fan" level, you're absolutely right. The team with the most wins, by definition, is "the best."

But, the issue of whether this W/L record results primarily from intelligent design or  happenstance is a different question, one with a less  self-evident answer.

On the one hand, this team exhibits many qualities that may enable it to "beat" Pythagoras somewhat.  They cant create alot of runs, but they can steal a base and manufacture the one run that wins a game. And they shut off oppenents' running game well. Obviously the pen is great, which provides pythagorean leverage. Maybe Josh stockpiling innings eating starters has something to do with it - I'm open to all that. But the problem at the end of the day is this: Even if one gives Josh and Bob Melvin all the credit in the world for the above construction and resource utilization, no GM that I know of goes into preseason saying, "Our plan is to get outscored by our opponents yet by shoring up the bullpen, improving the running game, etc, we'll manage our negative differential so well that we'll make a run at the pennant, have the league's best record, etc.

Nobody does that. As far as I know, nobody does that because it doesnt make any sense. It may "happen", but as a "plan", it doesnt work.  

There's a great deal of historical evidence that luck has played some role here, and reasserting this year's W/L record doesnt disprove that, so much as change the "question" - back to the one with the self evident answer.

P.S. Enjoy the playoffs :-)

Throw out the stats, look at this fact. The Diamondbacks play in the best division in baseball. From A(rizona) to Z(ito) the NL West is stacked with great pitching and tough hitting ballparks. The Cubs and Phillies were lucky that Bud Selig allowed them to participate in the playoffs. The Padres could have swept either team and the Dodgers probably would have taken them in five. The top pitchers in the National League when you look at ERA and Wins was Webb, Peavy, Penny, Zambrano, and Francis.

The top two teams in the National League are playing each other in the NLCS, how often does that really happen?

It strikes me as ironic in a sport where the only result is a win or a loss that there can be so much debate as to the statistics involved....

To my knowledge the most common mantra in all of sport is 'we're taking each day as it comes' if a closer blows a save he thinks about 'the next game'

If such things are true, then why does it matter what happened yesterday,last week, two weeks ago or 161 games ago? If you win that day then guess what you're the best team on the field. The D-Backs were the best team on the field in 90 games that they played this season. Every other team in baseball had the same number of games to win 90 and in the National League nobody else did that.

For me at least that's all that matters however the heck you got to the postseason you made it and you DESERVE to be there.

Whether you're Wimbledon playing long ball football or Liverpool who play some skillfull classy football, any team can win on the day (for reference see 1988 F.A Cup Final) Yes 'on paper' the Diamondbacks shouldn't win 90 games. On paper alot of things should happen....

Just remember that a win is a win, theres no such thing as 'bonus points' or a 'quality win' perhaps these things can be added in the future? heck why not put a target into centre field that if you hit you get 3 bonus wins and you're player is alowed to run 6 bases then the other team loses 2 wins. But that's not the game of baseball and the league rules the Diamondbacks played in.

Rant over.... ;)

First, nobody ever said the Pyth method is perfectly predictive or perfectly constructed.  It makes no attempt to account for the effects of an unusually well leveraged bullpen.  It makes no attempt to account for marginally "unimportant" runs in blowouts.  I don't even know if it really should attempt these things, I just know that it doesn't, and those things do matter.

And let's also not forget, there is some luck (sorry, "timing") involved in the raw runs scored/allowed numbers, too, and even in the raw plate appearance stats used for "equivalent runs" and the like, and of course in one-run games.

Second, there is a specific reason that we know that Pyth record is a real indicator of how "good" a team is, and that is its predictive power compared to win-loss record.  That is, if you want to predict your team's actual record next season, their Pyth record this season is a more accurate predictor than their actual record this season.  That is, the correlation is higher.

And by the same token, the research shows that no team exhibits an ability to "beat Pythagoras" on a consistent basis.  That is to say, there is no evidence that it is an actual skill, or an actual sum of attributes of a team.  I know that the D'backs have beat Pythagoras pretty good two years out of the last three, and as it happens, the Indians have gotten beat two of the last three.  Unsurprisingly, fans of both teams have scrambled to try to figure out why, to say, as one user above has, that it's time to get a new f'ing theory.  But nobody's found a "why" that holds up to any scrutiny.  It really might just be a fluke.

As a fun aside, a post above bragged about how many more wins the D'backs' divisional rivals had compared to the Indians' divisional rivals.  The reason the Indians' rivals don't have as many wins because the Indians crushed those rivals head-to-head.  That is, the Indians' rivals went 24 games under .500 against the Indians, while the D'backs rivals went exactly .500 against the D'backs.  I'm not even saying that's better or worse for one team or the other, because both teams had to get their wins somewhere, I just though it was kind of funny.

As another aside, the contention that the run differential was run up early in the year "before our pitching was set" is just false.  In April and May, they went 32-23 while outscoring opponents 239-224, which suggested they had gotten just a little lucky.  June and July were more jarring, 27-26 and 207-249.  I mean ... wow.

But August was the height of this, far beyond anything earlier in the season:  they went 16-12 while being outscored 127-141.  Over a full season, that's like going 93-69 while being outscored by 81 runs -- 735-816.  Three worst games: 5-34 = -29.  Three best games: 27-10 = +17.  Throw those six games out and you get a 13-9 record and a 95-97 score.  They were also 6-1 in one-run games that month.

Now we get to the lucky vs. timely thing.  I actually don't like the "lucky" tag, though I can't seem to stop using it.  When statheads throw this out, what they generally are referring to is a situation where we have not yet quantified any specific cause for the trend other than randomness.  That doesn't mean that there isn't a specific cause, it just means we haven't found one.  Realistically, at this point, it means it's probably luck, but it isn't definitely luck.

Bill James himself has written about this, and not without controversy.  He wrote, basically, that we can't prove clutch hitting exists, but that we also can't prove that it doesn't exist -- and we probably never will.  The data is just too noisy, there are too many other factors to isolate clutchness.  He was talking about individuals, but it might as well be said about teams, too.

And that's where I get off.  I can't tell you that the D'backs aren't heroic or clutch or timely, only that my understanding of the numbers historically is that they won't be able to keep it up.  That is, they can't keep beating Pythagoras forever, but as I wrote for Esquire, they're likely to keep winning by simply simply improving their raw production.

Because, you know, they're so young and talented.  And interesting.