Thanks to a couple of elimination-game victories last night by both Bay Area representatives in the playoffs, (more on the Giants/Reds extra-inning affair below) it’s not too late to play, in the spirit of TMZ, baseball's version of Who’d You Rather, or in this case Who’d You Rather Have as Your Closer? Here are the traditional and most recognizable 2012 statistics for this year’s post-season closers:
The Yankees finished the year with a lower batting average and slugging percentage with men on base than with the bases empty – reverse splits compared to the rest of the league. With the bases loaded, it was even worse; a Yankees batter with the bases loaded had a lower chance of getting on base (.290 vs. 293) than a Houston Astros batter did coming to the plate with the bases empty. Talk radio hosts, irate fans, and armchair psychologists all have reasons for Yankees failings this year in these situations. I simply dismiss it as random sequencing that fell on the unhappy side of luck. If the Orioles feel differently, they’re free to load the bases all series against a stacked line up and see where that gets them.
The Reds have defied objective analysis all season. With just 669 runs scored – just less than the Phillies and just more than the Mets (!) – they enter the post-season as the lowest scoring team in the playoffs. That is not how you picture a Reds team with Joey Votto, Jay Bruce, Brandon Phillips, et al, playing half its games in the friendliest home run environment in the National League (ex-Colorado, but a sentence with that phrasing is always ex-Colorado), challenging Washington for the best record in the National League until the last day of the season.
After the Rangers dropped Game 6 of the 2011 World Series, I had a lot of fun putting together a list of baseball games that fit the “Dead Man Walking” criteria Bill Simmons defined years ago in his seminal column on the Levels of Losing. There has never been a Wild Card, one-and-done playoff format before, so we’re all free to play psychologist for a day and take a guess at what effect blowing the AL West title will have on the Rangers. (Best tweet I saw yesterday: “The U.S. Ryder Cup team is impressed with the Rangers collapse.”)
On the eve of the beginning of the 2012 playoffs, let’s remind ourselves what it means to win MLB’s version of a post-season tournament. If you were to ascribe ‘superior skill’ as the factor most responsible for the victorious side’s triumph over its opponent, here is a list of activities/games, displayed in order of ‘superior skill’ importance: (By implication, I’m assigning 100% skill-based achievement to the top of the list and 0% skill-based to the bottom.)
Joe Peta