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Baseball: Too Simple A Game to Be Understood

Any writer, from Nobel Prizewinners down to yours truly, would ordinarily be thrilled to have a bylined article in the Sunday New York Times. Mr. Martin B. Schmidt is the exception to the rule. He's out there somewhere this morning, trying to locate and destroy every Times sports section he can get his hands on.

In "Keeping Score", the Times' weekly sop to the figure filberts in sportsland, Schmidt pored through history to determine that the best indicator of a ballclub's post-season success is how it plays in September. The better a team plays in the final 30 games of the regular season, the better its chances of making and winning the World Series.

Schmidt must've done a lot of work, and if his piece had only run LAST Sunday, he'd be OK this morning. Alas, current events have undermined Schmidt's scholarship, because the four playoff teams who were strongest in the final 30 games of the 2006 season, all cited in Schmidt's piece as good bets, were, you guessed it, the Twins, Padres, Dodgers, and Yankees. The teams with the weakest finishes were the Tigers, Cardinals, and Mets.

Three of the teams with "momentum" are gone, two of them without winning a single game, and the Padres are still one game away from elimination. The Mets and Tigers shrugged off their very real miseries down the stretch to eviserate their allegedly hot rivals in short order. The only comfort I can offer Schmidt is that prognicator's misery loves company, and boy, does he have some. All the media baseball experts hashed their divisional series predictions, too, and the ones who love statistics most ((hi, Rob Neyer!) did the worst.

Schmidt and his fellow wrong guessers aren't baseball ignoramuses. They know much more about the game than outsiders. That was their problem. The recurring failure of smart people in all disciplines is the tendency to overrate details at the expense of basics. Genius is the capacity to understand details as expressions of the basics.

Some folks use numbers as the bedrock of their baseball knowledge. That's a perfectly valid approach, but for myself, I use the game's endless encyclopedia of cliches. They're how generations of baseball men have tried to express the sport's mysteries, and ignoring them misses much wisdom (and, I'll admit, much hooey, too).

Post-season cliche number one: "We all start off 0-0 now." The important thing about this chestnut is that players actually believe it. The Tigers and Cardinals may have skidded their way into the playoffs, but they made it. A near-death experience of that nature gives a team a natural sense of relief. We're not chokers after all. We have a fresh start, let's use it. That, of course, is one psychic plus the Yankees never get. New York could go 30-o in September and a single man left on base in its first playoff game is an unacceptable negative.

Cliche number two: "Momentum is your next day's starting pitcher." The reason the Mets advanced and the Yanks did not is that in their Game Twos, Tom Glavine was lights out with minimal run support while his Bronx counterpart Mike Mussina was unable to hold a 3-1 lead. Champions win 3-1 games. The Yankees almost never play them.

Cliche Three: "Pitching is 75 percent of baseball." The Tigers had the best staff ERA in the American League by a wide margin. Oakland's hurlers are no slouches. Surely there had to be at least a 40 percent chance Barry Zito might outperform Johann Santana, and that the Detroit starters would thwart the over-loaded Yanks' attack (a team that has to bench Gary Sheffield and Jason Giambi in successive games is unsafely engineered. That's a waste of a roster spot better spent on a middle reliever who doesn't suck).

Not a cliche, just an observation: As the 2006 Red Sox proved as well, when older teams hit the wall, they don't skid, they collapse. This risk was always on the table for the Yankees, and it bit 'em. Surprise, if any, should be mild.

Cliche the fourth: "It's a game of percentages." The unspoken word in that sentence is the adjective "narrow." Historically great ballclubs win at best slightly over two of every three games, and historically lousy ones lost slightly over two of every three. Divide those figures into best-of-five and best-of-seven series and there's an uncertainty dividend so huge as to render any prediction a blindfolded guess. I realize the expertise industry requires forecasters to sound conclusively sure of themselves, which is why the wise avoid baseball predictions whenever possible.

Cliche the last, from the immortal Joaquin Andujar: "There's only one word to describe this game. Youneverknow."

posted by Michael Gee @ 8:53 AM