On the Yankees again

I don’t mean to suggest I’m a Yankees fan by defending their performance and their players (A-Rod, see below), but there are two points that should be added to this absurd discussion about what’s wrong with the Bombers: (1) The Yankees are an excellent team that may just as well have won the whole thing, and only need a little tweaking of the pitching staff next year to remain contenders. (2) The Tigers were a very good team this year and did not win by luck.

The Wages of Win blog fleshes out these points and more in a spot-on analysis of the series, showing that people focus too much on the Yankees payroll as a predictor of performance, and argue that the Tigers’ run differential and pitching staff were underappreciated prior to the series.

The authors repeat the oft-forgotten point that the postseason, a five-game series especially, is a huge crapshoot. Most “upsets” probably should not be that upsetting, but they are because people: (a) exagerrate differences in the quality of two very good teams; (b) overemphasize irrelevant distant history (e.g. the Yankees boast 26 WS titles, and possess the necessary aura and poise) and irrelevant recent history (e.g. the Tigers got swept by the lowly Royals to end the season); and (c) people underemphasize the most important history (how did each team fare over the course of 162 games, or even 81 games). On this last point, I’d guess that strong second-half performance is better correlated with playoff success than performance over the whole season, and I have no clue how much, but roughly speaking, I think we can agree that large chunks of a season are the best predictors of future success, and that the playoffs are a crapshoot.