The Futility Infielder

A Baseball Journal by Jay Jaffe I'm a baseball fan living in New York City. In between long tirades about the New York Yankees and the national pastime in general, I'm a graphic designer.

Thursday, October 28, 2004

 

Streaking

Perhaps the most famous line of Michael Lewis' Moneyball comes towards the end of the book, when Oakland GM Billy Beane watches his year's work go up in flames as the A's lose a five-game first round series to the Minnesota Twins. "My shit doesn’t work in the playoffs," says a frustrated Beane. "My job is to get us to the playoffs. What happens after that is fucking luck."

Beane's response sounds like so much sour grapes, of course, especially when considering that for all of his great work, his division-winning teams have yet to win a postseason series. No shortage of mainstream writers and baseball men have been willing to dismiss the sabermetric inclinations of the A's for that failure. But Beane was onto something that has less to do with the application of sabermetrics in running a team than the simple, unavoidable mathematical truth that governs October baseball: in a short series, anything can happen.

I didn't watch Wednesday night's deciding game of the World Series, not a single pitch. On a night with a full lunar eclipse, I'd have been more likely to stand atop my roof dropping trou to show the world my moon than to watch a sight which apparently comes around about as often as Halley's Comet. Nonetheless, my pants or no, the Boston Red Sox have completed an unlikely sweep of the World Series over the St. Louis Cardinals, a team which won 105 games, the most in baseball. The Sox, as you may have heard, rode a wave which saw them make history by rebounding from a 3-0 deficit against the Yankees, something that had never been done. At the most critical time of year, they completed an eight-game postseason winning streak against the only two teams who won more games than they did. For that they are the World Champions for the first time in 86 years. But still...

Back in the spring, at a Pizza Feed in Brooklyn that I attended, Baseball Prospectus' Joe Sheehan was asked a question about teams that win in the playoffs, more specifically if there were any underlying clues as to what makes a good postseason team. Joe actually wrote about the question a short while after that, so I'll use his words rather than paraphrase:
That research has been done, although not by us, and the conclusions are that there are no conclusions: There are no defining characteristics of a successful postseason team.

The comment I made at the time sticks with me: We have to find a better way to describe this phenomenon than "luck." Made famous in part by Billy Beane's quote in Moneyball, the idea that playoff series are determined by luck is both inaccurate and an inelegant way to present the concept to people invested in the idea that it's how the best team is determined. It sounds like you're--and I could say "we're," because it is certainly connected to the perception that Baseball Prospectus has favored the A's and their processes over the years--making an excuse for the team that lost.

The term "luck" is actually shorthand for a more difficult concept, that when two playoff-caliber teams square off in a best-of-five or best-of-seven series, any result is reasonably likely. Just because a particular one occurs doesn't reflect anything other than the events that made up that series: one player's hot week, or one pitcher's inability to throw his curve for strikes, or a baserunner's ill-fated decision to take an extra base. These events do not, despite the mythology of October, enlighten us about the character or fortitude of people any more than Nate Robertson's huge last week out of the bullpen does.

Those things aren't luck, they're performance, and using the former word to describe them isn't helping us make the larger concept accessible to more people. That's a challenge that we're going to have to meet, and I encourage everyone reading this to think about the idea and drop me a line with their suggestions on how to do so.
I've borne Joe's words in mind as I've followed the 2004 season, and I think the last two weeks has yielded many clues to the nebulous concept we're chasing. "Luck" or "small sample-related randomness" don't yield particularly satisfying explanations as to what elevates one team above another in the postseason, not when we're all searching for narrative tropes -- continuing the Curse of the Bambino, breaking the Curse -- to describe the particular sequence of events we've witnessed (or not). But Boston's eight straight wins against such high-caliber competition do bring another word to mind, one that fits very well: streakiness.

Think about it for a moment. We've watched a 101-win team and a 105-win team, both of them with devastating offenses but question marks in the pitching department -- question marks they share with the Sox, mind you -- fall prey to a 98-win team. Many of the games, but not all of them, have been close, and at key points, a break here or there might have been the difference. Take Trot Nixon's catch of Hideki Matsui's bases-loaded fly ball or Tony Clark's ground-rule double in Game Five of the ALCS, or Jeff Suppan's getting picked off base early in Game Three of the World Series. The breaks have all gone Boston's way for the past ten days or so, and thanks in part to that, they're World Champions.

The Sox were on a hot streak, one that followed a particularly cold streak, especially for some of their players. Mark Bellhorn was 3-for-21 in the ALCS before hitting a three-run homer in the fourth inning of Game Six. He proceeded to homer in the next two games as well, helping the Sox defeat the Yanks and get their first leg up on the Cardinals. Johnny Damon wandered through the first six games of the LCS in a daze, making baserunning mistakes left and right and failing to set the table for Boston's heavy hitters. He was 3-for-29 coming into Game Seven, led of the game with a single, and in his next at-bat, when Javy Vazquez left a fastball in his wheelhouse, socked a grand slam that turned the game into a rout. Two innings later, he homered again. Goat to hero. For the Yankees, the story was the opposite. Hideki Matsui went 11-for-20 with eight extra-base hits in the first four games of the LCS and was poised to receive the Series MVP award. A 3-for-14 performance in the final three games helped turn him into the Bruce Hurst of a new generation. Gary Sheffield's streakiness was even more dramatic, from 9-for-13 over the first three games to 1-for-17 in the last four. So it goes. The Sox and the Yanks spent the better part of the season alternately humiliating each other in such fashion, sweeps here, double-digit drubbings there, right up through the final game of the LCS.

The streakiness isn't just confined to Boston, either. Look at the NLCS, where the home team won every game. The Cardinals went up 2-0 in St. Louis, the Astros took the next three in Houston, and then the Cards returned home to finish the 'Stros in Busch. Houston would never have made it so far without one of the greatest postseason streaks ever, that of Carlos Beltran, who hit eight homers this fall and will soon turn those homers into additional millions of dollars on a long-term contract. Streaks aren't the only thing that decide close series, but they play a powerful role in making a merely good team a seemingly unbeatable one.

The point is that baseball is a game of streaks. No .300 hitter hits exactly .300 every month of the season. Across a 162-game season, performances waver due to a bewildering number of factors ranging from a player's physical and mental condition to the caliber of competition to the weather to sheer lady luck. We attach names like "slump" or "en fuego" to arbitrary sequences of events in order to grasp them better, and similarly apply labels -- "clutch" or "choker" -- to players for their perceived abilities to perform better or worse when things seem to matter most. We often invest those labels with grandiose narratives, as if the qualities of a man's soul could be divined from a small handful of late-inning at-bats with men in scoring position. Our understanding of the matter is like our grasp of anatomy and physiology circa the Dark Ages. Maybe if we bled those chokers with leeches, they'd turn into clutch hitters.

There's a growing body of work within sabermetrics, one which has brought academics out of the woodwork to show that the fluctuations we witness year in and year out in baseball have a lot more to do with randomness than most observers would care to admit. "True ability" is the elusive concept, one hidden behind mathematical walls that even most analysts are ill-equipped to scale. Markov chains and Bayesian analysis aren't likely to overrun broadcast booths or the blogosphere anytime soon, but dismissing them as the province of the ivory tower-bound slide-ruling class is a mistake. The underlying theory behind Defense Independent Pitching Statistics -- that pitchers have little or no ability to control the results of balls in play -- is but the tip of a much bigger iceberg, and need I remind you which team DIPS inventor Voros McCracken works for?

Beyond that, there isn't even much evidence that fans' and players' sacred-cow concepts stand up to scrutiny. Despite the Yankees celebrated postseason run and the tendency of one Mr. October to point to other ones wearing pinstripes as his equals, the search for true clutch hitters has proven to be a statistical red herring. Clutch hits surely exist, and we see them in nearly every game, but a repeatable ability to come through in clutch situations at a significantly higher level over time -- a skill indicating clutch hitting -- simply has not shown itself to be so. David Grabiner did a landmark study over a decade a go which showed that past clutch performance could not be used to predict future clutch performance, to the tune of a .01 correlation -- bupkus, as they say -- and those who've followed in his wake have been similarly unable to disprove his surprising, counterintuitive conclusion. Empirically, the sainted Derek Jeter's own dismal LCS (6-for-30 with one double and no homers) after being celebrated for years as the epitome of postseason clutch goodness, is but one example. Mariano Rivera's late-inning fallibility -- three blown saves in five opportunities this fall after a stellar 30-for-32 record in years past -- provides a similar pitching corollary.

To return to Jeter for a moment, his own 2004 performance offers ample evidence on the nature of streakiness. Back in May, just a few weeks after Reggie Jackson had blown smoke up his ass in the same publication, there was the Yankee captain on the cover of Sports Illustrated for hitting .189 thanks to a 0-for-32 run that saw him booed by the Bronx faithful. He broke out that o-fer with a homer, but soon began a 1-for-26 encore. Jeter's batting averages by month this year: .172, .261, .396, .262, .287, .372. Final average: .292, 25 points below his career average coming into the season. And yet, Tim McCarver and Joe Buck could not shut up about how clutch he was throughout the playoffs. In the end, it didn't matter much for the Yankees' chances.

A baseball season's streaks blend together like individual threads in a tapestry. If fifty blue threads are woven closely enough with fifty yellow threads, we call the result green, and if enough 2-for-4s follow those 0-for-4s and 1-for-4s, we call the result a .300 hitter. At that point, the individual streaks don't matter nearly so much unless we take it upon ourselves pore over the box scores, to remind ourselves of those threads, but whether we count them or not, they're there nonetheless. And they're finite; they run out. All streaks are bound to end sooner or later, even 86-year-old ones with supernatural attributions.

None of this is to belittle the Red Sox accomplishment at all. Nor is it to say that every postseason series outcome rests on a hot streak; plenty of them go back and forth like last year's seven-game LCS and rest on a seemingly-random swing of the bat by some bit player in a larger drama. We should be wary about extrapolating from the results of a small handful of games or at-bats when it comes to building monuments to players. Just ask Aaron Boone.

But credit the Sox. They got hot at the right time, and for doing so, they get to call themselves the better team. A World Champion must seat all pretenders to the throne, and the Bostons did nothing but that over the past month. Congratulations to them for riding one hell of a hot streak into the history books, and for their true fans for perservering lo these many years in the face of blah blah blah...

Now, get me a bucket for vomit, a gun for snipin', and a match for my hot stove. Chop chop! And boil some coffee, damn it! I've got better things to do than worry about streakers.

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