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http://grantland.com/features/mlb-detroit-tigers-oakland-as-rotations/The Super-Rotation RivalryThe A’s and Tigers are stockpiling star pitchers. But will adding aces actually help these teams trump playoff unpredictability? ... It’s possible there’s something to the “pitching wins pennants” hypothesis, but if so, it’s hard to see it in the stats. In 2012, Colin Wyers — then the director of research at Baseball Prospectus, now a “mathematical modeler” for the Astros — and I looked for evidence that teams with strong no. 1 starters outperformed expectations in the playoffs. We identified the ace of each playoff team from 1995 to 2011, rated each one using a normalized measure of ace-hood, and then checked for any correlation between the strength of each ace and the difference between his team’s regular-season and postseason winning percentages. There wasn’t one, which suggests that once you know a team’s regular-season record, knowing how good its best pitcher is doesn’t add any predictive power. Nor could Colin find any evidence of an effect after rerunning the analysis using the entirety of a team’s playoff rotation instead of its ace alone.... So why doesn’t the quality of a team’s top three starters or its ace register as significant? For one thing, the differences between teams are compressed in the playoffs, relative to the regular season: Teams with terrible staffs don’t make it to October, so the gulf between the best- and worst-pitching playoff teams isn’t as stark as we’re used to seeing during the season’s first six months. Perhaps more importantly, there’s more than one way to win baseball games, and even under an expanded playoff format, teams don’t get to October without doing something well. A team with an inferior pitching staff often makes up for its weakness on the mound by being better on offense.
If there’s no clear evidence that pitching acquires extra significance in the postseason, why is the belief that it does so persistent? It might be because it’s so hard not to notice the extent to which scoring is suppressed in the playoffs. There’s no question that playoff games tend to produce fewer crooked numbers: Last season, teams scored an average of 4.17 runs per game during the regular season, but in the postseason, their output declined to 3.78 runs per game, a 9.4 percent reduction. That figure fluctuates from year to year — in 2012, teams scored 19.2 percent fewer runs per game in the playoffs — but the direction of the difference is usually the same: down.8 During the 1995-2013 wild-card era, the gap has been exactly one run per game (half a run per team), or 10.6 percent.
Weather explains some of that effect; playoff games can be cold, and the lower the temperature, the less far the ball flies. Defense also plays a part, since playoff teams tend to be better than average at converting balls into outs. The bulk of the decline in scoring, however, stems from the difference in the postseason pitcher pool.... The pitchers on a given team’s postseason pitching staff are generally about half a run better than the same team’s full regular-season staff, and teams generally score about half a run less per game in the playoffs. The postseason scoring mystery is solved: It’s not that hitters lose their mojo once the calendar flips to October, it’s that they face superior opponents.
So in a sense, pitching is better during the playoffs, in that a team’s worst arms generally aren’t invited.9 However, that doesn’t mean it’s more valuable. Every team gets to tell its fifth starter to take a hike (if only to the bullpen) and concentrate its playoff innings among its most effective pitchers.... To be clear, the near impossibility of proving that pitchers have magical postseason powers isn’t an indictment of either Oakland’s addition of Lester or Detroit’s pursuit of Price. Both teams are probably better equipped to win with their new starters than they were without them, whether in the regular season or the World Series. Baseball Prospectus ran both teams’ playoff odds before and after adjusting their depth charts to reflect their July 31 trade activity, and according to BP’s simulations, the Tigers and A’s upped their odds of winning the World Series more than any other teams did on deadline day.
As far as those simulations are concerned, though, that’s not because Lester and Price are good pitchers; it’s because they’re good players. If Beane or Dombrowski had upgraded his roster by adding an equally valuable bat instead of a starter, the outlook for his team, statistically speaking, would be either identical today or close enough to it that we’d have trouble detecting the difference. Saving a run simply isn’t much more important than scoring one, even in October.
By constructing two of the strongest rosters in baseball — even before turning good rotations into great ones — Beane and Dombrowski did most of what they could to give their clubs a leg up in October. And by trading for additional aces, they ensured that if there is a slim distinction between a “good team” and a “good playoff team,” their rosters will end up on the right side of the divide. Even so, it’s possible the playoffs will have the last laugh. Four years ago, as the Lincecum-Cain-Sanchez-Bumgarner Giants prepared to face the Halladay-Oswalt-Hamels Phillies, Jim Palmer, the ace of those ’71 Orioles, was asked about the importance of playoff pitching. “It’s a great place to start, but to win, it has to be more than that,” Palmer said. “While you would think it would favor Philadelphia, it’s not as big an edge as you would think because of the fact that the Giants can pitch, too.”
That’s the problem with the playoffs: A team can spend a season assembling a super-rotation, but once it gets to October, it might find that its opponent has a super-rotation, too.
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Power is always in the hands of the masses of men. What oppresses the masses is their own ignorance, their own short-sighted selfishness.
- Henry George
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