Let's Beat a Dead Horse Just a Little More

Once upon a time, in a land called Playoff Baseball, three teams went up two games to none in their Division Series.

Each of these teams enjoyed an insurmountable lead because they had momentum.

Team One -- we'll call them the Dodgers, like the Artful Dodger of Oliver Twist fame -- went to the desert and swept the third game to win the series.

Team Two -- we'll recognize the genius of George Jetson's dog by naming them for him -- scored three times early in the next game and then got plastered 10-3. Uh oh, momentum gone! They came back from a deficit to win the series in Game 4.

Team Three -- the one that lost three straight deciding games to gakk up the 2016 World Series -- lost two straight deciding games in New York despite the largest gap in regular season wins between division series opponents (11 games). Now they must return to Cleveland with all the momentum switched to the other side. They might as well give up.

Three 2-0 counts; three different results. 

Momentum sure is predictive. Of nothing.

That September Momentum

There was a lot of talk in Game One of Yankees-Indians about momentum coming into the playoffs. New York has it. Cleveland has it. Aaron Judge has momentum. Cory Kluber has momentum. It is exuding from people's pores, by the announcers' telling.

It is true, of course, that both teams entered the playoffs after hot Septembers. All that was dutifully recounted.

Here's what wasn't recounted -- all the empirical evidence that demonstrates unequivocally that it doesn't matter. Not one iota.

There is literally no correlation -- zero, zilch, nada -- between how well a team played in September and how well it plays in October. We have 100 years of performance to guide us and its lesson is conclusive. Change the parameters and get the same result. How well they played the last week, or the second half, or since X happened. Doesn't matter.

This conversation is literally irrelevant.

But that doesn't seem to stop the talkers from talking about it. And it's going to get worse.

In the wake of Game One, the ordained analysts are going to chirp endlessly about the Astros' momentum and the Indians' momentum. They each won ONE GAME! But now they have that invisible force on their side.

Until they don't.

10 Predictions for 2017 That Can't Go Wrong

Anything can happen in baseball. The season is as long as a butterfly's entire life and then they start all over again to determine the champs. Balls take funny bounces, key ligaments incur the wrath of sliders and strokes get lost or discovered.

The game defies prediction.

And yet, there are events that can be foreseen by dropouts with bad depth perception. Here are a few that jump to mind:

1. Someone with an unimpressive resume will bash out of the gate, Adam Duvall style. Hosannas will be sung; articles will be written. And before the electrons are dry, pitchers will figure him out and he'll fade back to well-compensated oblivion.

2. Some September cellar occupant will rattle off early season wins. Try not to have an orgasm. The blooms of May are long forgotten by Labor Day.

3. Some dope with a microphone in his face and diminishing brain cells will rant against analytics, unaware that the debate is over, every team employs a gaggle of numbers crunchers, and MLB itself puts a tape measure and radar gun on every ball thrown, hit and chased. Just because a guy could snap off a curve -- or hit one -- in the 70s doesn't make him smarter than a Pet Rock. (That's White Sox resident Bozo Ken Harrelson proudly posing as avatar of this prediction.)

4, We will continue to hear about momentum, as if it's a thing in sports. Most speakers will mean that a team is playing well and has confidence, but they will invoke momentum as if it's a magic potion created with crystals and feng shui.

5. We'll see fewer infield shifts. You know why? Because those pesky advanced analytics tell us they don't generally work. (Damn those facts! Don't they know America doesn't do facts anymore?) They only make sense for a handful of players who pull everything and won't/can't adjust.

6. Mike Trout will continue his reign as best baseball player on Planet Earth, but he won't win the MVP. Voters get tired of voting for the same guys repeatedly, especially when they're as personally exciting as toast.

7. At least one MVP or Cy Young winner will rise up from the floorboards. Think R.A. Dickey, Brandon Webb, Terry Pendelton, George Bell. 

8. The trend towards using relievers in more optimal ways will continue to grow. Several long relievers will pitch key innings, not mop up, and their teams will benefit from it, particularly as starter throw fewer and fewer innings.

9. People will be surprised when Stephen Strasburg goes on the DL, Pablo Sandoval earns a starting job and the weather turns hot during the summer. Either we have short memories or we're distracted by our phones.

10. Some throwaway name like Tampa Bay shortstop Brad Miller will slug 30 home runs out of nowhere this year. Oh wait, Miller did that last year. Who knew?

Wouldn't It Be Great...

Dreaming of the upcoming season. Wouldn't it be great if...

Someone did a home run dance in the sixth inning of a 7-2 game . . . and no once paid any attention? You want to stop gratuitous celebrations? The sound of one hand clapping would do it.

A batter laid down a bunt to break up a no-hitter in the ninth inning of a 3-0 game, invoking the ire of the opposing team and leading to a plunking, a two-base error and a double that tied the game and unwrote the unwritten rule?

Ken "Hawk" Harrelson retired and someone who knew something about baseball in the 21st century replaced him? Then fans on Chicago's South Side would have at least one thing to celebrate this year.

Umpires ordered batters to stop fooling around and get in the box and demanded that pitchers serve up the ball within 20 seconds as required by the rules? And games started moving along?

Jake Arrieta really is as good as the second half of last season? Because that would mean that in 2016 he'd allow a .409 OPS and an ERA of 0.75. He'd allow four home runs all season.

A fan bopped by a batted ball admitted it was their own damn fault for not paying attention?

The players on a last place squad began extolling the team's chemistry? Funny, you never hear that.

Someone connected to a club 10 games under .500 announced that his team had just acquired "momentum" and then they went out and won 13 of the next 15 games? Then we

would finally have one verifiable example of the spirit magic that gives rise to that term.

Baseball writers and announcers all had to take a course and pass an exam on new analysis and be able to explain triple-slash stats, Fielding Independent Pitching, True Average, BABIP and Wins Against Replacement? That way fans would learn about them and we would all better understand the game.

Baseball announcers, particularly play-by-play guys (as opposed to analysts) had to pass an oral communication exam? Then we would stop hearing idiotic phrases like "controlling their own destiny," grounds rule double, and "second-chance opportunities."  (Destiny cannot be controlled and chances are opportunities.) Announcers would understand basic sentence structure, common idioms, proper usage and diction, and generally sound like experts in communication rather than like Norm Crosby.

Mike Trout did it again, and then again and again through age 30?  He'd have 96 WAR with half his career ahead of him.

A Conspiracy of Willful Amnesia

It was a rainy day in Charleston so I settled in to watch some footballs. With three games left in the NFL's regular season there were several near-elimination contests whose outcomes really mattered. For sure Fox and CBS would show the Dallas-Green Bay showdown whose loser would be in deep playoff purgatory or the Miami-New England contest critical to the Dolphins ' playoff push.

After all, making the post-season tournament is all that matters. As anyone who's followed the NFL even casually knows all too well, any team can hoist the trophy once they qualify for the tournament. Last year, the 10-6 Baltimore Ravens played three games, two on the road, on their way to Super Bowl victory. The year before, the 9-7 NY Giants ran the same gauntlet. In 2010, the 10-6 Green Bay Packers slipped in on a Wild Card and swept three road games en route to the championship. And so on.

In other words, every player, coach, GM, owner, writer, broadcaster and fan knows that seeding is irrelevant. Home field confers as much advantage as the return from injury of a flanker. A first-round bye guarantees passage into the second round -- and nothing more.

So what game did I see? That riveting Seattle-Giants affair, a Seahawk whitewashing that had utterly no relevance in the standings. Seattle had already clinched. New Jersey was already eliminated. Why on Earth would Fox show this desultory affair? It's not like I live in the Pacific Northwest or the teeming metropolis.

Then, adding insult to injury, the announcers on the Seahawks-Giants fiasco mentioned the high drama taking place in Miami. With their playoff hopes hanging by a thread, the Dolphins led New England by four points with Tom Brady poised a few yards from the end zone as the final seconds ticked down. And my television continued to show a meaningless 23-0 egg-laying.

You'd never know of my contest's irrelevance from the network description. According to them, Seattle was battling to maintain their home field playoff edge. The Seahawks, they said, were in a dogfight with New Orleans for that coveted one-seed and needed to defeat today's foe.

The next day, a national sports talk show asked its four hyperbolic panelists if Miami gained more than New England lost. This tripe was presented as a matter of opinion, as if New England's playoff seeding were as momentous as Miami's uphill climb into the postseason.

There are only two possibilities here: everyone involved in the game is lying through their teeth or there is a conspiracy of willful amnesia. The constant talk of seeding as if it correlates with playoff success requires that all the analysts, observers and fans squeeze their eyes shut so tight that they momentarily forget that most of these games don't matter. 

We see this in sports all the time. The talk about NBA playoff seeding is so totally laughable it goes beyond amnesia to schizophrenia. Fans of the sport are so paralyzed by grief for any drama in the season that they remain stuck in its first stage -- denial. College pigskin fans work themselves into a lather every season fretting about multiple-undefeated-team scenarios that never pan out. And, of course, all sports fans invoke "momentum" as if it's a guarantor of future events rather than a description of the past.

Wake up everyone, so on a rainy day I can watch a game that has some meaning.

Hey, Who Took My Momentum?!

After all these years of inquiries about the nature of this effable quality so many call "momentum," Major League Baseball has finally provided clarity. Here is today's headline about the St. Louis-Pittsburgh NLDS series, knotted at a game apiece following the Bucs' 7-1 victory.

Strategy Shifts Momentum in Pirates' Favor

So there you go. Momentum is . . . a win. A single nine-inning triumph, according to the official mouthpiece of MLB, constitutes momentum. A team secures one of these on-field victories, much as it had done 94 times during the season, including 10 times against the opponent in question, and it suddenly has this . . . thing, momentum.

Before that one victory, evidently, the Pirates did not have momentum. In fact, it appears that Major League Baseball asserts that the Cardinals, with their 9-1 win the previous day, took custody of momentum until it was transferred the following evening to Pittsburgh, much like Baby Veronica recently got shuffled from her adoptive parents in South Carolina to her biological father in Oklahmoa and back to the adoptive couple. Apparently, the Capobiancos now have momentum, as well as Veronica. The difference there is that their fight for momentum required court rulings, bench warrants, extradition requests, arrest threats and the intervention of an entire Indian tribe, whereas the Pirates merely had to build a lead and get three outs in the ninth.

The two teams will play again, twice, in PNC Park, where, we are to infer, momentum will be up for grabs, like the Little Brown Jug in the Michigan-Minnesota football rivalry. The magic power of Pittsburgh's momentous Game 2 victory will shrivel to irrelevance as momentum is bestowed upon Game 3's winner, and then presumably transferred back again after Game 4 and so on. If the series goes back and forth to a deciding Game 5, momentum will have been tossed about like a hot potato until it suddenly evaporates in the wake of actual elimination. 

God help poor momentum in a back-and-forth seven-game series. It must get vertigo spinning around from one club to the other until finally falling exhausted into the prevailing dugout.

Before PETA and the ACLU get hot and bothered about the inhumane treatment of momentum, there is good news. This wanton abuse of momentum is a figment of everyone's imagination because . . . momentum is a figment of everyone's imagination. In a five-game series, the survivor must win three games, not two and not one. Winning the first game does not convey any special advantage except banking one of those three wins. Being up two games-to-none, or two-to-one, or whatever, has proved pretty thin gruel (see: 2012 San Francisco Giants) for teams unable to close the deal. Each game is a separate entity beholden to that day's starting pitchers, game conditions, lineups,  tweaks of strategy, luck, more luck and a host of other factors.

Someone has to win Game 3. What they will have then is two wins and nothing more. They will still need to outscore the other team in one of the two remaining contests, and momentum is not going to help them one iota.

And Now, The Tournament Begins

In case you thought the 2013 baseball season is over, the Rangers and Rays beg to differ. They will battle tonight in Arlington for the right to fly to Cleveland and challenge the Indians Wednesday for the opportunity to fly to Boston and face a rested Red Sox team Friday with their best pitcher (and possibly second best) unavailable.

On Tuesday, the Pirates and Reds will join the fray. Earning one of the Wild Card berths is certainly a substantial achievement, but the euphoria gives way to disappointment with jarring speed for the loser of the play-in game.

Only then does the tournament begin. Like hockey, baseball does not have a championship; it has a tournament in which a team's regular-season exploits are largely meaningless and the results essentially random. Hockey's playoffs are doubly disconnected because they are open to half the league, including the disappointments, the rebuilders and the inconsistent. In baseball, at least, only the best teams are afforded opportunities to compete for the title.

Still, only three of the last 17 World Champions have had baseball's best record over the 162-game season, while five Wild Cards have won the title.  

You will hear ad naseum (actually, hearing this once is ad naseum, because it's patently false) that teams need to have "momentum" or a "hot hand" or simply be playing well entering the playoffs in order to emerge victorious. This shibboleth is repeated despite the 2006 World Series in which both teams (St. Louis and Detroit) entered with sub-.500 second-half records. The Tigers were swept in the season's final series by last-place KC to drop into the Wild Card. The Cardinals lost seven in a row the week before the playoffs commenced.

Last season, the eventual champs fell behind in the best-of-five division series two games to none before storming back, then dropped four of five in the NLCS before sweeping the remaining three games. That's not so much "hot" or "cold" as random.

In fact, research shows that there is almost no correlation at all between playing well at season's end and winning it all. Indeed, there's little correlation between anything and playoff magic, which is why the playoffs are both a lottery and impossible to predict except by dumb luck.

When the Rays and Rangers tussle tonight in their loser-go-home affair, both teams will enter the series "hot" and "cold." Texas lost its grip on the division and then the Wild Card by dropping 12 of 13 in the waning weeks of the season. In the final week, they rebounded for six wins in a row. Tampa Bay charged to the top of the Wild Card standings with a seven-game win streak before losing a pair that dropped them into a tie with Texas. One of these teams will survive and will thus be dubbed, ex post facto, on a roll. If you're a betting person, caveat emptor.

Except for the Cardinals, every team is at least six years from a championship and has suffered at least one indignity since. After St. Louis (2011) and Boston (2007), the most recent champion city is Atlanta (1995), followed by Cincinnati (1990), Oakland (1989), L.A. (1988), Detroit (1984), Pittsburgh (1979) and Cleveland (1948). Texas and Tampa Bay have never tasted the sweet fruit of victory. So for all but Cards and Red Sox fans, a World Championship would be a refreshing novelty. 

Let's go all of them!

Encore Performance: Playoff Guarantees

At the risk of falling into the sea while admiring my reflection, I present an encore performance from 2008 that has particular resonance this time of year.

It's easier than writing something new.

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With respect to the playoffs, some guarantees:

1. Baseball "analysts" will predict series outcomes based on which team was hotter in September. Research by Baseball Analysts found that there is absolutely no correlation whatsoever between a team's September record and its playoff performance. Hey, who needs facts when you have opinions to publish!
 
2. A team that loses game 1 of a five-game series with its ace on the mound will be written off by the baseball media. It helps increase the excitement when they come back to win.
 
3. A team down 1-0 and facing the other team's ace will be written off, as if the ace is a guaranteed win, even though he went 17-11 on the year.
 
4. The underdog in a series will take game 1 on the road and the baseball media will pronounce that it has the "momentum." When it loses game 2, the baseball media will announce that the momentum has "shifted," as if it were a paradigm, or a continental shelf.
 
5. One team's ace will get lit up. Another team's slugger will take the collar twice. The baseball media, now practicing psychiatry, will determine that they "choked" or "felt the pressure" or weren't "clutch."The media will be unable to process the notion that even great players have bad days.
 
6. Baseball "analysts" will "analyze" an upcoming series by assigning wins and losses according to pitcher and home field, because as we all know, the team at home with the better starting pitcher wins in the playoffs 85% or 90% of the time. Or maybe its 52%, I forget.
 
7. Once again, some knucklehead will run out the statistic that the winner of game 1 in a five-game series wins the series 75% of the time. Of course, since the average series goes four games, the winner of any game you choose wins the series 75%.

How About That Momentum!

For all you momentum buffs, which is to say, you believers in UFOs, ghosts, the single bullet theory, and stimulus packages, I would offer a modest proposal.

Entering the NFL playoffs, the Indianapolis Colts and New Orleans Saints had combined to lose their last five games after winning their first 27. 

The San Diego Chargers had prevailed in their previous 11. 

Remember all the analysts pooh-poohing Indy and Norlins because they didn't have any momentum? And touting SD? I wonder what Super Bowl they'll be watching.

Here was the San Francisco 49ers' season: They won their first game. And their second. Lost their third. Won their fourth. Lost their next four. They had momentum going against them, right? But they won their next game, then lost, then won, lost, won, lost, won and won. The 49ers were twice as likely to lose if they won the game before, or win if they lost the game before. Did momentum take every other week off?

Here's the modest proposal: if you still think there is some magic force by which teams and individuals succeed because they succeeded the last time or two, I propose that you need your head examined.

A baseball player doesn't get a hit because he was safe in his last two at-bats. Teams don't win because they swept the previous three game series. They get hits, and win, because they're good, or lucky, or both.

That's not to say that success doesn't breed self-confidence, which leads to more success. But the concept of self-confidence has a name and it's not momentum. So let's let the momentum shibboleth rest in peace, okay?

b

Capricious Moe

So your friend, Moe, is sitting in your team's dugout, quietly minding his own business. You know he's there, because he's always there when your team races out to a 7-0 lead over its archrival in a late August contest.

But suddenly, Moe bolts across the field to the first base dugout and the seemingly-vanquished foe piles up seven unanswered runs in the last five innings. Then, with Moe clearly on their side, they subdue your team in several key situations and scratch across the winning tally in the 13th inning.

"Woe is you!" everyone cries, because Moe has clearly switched allegiances and will accompany the Philistines the rest of the way, as he did the previous year. This becomes readily apparent when your homies fall behind the next evening by a run as your ace heads for the showers.

But wait, wasn't that Moe sprinting back to the northpaw side of the field? By golly, it was, sparking a comeback that leads to victory. Thank goodness we had Moe on our side!

Wait a second, says the annoying contrarian blogger type. What good is Moe if he's going to be so fickle and unpredictable? You'd be just as well off with a friend like Constance. Why are you so excited to see Moe when he's almost certain not to stick around. He's your friend until...he's not.

Come to think of it, it's not like you're even ever aware of his presence except in retrospect, based on the shadow he seems to cast. Could it be that Moe isn't even there? Could these advantage swings simply be the natural ebb and flow of athletic competition?

This notion is painful, I understand. All these years, everyone who loves baseball (and other sports too) had waxed poetic about Moe's myriad accomplishments, hale-fellow personality and abundant charisma. Now some second-rate flak comes along and takes a club to your Moe pinata. You're suffering from some serious cognitive dissonance.

But here's the thing about the facts: they don't give a flying patootski about your feelings. And the fact is, Moe is a figment of everyone's imagination, as David Murphy made evident last night.