How's That Home Field Working For You?

"There's nothing I hate more than nothing. Nothing keeps me up at night. I toss and turn over nothing. Nothing can cause a great big fight." Edie Brickell & New Bohemians, 1988

Oh, that home field advantage! It has catapulted two Wild Cards into the division series and four teams into their League Championship playoffs.

Wait, what's that? It hasn't?

• Road warriors swept the Wild Card play-ins games.
• Road teams have captured exactly half the Division Series wins, not counting tonight's Mets-Dodgers finale. If the home nine wins in L.A., the "advantage" will amount to 5% (a 10-9 record or .526 winning percentage), exactly as noted a fortnight ago in this space.
• Last licks played a role in exactly none of the contests. The team ahead after eight innings won every time.

And while we're inconveniently deflating the long-held myths that have passed for conventional wisdom in baseball, let's examine the myth of the critical first game.

If the Dodgers win their tilt with the Mets tonight, the Game One victor from every series will be watching the League Championship Series on television. Oh-for-four. That's the definition of critical, all right.

Finally, there are those mental calculations people do to predict who will win a series. Specifically, let's look at the ridiculous strategy of comparing pitchers and just assigning the win to the ace.

I calculate that the eight teams in the Division Series would have considered these pitchers aces:
Jacob deGrom - Mets
Clayton Kershaw - Dodgers
Zack Greinke - Dodgers
David Price - Blue Jays
Cole Hamels - Rangers
Jake Arrieta - Cubs
Dallas Keuchel - Astros
Johnny Cueto - Royals

We're having a plumbing problem here. I'm not sure the Cardinals would consider John Lackey their ace and you could make a case for the Cubs' Jon Lester. You could certainly argue against Johnny Cueto, but he was brought to K.C. for just that purpose. So that's three Johns at issue.

Let's see how their teams fared when they pitched:
Cueto - 2-0
Price - 1-1
Keuchel - 1-1
Hamels - 1-1
Kershaw - 1-1
Greinke - 1-0
deGrom - 1-0
Arrieta - 1-0

Greinke and deGrom will split tonight's game, so that's a wash. All told, the team sending its ace to the hill went 10-5. That's superb. It's probably unusual. But in any case, it's hardly automatic. You would love 2-1 odds in your favor for the deciding game, but every third time you would lose.

These are still uselessly small samples. But the point is that when you count something as an automatic, as many people do with the #1 arm, the first game winner and the home team, and it turns out to be a 5% advantage, that's a bit of a myth-buster.

And if you know that's a small sample size, then you know enough to examine a large enough sample -- like playoff games all time. In other words, you examine the facts. And that's when you stop predicting games based on who's got the shorter commute.

The Head Ball Coach Quit On His Team

Here in South Carolina, the state deemed too small to be a nation and too large to be an insane asylum, we're finally over the cop killing of an unarmed black man, the mass murder of nine parishioners in their church and historic flooding that closed more than 500 roads from Columbia to Charleston.

Those stories ended yesterday when the head ball coach suddenly retired. The University of South Carolina, like a lot of southern colleges, is a football team with a university attached. The main purpose of its alumni is to buy tickets to football games.

Now that Steve Spurrier has stepped down without warning, everyone connected with the state, and with SEC football, has spent the past two days lionizing him and his 10-year tenure at the helm of the Gamecocks.

Undoubtedly, Spurrier has lifted the 'Cocks to new heights, including three straight 11-2 seasons in the brutal SEC, wins over arch-rival Clemson and prestigious bowl victories. He has recruited half a dozen of the 10 best players the team has ever produced,. including Jadeveon Clowney, Connor Shaw and Marcus Lattimore. And he retires with the most coaching wins at what locals sadly call "USC." He put the program on the college football map.

What no one seems to have noticed is that the head ball coach has quit on his team. He said it himself: he's leaving because he was frustrated by the 7-6 showing last year and thought the team would be better than the league cellar-dwellers it appears to be this year. He doesn't like the losing and so he has quit.

Just like that. Middle of the season. No heir apparent. Facing a string of tough SEC games.

Imagine if a player decided to quit on the team because it stunk. What would the sports media, the people of South Carolina and Gamecock nation be saying? He lacks character. He's a quitter. He's immature. I'm pretty sure Steve Spurrier would have had some cutting remarks for a juvenile outburst like that.

Is the inventor of Fun 'n' Gun allowed to act like a crybaby just because he's got a legacy? If the 'Cocks, already dealing with the upheaval on the field and in the classroom, go winless in the conference this year, what does that do to recruiting?

The local newspaper is selling Spurrier's departure as selfless, allowing the anonymous assistant coach who succeeds him (without any chance of succeeding) an opportunity to turn the club around. It's plump with speculation about the next big name coach, proposing that South Carolina could lure Bob Stoops from Oklahoma or Mark D'Antoni from Michigan State. They assert that the 11-2 records that Spurrier engineered three-to-five years ago have set the bar higher and will draw a bigger name.

Only someone who has never been to Columbia, SC and is not paying attention to the current state of the team could make such a lame suggestion, and yet residents of that squalid town are the only ones doing it.

No, Spurrier has dropped the team on its head in the middle of the season. He took his ball and went home. He has left South Carolina football high and dry, even after 18 inches of rain. It's as if everyone is wearing a visor -- and has it pulled down over their eyes.

...And E-Manager

Following up on yesterday's post about the Utley case, after charging the ump, the replay and the league with errors, today we add Don Mattingly to the party for a grand slam of misjudgments.

When his two-game suspension was announced, Utley promptly appealed, automatically suspending the suspension. Reports asserted that the suits offered Utley a one-game punishment if he'd drop the appeal -- and he took out that offer with a hard slide too.

So with his star second baseman available for duty at Citi Field, where he has hit well, against Matt Harvey, whom he has hit well, manager Don Mattingly sat Utley for Game Three of the series in favor of inferior performers.

While Chase Utley's lawyer was gathering evidence to dismiss the suspension, his manager made it moot by imposing the equivalent of one. And because Stephen Matz, a southpaw, starts Game Four, left-handed hitting Utley will sit again.

Making it, conveniently, a two-game suspension.

So why do we need a hearing?

E-Ump, E-Replay, E-League

What do you call it when everyone gets every possible decision wrong? A grand slam? Taking the collar? E-ump, E-replay, E-league?

That's the dumpster fire that was Chase Utley's leg-breaking slide into Ruben Tejada at second base in Game 2 of the Mets-Dodgers series.

In case you snuck out of the country for a week to a place without a connection to the rest of the world - let's say you were enjoying North Korea's independence celebrations with that nation's inmates -- here's the rundown: With runners on first and third and one out, Utley slid well wide of second on a grounder behind the bag to bust up a double play.

Under any reading of the rules, the slide was illegal. He wasn't aiming for the base but for the fielder and never came in contact with the bag. He should have been ruled out for interference, irrespective of Tejada's broken fibula.

It was also clearly not malicious. Chase Utley has a 15-year record of hard-nosed but principled play. His efforts helped a run score. He deserves the benefit of the doubt, of which there shouldn't be any.

The ump ruled Utley out on a force, but the replay demonstrated that Tejada, because of his awkward positioning, missed the bag. The anonymous replay umpire from behind the curtain in New York overruled the call but didn't propose interference.

No one seems to know what powers the Great Oz in New York has, but someone should have sent Utley off the field. Indeed, they should have ruled the batter out too, because the illegal slide prevented any attempt at turning two. That would have ended the inning and negated the run.

Then, to compound the mistakes, Joe Torre, now an MLB mucky-muck, suspended Utley for two critical games -- maybe the last two of L.A.'s season. That move implies that Utley committed a purposeful act and gave the Mets ammunition for their cries of "dirty play."

There is no evidence for this decision, but plenty to the contrary. The ump, the replay apparition and the suits all got it wrong. Utley and Howie Kendrick should have been out, the inning should have been over, the run shouldn't have scored. And Utley should have been in the on-deck circle preparing to bat against Matt Harvey in Game 3. Sadly, Tejada's leg is broken either way.

Let's hope the rulings don't have much impact on the outcome of the series.

The Injustice of the One-Game Play-In

Think about packing a box to send a birthday gift to a friend. It has six sides, all of them solid. We want to fill the box as much as possible to maximize the gift. 

We're going to place stacks of flat objects in the box that nearly fill it. Then we're going to squish some fist-sized items the consistency of bean bags into the box. They can be molded to any shape but they still take up room. We're running out of room, but we can tear open a couple of those bean bags and disperse most of the beads before tying back up the bag and stuffing it inside.

Man, we really want to cram more stuff in there. It's a flat fee for shipping, so the more we get in, the better the value. But the box is groaning at the seams. In fact, some of the bean bags are poking above the fold. We'll tape it up best we can. It's pretty jerry-rigged.

We could just bring the gifts to our friend but it wouldn't be the same. Every year since forever we have been shipping a box of goodies and it's a nice tradition we want to keep. We could send fewer gifts too, but that's another great tradition.

And that is the baseball's dilemma in a nutshell, or a box.

Baseball is stuck on a 162-game schedule because it's been that way for 54 years. There's nothing magic about 162 games; in fact, with the elimination of double-headers, they don't really fit between harvests in Northern climes with the populations to support Major League teams. They shouldn't be playing baseball in New York, Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee or plenty of other MLB cities in early April or October, particularly at night. But they must. A more sensible 140-game schedule is a non-starter, like Republicans acknowledging that they don't understand science.

So the season spans the months that can barely support a warm-weather sport, and then the playoffs begin and stretch into November, at night, often in places whose winters are debuting. World Series games in those cities are deplorable nonsense. The box is stretched beyond its limit.

Beyond that, baseball has encountered another conundrum. Fans turn tail when their home nine is eliminated in August. It makes for a soul-crushing season and induces them to turn their attention to their alma mater's minor league football team. With the number of baseball teams doubling since 1960, they want more opportunities to get into the post-season tournament. We need to fit ever more into the box.

But the game reveals itself only through the long slog of the season. Any cellar dweller can rattle off a week's worth of wins; any pennant contender can slip up over half-a-fortnight. The tournament, though sometimes enthralling, has lost its ability to determine the "best" team. It merely asserts a champion, whose crown fetches diminishing amounts on ebay.

For the first 68 years of the previous century, the two league winners competed unencumbered by "playoffs" for the World Series crown, with the victor reasonably claiming superiority over all. For another couple of decades, the league split into divisions and each World Series team was forced to defeat its foe from across the Mississippi to earn a slot in the championship. That led to some questionable World Series opponents, but still, they had won a segment of the marathon.

And then the Wild Card, and the playoffs devolved into a series of coin flips. So the regular season is more thrilling but the race to the championship is dishwater. The last teams in are winning the tournament with disturbing regularity. Moreover, the post-season has begun to tear the sides of the box.

To counteract the playoff success of the Wild Card, MLB gave it a twin and ordered a sudden-death play-in. Even more value to the fans and a sense of advantage to the division winners. Alas, the box cannot expand any more. 

There is time for but one game, a winner-take-all. It's that last bean bag, drained of most of its beads. The drama builds but the fairness declines.

After the 98-win Pirates succumbed to Jake Arrieta Wednesday night, voices rose again about extending the play-in to at least three games. But the calendar is inflexible. And so Baseball is pushing up against all six sides of the box. It wants more games than the calendar will hold. It wants more teams in the playoffs but that dilutes the championship. Short playoff series accommodate the seasons but eliminate the best teams more often. Longer series present the opposite dilemma.

The center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. 

And under-girding the entire enterprise is the constant drumbeat of economics, which is never satisfied with too much and must always demand more, more, more. And so the box is splitting and the sensible course of action -- remove some of the contents -- cannot be considered. 

That is the injustice of the one-game play-in. And it is not going away.

Who *Doesn't* Win the NL Cy Young?

If you were Dr. Frankenhurler and conspired to design the next Cy Young winner you would assemble a creature who could eat innings, keep the ball in the park, miss bats, carve up the strike zone, suppress plate crossings and stand tallest when the pressure mounted.

Your monster would be named Jake Arrieta.

I mean Zack Greinke.

Oh Lord. We only have room for one of them. And we haven't even mentioned Clayton Kershaw.

It looks this year like Dr. Frankenhurler used the same template twice. One of these guys is Cy Winner 1.0 and the other 1.1.

Arrieta (22-6, 1.77) and Greinke (19-3, 1.66) both posted cartoon numbers with laser command and a cornucopia of offerings. Each topped 220 innings. Each fanned at least 200 and walked fewer than 50. Both benefited from defense and luck about equally; both are freakish specimens even without serendipity's side effects.

Each spells his first name with four letters and his last with seven, including three vowels. Freaky similar.

Their "Deserved Run Average," a complicated computation that accounts for everything the geeks can think of and weighs most heavily the components of good pitching rather than the results, favors Greinke, 2.17 - 2.31.

That's the difference of one run every 63 innings.

The trajectory of the two pitchers' years provide the greatest contrast: Greinke the model of consistency, Arrieta the charging bull. By now you've heard that Arrieta allowed four runs after the All-Star break. (That includes one complete game play-in, which doesn't count in the voting.) Batters hit .136 and slugged .172 against him in August and September, because he allowed two doubles, a triple and a homer. In two months of work.

Greinke is defined by his worst month, August, during which he went 4-1, 2.45, allowed a .325 SLG and whiffed six times as many batters as he walked. That was the bad month.

Cy Young voters will be swayed by which shiny object most appeals to them, the big kick or the steady speed. The overall numbers tilt ever so slightly to the Dodger, as if the inventor made one small tweak in the form between creations. But one of these guys won't win the award, and we'll shake our heads and wonder what more the good tinkerer could have done.

It's Mike Trout and It's Not That Close

For the fourth consecutive year -- indeed, for the only four years of his career -- Mike Trout will finish in the top two in the MVP race. Also for the fourth time, he should finish first, ahead of a star with bigger traditional numbers. And for the third time, he might finish second.

Josh Donaldson has produced a monster season for the Blue Jays, hitting .298 with 41 homers and a league-leading 123 RBI. He's scored a league-pacing 122 runs too. His OBP-SLG of .373/.571 places him second in the AL in OPS.

Behind Mike Trout, whose .299-41-90 with 104 runs scored and a .400-.588 OBP-SLG gives him 44 points more of OPS.

Here's the comparison, with league-leading numbers in bold.
Trout            .299-41-90   104R .402/.590/.992 176 OPS+ .353 TAv
Donaldson  .297-41-123 122R .370/.569/.939 155 OPS+ .323 TAv

In other words, Donaldson leads in team events because he bats in the middle of that historically-potent Blue Jays lineup. Trout leads in measures of individual excellence.

Both are superb base runners who have not applied that to base stealing. Donaldson has swiped all six of his attempts. Trout, once a 40-steal guy, is just 11 of 18. That's a ding against Trout.

Both light up the web gems highlight reel. Donaldson is generally considered even more special at his position than Trout is at his, but Trout plays the more critical CF to Donaldson's hot corner.

Factoring in their ballparks and strength of opposing pitchers, Trout has produced 8.7 offensive wins for his team, 13% more than Donaldson's 7.7, according to Baseball Reference. Baseball Prospectus has the gap even wider, and rates Trout the better fielder too.

Sentiment had shifted toward Donaldson as he and Toronto heated up while Trout and the Of Anaheims cooled in August. But the tables turned some in September/October as Trout humped it up and his team hung in the playoff race until the last day. Of course, the performance of his teammates should be of no consequence to a player's MVP candidacy: it's not up to him whether the nine wins he adds are wins 71-79 or wins 87-95.

So a voter could cast his vote for Josh Donaldson for 2015 AL MVP and that would be a perfectly reasonable choice. No one could argue that Donaldson didn't deserve it for the quantum leap he's taken this year following his shocking trade from Oakland. It's just that Trout is clearly the better candidate, not by a significant margin, but by enough that everyone ought to recognize it.

Hey! You Missed A Grand Slam!

Watch the crowd at any Major League Baseball game and you'll notice something relatively new: many of the paying customers are not paying attention.

I viewed three random games on the last day of the season. In the shot from behind the pitcher, where maybe the first two rows behind the catcher were visible, I counted 10 people at the Royals-Twins tilt who were clearly unimpressed by the on-field proceedings. Most of them were engaged in conversation. Two of them were looking at or talking on their phones.

At the Astros-Diamondbacks game, where about 10 people get exclusive seats at ground level behind the backstop, one woman was either reading a book or looking at her phone the entire game. Keep in mind, these are precious seats -- front row behind the plate. These tickets cost $100 or more. And she couldn't care less.

I counted about 14 people in the first three rows disengaged from the Dodgers tilt with San Diego, at the very moment Clayton Kershaw was recording his 300th strikeout, the first time that had been accomplished by anyone in more than a decade.

About now you're thinking, so what? So people pay good money to attend baseball games and miss half the game lost in conversation, staring at their phones, taking selfies documenting their attendance or tweeting about the experience they're not experiencing.

So this: You may have noticed that there has been a hue and cry about MLB extending the protective screens around much of the ballpark following a spate of fan beanings by foul balls, wide throws and flying bats. Major League Baseball has been played for 140+ years, yet all of a sudden the number of these incidents has skyrocketed. Why do you suppose that is? Are batters hitting more foul balls? Increasingly losing the grip on their bats? Are fielders wilder with their throws?

No, the problem is that the people in the ballpark are not watching the game. Instead of sticking out the mitt they brought with them to snag a foul fly, they bring their phone to snag a text and get bonked by an errant projectile.

I'm just back from a business trip to Cincinnati and Detroit, where I made sure to take in games at Great American Ballpark and Comerica Field. Both ballparks are exquisite urban parks molded around their downtown cityscapes.  Great American sits on the Ohio Riverfront, connected to Covington, Kentucky and surrounding Ohio towns by throwback bridges reminiscent of the Roberto Clemente in Pittsburgh. It also features neo-smokestacks that spit fire every time a Reds hurler fans an opponent.

Both parks pay homage to their team histories and both feature gigantic, HD video board replete with information about the players on the field. But that's not the main purpose of the video boards.

You see, baseball games are no longer about baseball, or baseball fans. They are about relentless advertising to casual attendees who visit the park for an experience that may include, but is not confined to, and may not even be primarily about, a ballgame. It's phony sausage races and video board competitions. It's blaring music and cheesy interviews from the stands. It's an hour of feting sponsors during the pre-game. (At one point in Cincinnati, General Electric Company, a quarter-trillion dollar business, lauded over the P.A. and shown on the videoboard presenting an oversized check for $7,000 to Muscular Dystrophy. G.E. spends more than that on paper clips each month.)

And it's repeated shots of people kissing and waving and kids dancing, kids dancing, kids dancing.

It's not going to stop, of course, because the teams are filling the stadiums and squeezing every dollar they can from people who pay $75 each to post their birthdays on the scoreboard.

For 100+ years, the zenith of a child's experience at the ballpark was to catch a ball that went into the stands while watching the home nine win. Today, it's getting shown shaking booty on the video board and asking dad on the way home which team won. Fine. But don't cry to me about your broken orbital socket when you get hit by a foul ball you weren't watching.

Why Pitching Stats Are Sketchy: A Case Study From Game 161

"It looks like an infield popup in the boxscore." --Comment about a home run ball snagged by a leaping outfielder.

Besides its towering significance in the standings, still in limbo with a day left in the season, Saturday night's barn burner between the Rangers and Angels was a lesson in how unhelpful even ERA can be, particularly over short stretches like a single season.

In case you hadn't heard, Texas, poised to clinch the AL West before an adoring crowd, broke open a back-and-forth game to establish a 10-6 lead entering the ninth inning. Interim closer Shawn Tolleson, pitching for the fifth straight day, entered the final frame and proceeded to cough up consecutive home runs to Erick Aybar and Kole Calhoun before manager Jeff Bannister correctly cut his losses and handed the ball to veteran reliever Ross Ohlendorf.

After inducing Mike Trout to ground out, Ohlendorf fooled Albert Pujols, who popped up behind first. Poor communication between Mike Napoli and second baseman Rougned Odor led to a collision of gloves and two bags for a hustling Pujols who was inexplicably awarded a double.

Ohlendorf fanned Daniel Murphy, bringing the Rangers to the brink of clinching and reducing the Of Anaheims to playoff life support. He then fooled C.J. Cron into bouncing a 15-hopper to the left of second base that shortstop Elvis Andrus recognized late and failed to retrieve. The Pujols run, which should have been charged to Odor, accrued to Ohlendorf's record.

Next, following a sharp David Freese single, Ohlendorf splattered Carlos Perez's bat on a two-strike pitch. But the ball leaked into shallow center and Cron, who was aboard entirely because of luck, tallied the tying run before a slack-jawed crowd. Charge that run to Ohlendorf.

Up came Johnny Giavotella, who swung awkwardly at a slider and popped a single off the end of his bat, scoring the go-ahead run. Which the record will show was Ohlendorf's fault.

Pitching coach Mike Maddux went to the bullpen after his reliever had failed him, but let's review the record. Ohlendorf allowed one hard hit ball -- Freese's single. His fielders failed to retire Pujols and Cron, and serendipity sang paeans to Perez and Giavotella.  Ohlendorf got ahead on every hitter and made the pitches he wanted. Of his 27 offerings, 21 caught the strike zone.

And yet, Ohlendorf is charged with three runs on five hits, a blown save and a loss in two-thirds of an inning. Those searching for explanations will trot out the old moralizing shibboleths: "he isn't clutch," "he isn't a big game pitcher," "he doesn't have heart," "he chokes," and "he wilts on the big stage," when in fact he faced seven batters and should have recorded six outs. The only missing element of the story is a reliever following him and allowing his baserunners to score.

This outing stands as testament to the need for fielding independent pitching statistics and for measures like Deserved Run Average that separate the results of a pitcher's work from what he can actually control. DRA and its cousins are still relatively primitive and may never achieve their goal of teasing out real pitching acumen, but that is a quest worth the effort.

As a coda to this story, the Rangers did nothing to rescue Ohlendorf in their final at bat. With two outs and Elvis Andrus on first, the runner easily swiped second to place himself in scoring position for a potential tying hit. But Andrus slid past the bag and was tagged out to end the game, and consign Ross Ohlendorf, who did everything his team could ask to salvage the victory, to goat status.

(Double coda: the "winning pitcher" was Jo-Jo Reyes, who threw one seemingly meaningless pitch to record an out in the bottom of the eighth, before Anaheim's Big Adventure began.)

The Too Close To Call

As a young adult, I felt it was my civic duty to investigate every policy issue facing our country and have an informed opinion on each. As I've aged, this need has ebbed, and I'm now perfectly comfortable not having an opinion on some complex issues. I can continue to cast informed votes on representatives and referenda without possessing exhaustive knowledge of every issue upon which they must rule.

When it comes to baseball awards, however, that's exactly the demand we make of voters. They must have a definitive opinion on who is the MVP or the Rookie of the Year, etc. But this year, there is one race in which it's just impossible to distinguish between a couple of candidates.

The AL Cy Young contest pits David Price's Blue Jay brilliance, following a trade from Detroit, against Astro ace Dallas Keuchel, whose season-long excellence stumbled a bit in September.

For the season, Keuchel's 20-8, 2.48 is Cy-worthy. Price is right too -- 18-5, 2.45.

Accounting for ballparks, Keuchel leads in ERA+, 162-161. In other words, the two pitchers allowed the same number of runs.

Price's 4.70 K/BB ratio is slightly superior to Keuchel's 4.24. Pitchers can't control anything as much as they can control walks and strikeouts. So that's a relative feather in Price's ball cap.

Keuchel owns a small edge in WHIP, 1.017-1.076. He's allowing fewer base runners. Because they keep the ball in the park at the same rate, that's one for Keuchel.

Keuchel has pitched 12 more innings, 232-220, which partially accounts for his superior WAR of 7.2 versus Price's 5.9.

The various defensive metrics generally like Houston's defense behind Keuchel better than Detroit and Toronto's defense behind Price. That might partially explain why teams scored 10 unearned runs against Price and only four against Keuchel. Those runs don't show up in ERA. That would seem to tilt towards Keuchel.

But fielding independent pitching measures -- about which you should be a little leery -- suggest Price has "earned" a 2.78 ERA; Keuchel has earned a 2.91.

Now, you make sense of all that. About the only thing we can say about the best pitcher in the American League this year is that it's Dallas Keuchel and David Price. (Oakland's Sonny Gray, 14-7, 2.73, is next best, but he tailed off by summer's end and pretty clearly fell out of the race.) Writers who split their votes are disdained for their indecision, or lack of guts, but in this case I think it's not just defensible, its indicated.

The Myth of Home Field Advantage

The Mets and Dodgers are engaged in a great battle, testing whether their team, or the other team, so dedicated to the proposition of winning the World Series, can long endure. They are met on separate battlefields -- the Mets at Citi Field against Washington and the Dodgers in L.A. versus the Padres. 

A portion of that home field will serve as a final resting place for one team's playoff hopes so that the other team's might live on. 

Is it altogether fitting and proper that they should do this? 

Likewise, the Pirates and Cubs do indirect battle for home field in their one-game play-in. Will people little note, nor long remember, who batted last?

The answer, as even a Phillies fan in Gettysburg can see, is that these are very different questions.

For the season, home teams have emerged victorious roughly 55% of the time. Home cooking, familiarity with the field, a partisan crowd and the final at bat conspire to roughly a 10% advantage. That's not an insignificant edge in a game pitting essentially even teams like Pittsburgh and Chicago in a single, sudden-death tilt.

New York and L.A. are also essentially even, having both played .560 ball this year en route to division titles. But home field conveys so much less advantage to them, even though the Dodgers have won two-thirds of their games at Chavez Ravine and just 45% of their games as the visitor. 

Their series will be five games long. The home team enjoys an advantage if the series goes three or five games. The margin of that edge can be expressed this way: in a 21-game series, the home team can be expected to win 11 times. Not really a game-changer.

In a seven-game playoff, it's so much less significant. In series that end after four or six games, each team will have hosted half the contests. In a five-game set, the lower-ranked team actually has the home field advantage in a 2-3-2 format. 

So home field "advantage" is a small disadvantage in a truncated seven-game series and is a benefit only in the full seven, and even then, worth just 10% in that one game. Because roughly a quarter of series extend to their full measure, homefield accounts for just a 2.5% edge. That's the difference between the Mets at 89-70 and the Dodgers at 90-70, which is where they stand at this writing. Factoring in the home field deficit through Game Five, the total value of the better record is essentially a rounding error.

You'd rather have home field than not, but teams would be much better advised to spend their time arranging their rotations, resting their bullpens, healing the injured and preparing their entire rosters psychologically for the amped emotions of playoff baseball. 

And "analysts" would be better advised to just shut up about home field advantage.

The Latest Unwritten Rule

Like the anonymously invented law that the Heisman Trophy winner has to come from a national championship contender...

Like the suddenly ascendant notion that the Rookie of the Year must perform for a playoff team...

Like the unwritten rule that you don't bunt to break up a no-hitter when your team is down 2-0...

Like the apparent acceptance that there won't be a traveling violation call if you're taking a layup...

...comes another orphan rule, devoid of known parentage, bereft of logic, indefensible beyond the circular reasoning that it exists because it has existed.

It's the latest kerfuffle around Cam Newton's claim that he was told he didn't get a roughing the passer call because he hasn't achieved sufficient status.

We heard for years that umpires afforded extra dispensation on the outside corner for Tom Glavine because he was a great pitcher.

We heard general acceptance of the claim that Michael Jordan got away with more malfeasance than others on the basketball court because he's the Greatest of All Time.

This is evidently accepted wisdom, except for one thing: there's nothing wise about it.

Why should the best players get the benefit of the doubt? Don't lesser players need it most? Who decides when this new status kicks in? Is there some pre-approved matrix of performance and tenure that arbiters consult?

It's all just more nonsense that sometimes serves as gravity in the bizarre sports universe. If your team wants to subscribe to these fabricated truths, it should knock itself out. But my team is bunting against a tough pitcher down 2-0.

The Rookie of the Year Award Isn't About Jake Arrieta

The baseball world is making strides. Local broadcasts show players' OBP and OPS. Most Valuable Player discussions regularly invoke WAR. WHIP and fielding independent measures pepper Cy Young debates. These advanced metrics -- (if you can call them that: OBP and SLG are as old as Yogi Berra, though they didn't storm the shores of Normandy) -- aren't the final word, but they're superior to the old standard of BA-HR-RBI and W-L, ERA.)

It's been gratifying to see that most fans and reporters have begun to digest the argument that a player's value has little to do with his teammates' performance. Unless his world craters in the last 15 games, Bryce Harper will win the MVP award he deserves in a rout, despite the Nationals' 2015 face plant.

Some of the credit for this belongs to MLB itself, which has embraced the new analysis and all the fun tools like Statcast and PitchFX. Articles on MLB.com are replete with references to True Average, WAR, BABIP, FIP and myriad other helpful measuring tools.

Simultaneously though, we're backsliding on that notion in other bailiwicks. Much of the Heisman discussion over the past five years has centered on the best team's best player, rather than on simply college football's standout performer.

Along those lines, I commend to your attention this article from Sports On Earth, a generally excellent site with lots of good insight. In it, the writer suggests that candidacies for the Rookie of the Year award waxed and waned based on team fortunes. We've seen this illogic before.

There is utterly no justification to holding an individual baseball player responsible for the performance of his 24 teammates. Moreover, while some retrograde writers still cower behind the "valuable" nomenclature of the MVP award to denigrate the candidacies of great players on non-contenders, there is no such fig leaf in the Rookie of the Year award. It is simply a measure of the first-year player who has had the best season. Period.

Kris Bryant is almost surely the 2015 NL Rookie of the Year, not withstanding the final 15 games. He's posted a .317 True Average at the plate, defended third base reasonably well and contributed five wins to his team, the best of the freshman lot. That his team will make the playoffs is absolutely, completely and undoubtedly irrelevant.

The Moment the Rangers' Season Turned Around

You may have noticed that the season, and the Texas Rangers, have finally caught up with the youthful Houston Astros. The Rangers have launched themselves into first place in the AL West with a 31-15 record since July 28, when  the Yankees blitzed them 21-5.

It's also two days before the Rangers plucked Cole Hamels out of Philadelphia.

Texas stood five games under .500, eight games out and in third place. 

So as you might imagine, all the talk this week has been about identifying the catalyst for the Rangers' rebirth.

Did the shellacking by New York incite new determination?

Did a players-only meeting light a spark?

Did Hamels bring new energy?

Of course, that's only how it works in Ex Post Facto Analysisland. In real life, teams make large improvements by compiling a series of small improvements until they reach a critical mass.

Certainly Hamels, and the return from injury of Derek Holland, helped. They bumped two replacement-level starters from the rotation. That meant Colby Lewis and Yovanni Gallardo no longer had to shoulder the load.

Consequently, at least in part, the Rangers lopped a run off their ERA after August 1.

In addition, after splitting their first 42 one and two-run games before July 28, Texas captured 17 of 24 close games. Timely hitting and relief pitching can do that.

The offensive juggernaut of the first half hasn't slowed and the defensive metrics say the fielding is up a tick. Put that all together and wheels once stuck in the mud gain traction. It didn't hurt that the Rangers have played 26 of their last 42 against losing teams.

We have a tendency to look for that epiphany, that one moment where the worm turned. We attribute it all to something that correlates with the hot streak without any evidence of causation. You see it all the time with managerial changes, as if a new manager could transform a lousy nine into world beaters in his first day.

Ranger manager Jeff Bannister had it exactly right today when asked what sparked the turnaround. He said Spring Training, where the team adopted a never-quit culture.  That's a far better explanation than a team meeting, a clubhouse presence or a bad loss.

Though acquiring Cole Hamels doesn't hurt.

Joey Votto and the Idiocy of Umpires

With limited instant replay reviews, baseball now has a formula for overturning all kinds of missed umpire calls on the field. Managers can challenge whether fouls balls were called fair, runners were safe, catches were made, and fly balls cleared the fence.

Every case contains within it the implicit recognition that umpires make mistakes, and that getting the call correct is paramount.

Calls cannot be challenged that involve judgment, or that if overturned would cause havoc. For example, if a ball was originally ruled foul, there is no going back and re-running the play if the videotape reveals that it was actually fair (except in the case of a home run.)

There is one glaring and utterly indefensible exception: balls and strikes. The most common and impactful missed call of all is the ball-strike because it alters the tenor of games. Research shows that the strike zone has been expanding over the past few years -- mostly at the lower end -- and with it scoring has contracted. Batters must now defend a larger zone than ever, and must adjust their calculations depending on the whim and idiosyncrasies of the given arbiter on the given day.

What's more, the ball-strike call is not simply a judgment; it appears to be a personal statement. Some umpires are known to have low strike zones, others like the outside pitch, etc., as if strike zones are just a matter of style and preference.

All of which led to this recent outrage by umpire Tim Welke, who chafed at Joey Votto's constant chirping about ball-strike calls, refused to grant him time, and then ran Votto when he complained to his dugout. In fact, replays showed that Votto had reason to gripe about several strike calls that were clearly out of the zone. What made matters worse in this case is that Welke escalated the dispute with his unjustifiable refusal to allow Votto to take time and blow off steam.

All this could be cured with existing technology that can accurately pinpoint the swing-worthiness of every pitch. It is available to television broadcasts, so that everyone watching the game at home knows how embarrassingly often home plate umpires gack up the call, or has imposed his personal preferences over the rule book.

Calling pitches correctly is unfathomably difficult. The ball is small and the strike zone dependent on the size of the batter. Pitches are spinning, moving at 90 mph or more and changing planes often in two directions at once. Research by Scott Lindholm of SB Nation shows that umpires miss the pitch call about 15% of the time, or about 40 times per game. How is that acceptable?

It's long past time to replace umpire decisions with existing technology that that can accurately, definitively and instantaneously determine balls and strikes. It would eliminate the griping that led Joey Votto to request time, Tim Welke to pout and both of them to engage in juvenile pyrotechnics. Not to mention a wholly unwarranted two-game suspension for the Cincinnati star.
 

Matt Williams, Geniu...Um Ditz

Now that the Washington Nationals' 2015 playoff aspirations have been plausibly quashed*, and Matt Williams' boneheaded miscalculations have been picked apart like a Thanksgiving turkey, I have some questions for all the baseball writers who voted him Manager of the Year in 2014.

*I know, this is asking for trouble. But although leads this large have evaporated in shorter periods, the odds are squarely against the Nats, particularly because they have played so miserably all season.

Did the all the smart decisions just leak out of the head of last year's best NL manager?

Or was a he just the random monkey in front of a computer keyboard who produced MacBeth in 2014?

Was he a dope who received too much credit for the team's primacy in the NL last year?

Or is he a genius being unfairly tarred with the brush of his squad's 2015 failure?

Or is he perhaps neither a dope nor a genius, but just muddling along, and happened to be holding the reigns when his team spiked the finish in 2014 (45-23 after the All Star break) and spit the bit in 2015 (22-29 after the All Star break)?

Finally, whichever theory you now subscribe to, how stupid do you feel for electing him Manager of the Year in 2014?

The wildly varying demonstration of skills that should correlate heavily from one year to the next is yet more proof, as if there was any doubt in the first place, that no one has any idea who the best manager is, particularly in a given season, because most of the good work managers do is in the clubhouse, away from public view. Anyone who wants to claim that they know the best managers is going to have to explain why those with reputations as savants -- Joe Maddon, Bruce Bochy, Terry Francona, Mike Scioscia, etc. -- are rarely so honored.

I have the explanation. It's because the honor is meaningless. Abolish the Manager of the Year award.

Chris Davis Regressing To His True Mean

An axiom of prognosticating the future performance of veterans who break out is to regress them back to the mean. Last year, Chris Davis regressed to the mean, the meaner and the meanest, putting his starting job with Baltimore in jeopardy.

This year, the bulky first baseman has found his own true average by mashing like he did in 2013 but without the gaudy average. The point with him is that as long as he goes yard and collects his walks he can be awfully valuable.

Let's take a look at the numbers:

In his first four seasons with Texas and Baltimore, Davis contributed below-average production at the plate while flashing 20-home-run power.

Then in 2013 he raked .286/.370/.634 with a league-leading 53 homers, 42 doubles and 138 RBIs, earning third place in the MVP voting.

Last season, the bottom fell out. His average sank to .196 with 26 home runs. Lumbering and defensively-challenged, Davis was a liability for the Orioles.

If you averaged those two seasons you'd get a .250 batting average with 40 home runs. With 60-70 walks, that's a middle-of-the-lineup Gulliver. Davis was headed that way, but at a lower batting average until he got hot, roughly coinciding with the O's collapse.

Today Chris Davis has the slash line up to .260/.351/.556 with 41 home runs. He's above four wins over replacement at the plate, which puts him at All-Star level with two dozen games yet to play.

When three true outcomes players like Davis -- i.e., he walks, strikes out or homers on most at bats -- get their average up to .260 they radically enhance their value, even beyond their own stat line. Opposing pitchers have to account for him every time the top of the order rolls around because of the damage he can do. That means pitching more carefully to everyone else, which leads to more opportunities up and down the lineup.

Davis is unlikely to ever again crush the record books the way he did two years ago. But .260 with 70 walks and 40 home runs will do just fine.

The Controversy Around Harvey, the Rabbit

In the 1950 movie "Harvey" Jimmy Stewart's character keeps the world at bay with his invisible six-foot tall rabbit, Harvey.

In 2015, the Mets kept pennant talk at bay with an invisible six-foot controversy about Harvey, the pitcher. It seems that his doctor and agent want him to return home after hurling a definitive number of innings. The Mets, on the other hand, want Harvey available for either the playoffs, or for the race that will punch their ticket.

Harvey for his part, appears to  be listening to whoever spoke to him last.

It's obvious that both sides have reason for concern. In his first year following elbow surgery, Harvey might be medically fragile and need to avoid throwing while fatigued. This has got to be a consideration for the team as well, which receives no benefit from his massive talent if he's laid up again.

The Strasburg experiment, followed by the Nationals' ineptitude this campaign, has sucked the justification out of speculative benching during a post-season run. The Mets are going to need their 6'4" righty to succeed in the playoffs.

And so, the obvious and predictable conclusion. Terry Collins has the starters in a six-man rotation, with Harvey skipping some starts. But if they make the playoffs -- which now seems likely -- all of Gotham will be relying on its Dark Knight. 

After all, Harvey the movie had a happy ending.

P.S. With their come-from-ahead collapse last night, Washington is now six out with 24 to play. But keep in mind, the Mets held a seven game cushion in '07 with 17 to play before crashing out of October. Those screams last night at Nationals Park were the Fat Lady's sister singing.

Long Games and Low Scoring? Think Football, Not Baseball

People who don't understand baseball complain that a game takes too long and produces insufficient scoring. While the pace of the game is often unnecessarily sluggish -- weighted down by ceaseless pitching changes and bizarre batting rituals -- this criticism is more reasonably leveled at America's most popular sport.

Exhibit A this weekend was BYU's unfathomable 33-28 thriller over Nebraska. In case you missed it, the Cornhuskers led all the way until a last-second Hail Mary heave that they somehow failed to defend.

Sounds like riveting viewing, right? Except it suffered from all the maladies attributed to "boring" baseball:
1. The contest was completed in regulation and took three hours and 45 minutes.
2. Every single play was followed by, as George Will has pointed out, a committee meeting.
3. The final score was, in baseball terms, 5-4.

It's counter-intuitive but true: football involves less scoring than baseball. It just obscures its offensive anemia in two ways. First, when a team fails to do the equivalent of plate a run, it has a back-up option: kick a field goal. This is akin to baseball teams getting credit for half a run every time a runner reaches third.

Second, it awards crooked numbers for its scores. So Nebraska, which tallied four touchdowns (and four of those formalities called extra points, which are the equivalent of a butt slap from the third base coach), boasts a 28-point outburst. When a baseball team manufactures four scores per game, we decry their middling offense.

For its part, BYU crossed home four times (skipping the formality of the tushy touching at game's end) and reached third twice, for the margin of victory. Yawn.

That the game ended with a blown save by the defensive secondary in the most dramatic fashion shouldn't obscure the fact that the game suffered from the very characteristics that dog baseball in the public's eye.

Was that game an anomaly? At the very same time, , Alabama spent more than three hours defeating Wisconsin 4 1/2 - 2 1/2, Auburn held on for a three-hour-plus 4 1/2 -3 1/2 victory over Louisville, and Notre Dame needed more than three hours to smother Texas 5 1/2 - 1/2. And because there's a clock limiting late game possibilities, utter futility attended an entire quarter of that game. 

And all those yards they chew up? Cubbie third baseman Kris Bryant's latest bomb accounted for 185 yards on one play alone. Baseball is exciting. Football needs to speed up play.

Sports Predictions Are Like Confedrate Money: Worthless

This is the time of year that pundits make their predictions for the college and professional football season. It's a fascinating study in recurrent, global amnesia. And its lessons apply to punditry in all sports.

Take the college prognosticators who are busy predicting who will compete in this season's four-team championship tournament. Let's examine their myths and the truths:

Myth:  Determine the four best teams and you have your playoff.
Truth: Have you never witnessed a college football season? One or two plays can transform a team's season and launch them into or out of a championship. Consider the bizarre occurrences that put Auburn in the title game two years ago.

Myth: The team with the most talent going into the season is the best team.
Truth: Have you already forgotten Cam Newton? Honey Badger? Robert Griffin? Maurice Clarett? Jameis Winston? Johnny Manziel?  These relatively unheralded freshmen catapulted their teams to greater heights than anyone thought possible at season's start.

Myth: If you can name all the biggest stars and quote their gaudy statistics you have insight about which team will sweep through its schedule.
Truth: Even the "analysts" spewing this nonsense know it's not true. They know that an offensive or defensive line, whose accomplishments are hard to measure, can have an immense impact.

Myth: To determine the playoff teams, first determine which of the five BCS leagues will fail to earn a bid.
Truth: Were you not alive during the two-team playoff era? Because way back then (20 months ago), two teams from the same league played for the title several times. In addition, even last year the weak ACC produced an undefeated team, which made the playoffs. So two or even three leagues could fail to produce a single title contender if a team from a smaller league routs its opponents and garners a bid.

Myth: Determine a team's record by examining its schedule and figuring how many times they will be the underdog.
Truth: Sure, that's how it works. There are never any upsets in college football. Boise State never beat Oklahoma in the '05 Fiesta Bowl. Oregon State didn't take down undefeated USC in 2008. Navy didn't best Notre Dame in '07. App State never defeated Michigan. Jacksonville State's win against Ole Miss five years ago never happened. Neither did Utah over Alabama in the '08 Sugar Bowl. Or Division 1-AA  James Madison over Virginia Tech that same year.  Ohio State didn't take the championship from Miami in '03. Need I go on?

Myth: A team will win its league because it plays its tough opponents at home.
Truth: Which means it plays its weak opponents on the road. So a crippling loss to an inspired squad exhorted by a gleeful crowd is far more possible.

Myth: The experts know anything.
Truth: Thank goodness they don't or the season would be predictable. Did you know that Ohio State has earned the top pre-season perch seven times in the past and won the NCCA championship exactly none of them?

The best prediction you're going to read about the college football season:
Some unexpected things are going to happen. Yay.