When asked about the baseball playoffs, now that the Yankees are out of the postseason, about who I liked or thought would make it to the World Series, my answer probably was more a reflection of who I wanted to make it out of those final four teams. I was feeling Milwaukee versus Detroit; a Great Lakes World Series.
How cool that would be, I imagined.
Well, it turns out to be the other two teams, St. Louis versus Texas, and I'm ambivalent. I don't have the a hate on for the Rangers, or the Cardinals, so I guess the real storylines are: will the Rangers win their first or will Pujols win his second?
I only wanted to bring this up for a quick second to tie it together with some ideas I've been having that were inspired by Moneyball, the movie about the book of the same name. Really, the ideas were inspired by conversation about the movie, that itself was inspired by the book about the Oakland A's general manager, Billy Beane, exploiting inefficiencies in the market.
That's all Moneyball is; an economics book about how a guy had some marginal success exploiting inefficiencies in the market he operated in. Nobody valued on-base percentage. So Billy Beane went out and picked up a bunch of players with high OBP and turned a seemingly motley crew of ballplayers into a playoff team.
The irony that got me thinking is that the A's have had something like four losing seasons in a row and since exposing the market inefficiency they really haven't had anymore successes. The 20-game winning streak that year notwithstanding, they never won a single playoff series during that span.
Recently the market inefficiency that everyone thought was undervalued was defense. Some small budget or small market (or both, sometimes) teams decided they could field competitive teams by locating outstanding defensive players and snatching them up at bargain rates.
One thing overlooked by this rubric is that defense is half the game; offense is the other half. If these great defensive players were even mediocre on offense they'd be all-stars and MVP candidates every year.
The best example of a team that got snake-bit by this is the Seattle Mariners. In 2010 the baseball world awaited the coming of the Mariner season to see how their defense and pitching philosophy would play out.
They lost 101 games.
I read somewhere that the Brewers this year had bucked the trend of adding defense (it wasn't only the Mariners who went in that direction, it's just they went all in with pitching and defense and their spectacular failure cost their GM his job). The Brew-crew out in Milwaukee had lots of clubhouse chemistry, swagger, offensive power, as well as the best record while playing at home. They also were one of the worst fielding teams in the game, and easily the worst fielding team in playoffs in recent memory.
It wouldn't matter, we were told, since their starting pitching was above average, they played so well together, played so well at home, and could just kill the ball, putting numbers up on the scoreboard like me snoozing my phone in the mornings.
They lost tonight. At home. Their season's over.
In the last two games--both losses--they committed seven errors.
Seven.
All defense isn't the answer. Neither is no defense.
No comments:
Post a Comment