When They Were Kings

Let's start back in with baseball, since it's where I'm having the easiest time catching up. Here's Joe Sheehan, explaining why Yankee fans shouldn't be disheartened to see their team turning into this decade's answer to the late-'90s Atlanta Braves, a good team bounced again and again in the first round of the playoffs:

A more concrete problem is that postseason series, best-of-five or best-of-seven sprints, are poor tools for separating the evenly matched teams that play them. The gaps between even the best and the worst playoff teams are small when reduced to a week’s worth of games.

Last year, the Mets (97-65) met the Cardinals (83-78) in the National League Championship Series. That 14-victory gap made it seem as if the Mets should be a big favorite. In fact, that difference amounted to one victory every two weeks or so during the season. That is inconsequential over the course of a postseason series. The Cardinals went on to win the pennant and the World Series.

If a 14-victory advantage can be negated in a playoff series, how does one make meaningful distinctions when four contenders finish with 94 to 96 victories, as in the American League this year?

This is a crucial question for the Yankees. They were 12-1 in postseason series from 1996 to 2000 on their way to four World Series championships; they have since gone 5-7, with two World Series appearances and no titles. The Yankees have been eliminated in the first round the last three seasons.

When looking at the big picture, though, the Yankees’ recent futility does not stand out. What is notable and unusual is their four championships in five years. The correlation between regular-season quality and postseason success is weak, and the Yankees’ achievements from 1996 to 2000 are a statistical anomaly.

Like most wonky baseball fans of my generation, I'm much more likely to call some highly unlikely development - like, for instance, the play of the Colorado Rockies over the last four weeks - a statistical anomaly and leave it at that than to wax eloquent about how the anomalous team or player has more "heart," or somehow just "knows how to win." In the case of those all-conquering late-'90s Yankees teams, though, I turn into a grizzled old scout, shaking my head and muttering about intangibles. With the exception of the 114-win '98 team, none of those Yankee squads were obviously head and shoulders above the competition as far as regular-season stats were concerned; Sheehan notes that they "featured power pitching, good defense and a great closer," all of which "correlate well with postseason success," but you could say the same of other ninety-win teams, in that era and others, that didn't come close to pulling off what the Yankees pulled off. Which would ordinarily lead me to call their run a fluke - except that I was there, I saw them play, and against all my pro-stathead instincts, I'd bet a not-insubstantial sum of money that if you replayed the postseasons of 1998, 1999 and 2000 a hundred or a thousand times over, those Yankee teams would win through many more times than the statistics suggest they would. It makes me cringe to say it, but I really do think that particular combination of players just, well, knew how to win, like no team I've seen before or since.

And God, I hated them for it.

Photo by Flickr user Dennis used under a Creative Commons license.

Comments

You demonstrated why you are a go-to person on the web by restarting with baseball.

This is coming from a Dodger's fan: Colorado's last 21 games are partly fluctuation. But the NL west has a many good teams so Colorado's play all year got hidden by the Dodgers (who started strong before collapsing after Randy Wolf's injury) and Arizona and San Diego. Asymmetrical scheduling hides good teams in strong divisions.

Earl Weaver said something like the formula for winning is "pitching, fundamentals, and three-run homers". True enough and Colorado is hitting the ball and they are in a groove.

Colorado did get flukey, but they have a fine baseball team.

Posted by Chris J | October 15, 2007 3:13 PM

One of the greatest things about baseball is how it brings us all together. I can feel at best qualified agreement with almost everything else Ross writes, but this column gets a "Right on, brother!".

Posted by Mike | October 15, 2007 4:06 PM

Nice to have you, well, back.

Posted by anon | October 15, 2007 4:10 PM

Weclome back, Ross. Congrats on joining the ranks of the happily married. I think, however, that you're wrong here. I tend to think it's more likely that (except for the 114 win team, which was a juggernaut) the Yankees were a very good team that also had a marvelous string of good luck than that Scott Brosius and Tino Martinez and Paul O'Neill and Jim Leyritz, etc., had some pixie dust-ish quality that allowed them to elevate their games in the playoffs.

As you obviously know, humans are notoriously bad at analyzing statistical phenomena based on subjective experience. People wouldn't believe in things like heart, intangibles, knowing how to win, etc., if they didn't feel true. But a lot of things feel true that aren't. Same goes, I think, for the Yanks of that era.

Posted by Led | October 15, 2007 5:04 PM

Welcome back, old married guy.

I work with statistics for a living, but I think there's quite a lot to be said for the intangible, unquantifiable aspects of a team, especially in the postseason. Chemistry, experience, professionalism, maintaining the right attitude under stress... all that and more.

The '98-'00 Yankees didn't have any pixie dust... they just had a damned good baseball team. They got lucky in 2000 when they won only 87 games and got hot at the right time, but I don't think there's any doubt that the '99 team was the heavy postseason favorite... even though there were other teams who looked nearly as good on paper.

I suppose perhaps the best way to put it is that there is no such thing as a mystical ability to "elevate your game" in the postseason. But there is such a thing as a choke job. Some people get nervous and psych themselves out under stress. Some people slack off when the stakes are low but improve their focus when a deadline approaches. Some people dwell on failure, others put it behind them quickly. That's just human psychology, and you can't quantify these things by looking at regular season statistics.

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | October 15, 2007 6:28 PM

Baseball's been around for a while, right? All you need to do is, for all the teams competing during the playoffs, to compare the ratios of wins during the season versus during the playoffs over the last 100+ years to see if the ratios hold constant.

If the best teams actually do better than their regular season records would predict (as I suspect is the case), then it could be because the best teams don't try as hard to win during the season (resting pitchers, etc), and so they are actually better than their records suggest.

Posted by Jim W | October 16, 2007 10:00 AM

First, as others have said, you're being a bit dense about the mysterious championship aura of the late 90's Yankees. They got very lucky in 1996 (a botched double play by Rafeal Belliard, pass interference in RF by the umpire, etc.) They were really good from 1998-2000 but they got lucky on the playoff draw. Nothing more, nothing left. They could have just as easily have been the Mariners squad that won 118 games in the real season and then got bounced by a wild-card atrocity. That's the playoff system MLB has set up. It's a crap shoot. That the Yankees rolled sevens four out of five years isn't a special fact about them. It's just the weirdness of random chance.

Also, for the record, the Braves were not bounced early very often in the 90s. You're probably misremembering the tail end of their run, the early 2000s. The Braves won playoff series left and right in the early 90s. The went to World Series after World Series. It wasn't until 2000 that they were ever bounced in the first round.

Posted by Sam Hutcheson | October 16, 2007 10:54 AM

Jim W.: Before 1969, there was only the World Series, so in each league the pennant winner was also the best regular-season team. The present system with wild cards is even newer, going back only to 1995.

Posted by James Kabala | October 16, 2007 3:48 PM

Led is correct, people clearly recall events that confirm their overall thesis or ideology, not necessarily actual events. Read Tom Gilovich's "How We Know What Isn't So" (Yes I read books by Ivy League
wonks/psyc profs, I have done it a "few" times, it's not a habit)

But Ross, didn't the Yanks lose in 4?

Posted by Jozef | October 17, 2007 7:48 AM