Quote:
Originally Posted by SNR
Here's a separate question (not in reference to trades messing up team chemistry):
Detroit may not have tanked, but they clearly had a slump in the last two months of the regular season last year. Is that for the same reason?
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Most likely.
It's more sophisticated than either side paints it. Old school baseball folks will say that they had issues with chemistry, or that they choked.
Analytics-only people will say it was merely an aberration provided by a small sample size.
The latter argument is about 90% correct, IMO, but that last ten percent does matter. Part of what causes variation in play is the fact that pitching and hitting are dynamic movements that require incredibly precise timing.
Last year people in this thread were talking about how hot Nori Aoki was because he had a batting average well over .300 in September. The truth was that he was still hitting the same number of grounders that he always did, but that they were finding holes at a much higher rate than normal. His BABIP was well over .400 in September. That's not a repeatable skill; it's luck. That's the same reason why your team got rid of Frasor, who wasn't nearly as good as his ERA and why you should bench Young (who isn't either).
The vast majority of the time when people are complaining about a player playing like shit they're really bitching about randomness in a small sample size.
There are certain things you can't control in baseball, like hit sequencing. Both teams can play a game where they have eight base hits, but if the first team has one an inning and every one comes with two outs, they aren't scoring any runs, whereas if the second team has eight hits in a row they could easily score seven runs in the inning.
Two box scores: 7 8 0 and 0 8 0 .
Who really hit the ball better? Almost everyone would say team A, and they might be right, but it's not as clear as one would believe.
Baseball is not unlike origin myths. People invent narratives to explain things they can't understand--"This guy is so much better because he got confidence last year," because it provides an easily digestible fiction they can pass off as authoritative.
People said that about David Freese after 2011 and it wasn't true. Freese had a great 2012 because he was healthy the entire year and finally had a solid amount of big league experience. People are saying it about Lorenzo Cain this year. The truth is, given his relative inexperience in baseball growing up he's at the place in his aging curve where one would expect peak production.
It doesn't fit the flowery narrative, but unlike said narrative, it's actually supported by empirical evidence, not bullshit.