Why Doesn’t Billy Beane’s Shit Work In The Playoffs?

The good people at Baseball Prospectus, in their fine book “Baseball Between the Numbers,” which I can’t recommend highly enough, tried to come up with a way to look at what qualities correlated with success in the postseason. They somewhat arbitrarily gave each team 3 points for making the postseason, and then +1/-1for every victory/loss, and a bonus of like 10 points for winning the World Series. They called these Playoff Success Points, and then looked at the correlation between various team qualities (prior playoff experience, number of veteran players, team offense, strikeout rate for the top 3 starters, etc) and the number of PSPs.

Common baseball wisdom is that Wild Card teams in particular can enter the playoffs “on a roll,” and streak their way to a championship. But one of the things that the Prospectors found did not correlate at all with postseason success was a team’s record in the last month of the season. In fact, there was a slight negative correlation between a team’s record over the last month of the season and subsequent playoff success, meaning that the teams that performed the best after September 1st were less likely to advance than teams that slumped into the playoffs.

Of course, often it’s the really good teams that back their way into the postseason. Clinching early, resting starters, and starting the B-team are probably what caused that slump in the first place.

Having said that, I was still really happy when the Mets won their last four in a row. At the very least, it means that I won’t have to hear my friend Paul give me any crap about following the team with the second-best record in New York.