Baseball Prospectus just had a free week, where you got to taste the offerings if you aren’t a subscriber. This story by Joe Sheehan has a chart that shows standings for one-run games and regular games. His point seems to be, well, let him tell it: ” What follows are two sets of standings: record in one-run games, and record in other games. I think it’s illustrative of the point that the latter is more indicative of team quality than the former.
Record in one-run games is essentially the team version of player performance in whatever clutch situation (late-inning pressure situations, runners in scoring position, et al) you care to measure. It’s not predictive, and is generally unrelated to overall quality. Within a season, however, it is valuable and can be the difference between success and failure.”
If the archive is free, however, take a look at the standings. The Blue Jays are atop the AL East standings, if you take out their pitiful record in one-run games. And the Marlins are neck and neck with the Braves in games that aren’t determined by one run. It is a canard that a team’s record in one-run games is determined more by luck than anything else, but that doesn’t mean those records are completely determined by it’s luck. It’s just flashier to imply that they are.
Our problem is that we tend to take the limited knowledge we have about the game, based always on small samples, and try to extrapolate greater knowledge. The guys at BP hit this wall every day because their whole reason for being is to demonstrate that the oundation of baseball is scientifc (or at least mathmatically consistent). But while this approach helps illuminate all sorts of bad thinking about the game, as Bill James demonstrated a long time ago, almost every effort since to extend that realm further based on the science of baseball statistics falls flat, because in reality the margins are so wide that at any given moment anything can happen.
It seems the game is a lot like poker. Skill matters, for sure, but the really interesting thing is trying to figure out how much it can encroach on the dominion of luck. Which is why the game is so darned fun to follow, and why Sheehan shouldn’t waste his time explaining what made him write off the Astros and A’s back in May. The answer? Showbiz, baby. He’s providing it, his readers are buying it.