Whether the “big star” theory for large-market dominance in the postseason is bs or not, the fact remains that high-salaried teams tend to win the World Series. Since 2015, only two World Series winners (‘15 Royals and ‘17 Astros) did not rank among the top 10 in salaries, and five ( those two plus ‘19 Nats, ‘21 Braves, and ‘22 Astros) did not rank in top 5.
I hope the Brilliant Readers will indulge me for a moment. But for reasons, I think that this belongs here just about as well as anywhere.
In the late 1990s, I was a frequent poster quote unquote wasting my time on several on-line baseball discussion sites. Most of that was at what was originally called Baseball Boards and later, after application of some private equity money, Fanhome. There were individual boards within the larger entity for discussion of each team as well as more general ones including some top-flight discussion of the then state of the art sabermetrics. It was there that MGL was first working through UZR or that Patriot was writing about BaseRuns or Tangotiger conceptualized and RallyMonkey digitized early versions of WAR. As a Braves fan, I was on that board mostly, kibbitzed around on the more heavily traveled other team boards particularly the two NYC teams, and, as a charter member of the 'liberal arts wing' of the sabermetric movement, enjoyed reading there too.
One of the other posters with whom I would have occasional discussions was a fellow who went by the moniker 'trane. He was, as one may be able to guess, a devoted fan of John Coltrane and would chat about jazz on the culture & music discussions. He was also an obsessive Yankee fan, but I didn't hold that against him. And he was madly in love with his wife and young daughter. In one message thread when others were talking about attractive actresses and models, he simply said that to him, his wife was the most beautiful woman in the world.
Dennis Gomes worked for Fidelity Trust in the South Tower. His last login to Fanhome was several minutes before the first plane struck. He, with thousands of others, lost his life on that day 25 years ago.
It is odd how folks I only know of via the pixels on the screen can become friends. I miss him still.
Joe wrote: "I really do wish that Tampa Bay and Milwaukee, should they finish with the best record in their respective leagues, would get more than a first-round bye. But, heck, you know me. I’d put them right in the World Series."
This made think of a new idea for the postseason: at the end of the regular season, the team with the best record in the AL would face the team with the best record in the NL in a best-of-9 series, with the winner becoming the Season Champions. They get a trophy, a champagne celebration, etc.
At the same time, the other division winners and the top 4 teams with the best records (8 teams) would compete in a postseason tournament, but the Season Champion would advance directly to the World Series, where they would meet the winner of the postseason playoff tournament in a best-of-7 series to determine the World Series champion, same as usual.
This would reward the teams with the best records over the long season and let them face off in a dramatic series with big stakes, but still keep the big October postseason tournament that MLB loves for the money, so it isn't going anywhere.
Junior Caminero seems to get no love and attention for MVP. Is he too young? Does he play too much in front of no one for Tampa? His offensive numbers aren't too much different than Yordan's and he's a 0.6 DWAR defender, second in the AL (Durbin). Doesn't Tampa have the best record in the league and he's there best and most important player?
Here’s a compromise to consider to make the regular season count more: why not let the team with the best record in each league automatically make the LCS? Then let the rest of the teams fight it out. If you want to get cute, you can even add another playoff team to even out that bracket.
This is *my* shouting at clouds moment, but I wish folks would stop using the terms "big market" and "small market." No one really means the market size. They mean the ability of a team to spend based, in part but only in part, on the raw size of the market as well as other factors such as history of the franchise and nature of the owners. There is overlap to team spending, but not a 1:1 relationship to metro or television market size.
This is the problem with wildcards: they change the regular season from a contest to see who is the best, to a contest to see who is sixth-best.
So, here's my random thought from the weekend. The Brewers clinched a playoff berth, but they deferred the champagne-shower celebration. They poured a glass, raised a toast, and had speeches about how there's still work to be done.
And that's as it should be, I suppose. Simply making the playoffs is not such a big deal -- 40% of all teams will do so. But what *will* they celebrate? What is the "work still to be done"?
There's the division title, and sitting 10 games up with 12 to play, that's a forgone conclusion. But division titles rarely affect the seeding, and this year in the NL they definitely won't, so not a big deal.
Then there's finishing with the best record, securing home-field advantage through the playoffs and possibly the Series. But they're only 2.5 up on the Dodgers and the Rays. Heck, they're only 5 up on the Braves. It's not likely, but they're only one bad week away from making the playoffs without ever celebrating anything.
If I were them, I'd go ahead and have the champagne party when they win the division. It doesn't change the seeding, but it's always great to beat your rivals.
Bob Feller was a truly great pitcher. And Bob Feller was truly inner circle, Mt. Rushmore, pinnacle of Old Man Shouting at Clouds. He hated how the game changed by the 90s and 00s before his death. Now? After pulling out the card from his wallet that shows his projected stats but for his service in the US Navy, then charging an appearance fee at the card show, he'd be bonkers crazed at the modern usage.
...
I was recently along the Gulf Coast and stopped by the USS Alabama battleship museum. There is a small display featuring Feller's service aboard the ship. Kinda cool.
I've always loved that Bob Feller's "projected" stats for the time he missed at war basically conveniently don't mention that, as soon as he returned home, he had that one MONSTER season in '46, and then his arm fell off and he wasn't ever that big of a pitcher again. How much of that was overuse in '46? How much was he ABLE to pitch that well after three years' rest? How much of it was that he just turned into a pumpkin at age 29? We'll never know... and neither did he. But WAR and stats like it reveal that his run from '47-'51 was nowhere near as great as people assumed it to be at the time, based purely on W-L totals. He won 92 games in that 5-year span, which is FABULOUS. But only 15.5 bWAR, which is... like any THREE-season run of Justin Verlander's career. And you don't have to believe in WAR to see that his ERA was in the mid-3.00s rather than the 2.00s during that span. This is not to knock Bob Feller as a pitcher; clearly, one of the greatest of all-time. And incredibly impressive that he gave up a lucrative career as a famous baseball player to fight for his country. Nonetheless, the "projected stats" thing was probably both mathematically unsound... and also a little pathetic.
The rules say pitchers can win the MVP, yet I’d say the voting class has evolved the award to being for position player. Judge clearly buys into that. I actually find it refreshing he’s basically stated that. Clearly a large enough block of the BBWAA feels similar. I don’t agree with it, but that’s where we’re at.
I felt that way about Maddux in '95. With the passage of time, I guess I'm glad that Barry Larkin got an award as otherwise, he could have been in the Alan Trammell bin of overlooked greatness. But Doggie was *easily* the best player in the NL that year.
Remember how George King of the New York Post left off Pedro completely in 1999... even though he'd voted for two pitchers the previous year? Almost as if that New York sportswriter had some sort of anti-Red Sox bias...
Also, LaVelle Neal didn't believe in voting for pitchers at all. Which... you know... the rules say you MUST consider. So it's not a great look, that Pedro vote.
There's a real irony that 1999 was one of Jeter's absolute best years (the Yankees won 98 games without an ace starting pitcher, his OPS was basically 1.000, and he led AL hitters in WPA) and he somehow finished *6th* in the MVP vote.
Obviously, Pedro deserved the MVP that year. It's a silly thing to argue about. (The 1999 Red Sox had Pedro, Nomar, and no one else remarkable, and still won 94 games.) But the whole ballot makes no sense.
I will contribute to Bill James' theory and attribute at least some of the decline in doubles and triples to the obsession with "launch angle" by players, commentators and coaches. It is a very fickle data point, and its significance is somewhat arbitrary. I wonder how many coaches screw up a hitter's stroke and value by trying to teach players to elevate their launch angle. I don't think Eddie Murray paid a lot of attention to launch angle and instead paid more attention to knocking a line drive through the outfield wall in Baltimore.
A line drive IS a launch angle, though; it's the angle they teach people to swing for. It's the ANGLE at which the ball LAUNCHES off the bat. I truly don't understand why people bring this up. Did Eddie Murray know the numerical value of his average launch angle? Certainly not. But did he try to hit the ball not too high so it pops up and not too low so it isn't a grounder? Definitely.
Whether the “big star” theory for large-market dominance in the postseason is bs or not, the fact remains that high-salaried teams tend to win the World Series. Since 2015, only two World Series winners (‘15 Royals and ‘17 Astros) did not rank among the top 10 in salaries, and five ( those two plus ‘19 Nats, ‘21 Braves, and ‘22 Astros) did not rank in top 5.
He never told us what pitcher got the one first place MVP vote :(
I hope the Brilliant Readers will indulge me for a moment. But for reasons, I think that this belongs here just about as well as anywhere.
In the late 1990s, I was a frequent poster quote unquote wasting my time on several on-line baseball discussion sites. Most of that was at what was originally called Baseball Boards and later, after application of some private equity money, Fanhome. There were individual boards within the larger entity for discussion of each team as well as more general ones including some top-flight discussion of the then state of the art sabermetrics. It was there that MGL was first working through UZR or that Patriot was writing about BaseRuns or Tangotiger conceptualized and RallyMonkey digitized early versions of WAR. As a Braves fan, I was on that board mostly, kibbitzed around on the more heavily traveled other team boards particularly the two NYC teams, and, as a charter member of the 'liberal arts wing' of the sabermetric movement, enjoyed reading there too.
One of the other posters with whom I would have occasional discussions was a fellow who went by the moniker 'trane. He was, as one may be able to guess, a devoted fan of John Coltrane and would chat about jazz on the culture & music discussions. He was also an obsessive Yankee fan, but I didn't hold that against him. And he was madly in love with his wife and young daughter. In one message thread when others were talking about attractive actresses and models, he simply said that to him, his wife was the most beautiful woman in the world.
Dennis Gomes worked for Fidelity Trust in the South Tower. His last login to Fanhome was several minutes before the first plane struck. He, with thousands of others, lost his life on that day 25 years ago.
It is odd how folks I only know of via the pixels on the screen can become friends. I miss him still.
https://www.legacy.com/legacy/memorial/dennis-gomes
Joe wrote: "I really do wish that Tampa Bay and Milwaukee, should they finish with the best record in their respective leagues, would get more than a first-round bye. But, heck, you know me. I’d put them right in the World Series."
This made think of a new idea for the postseason: at the end of the regular season, the team with the best record in the AL would face the team with the best record in the NL in a best-of-9 series, with the winner becoming the Season Champions. They get a trophy, a champagne celebration, etc.
At the same time, the other division winners and the top 4 teams with the best records (8 teams) would compete in a postseason tournament, but the Season Champion would advance directly to the World Series, where they would meet the winner of the postseason playoff tournament in a best-of-7 series to determine the World Series champion, same as usual.
This would reward the teams with the best records over the long season and let them face off in a dramatic series with big stakes, but still keep the big October postseason tournament that MLB loves for the money, so it isn't going anywhere.
Junior Caminero seems to get no love and attention for MVP. Is he too young? Does he play too much in front of no one for Tampa? His offensive numbers aren't too much different than Yordan's and he's a 0.6 DWAR defender, second in the AL (Durbin). Doesn't Tampa have the best record in the league and he's there best and most important player?
"Rest vs. rust" might be the best example of a BS ad hoc reasoning. You can play it either way
Here’s a compromise to consider to make the regular season count more: why not let the team with the best record in each league automatically make the LCS? Then let the rest of the teams fight it out. If you want to get cute, you can even add another playoff team to even out that bracket.
This is *my* shouting at clouds moment, but I wish folks would stop using the terms "big market" and "small market." No one really means the market size. They mean the ability of a team to spend based, in part but only in part, on the raw size of the market as well as other factors such as history of the franchise and nature of the owners. There is overlap to team spending, but not a 1:1 relationship to metro or television market size.
I hope that whatever is making today hard gets easier tomorrow.
This is the problem with wildcards: they change the regular season from a contest to see who is the best, to a contest to see who is sixth-best.
So, here's my random thought from the weekend. The Brewers clinched a playoff berth, but they deferred the champagne-shower celebration. They poured a glass, raised a toast, and had speeches about how there's still work to be done.
And that's as it should be, I suppose. Simply making the playoffs is not such a big deal -- 40% of all teams will do so. But what *will* they celebrate? What is the "work still to be done"?
There's the division title, and sitting 10 games up with 12 to play, that's a forgone conclusion. But division titles rarely affect the seeding, and this year in the NL they definitely won't, so not a big deal.
Then there's finishing with the best record, securing home-field advantage through the playoffs and possibly the Series. But they're only 2.5 up on the Dodgers and the Rays. Heck, they're only 5 up on the Braves. It's not likely, but they're only one bad week away from making the playoffs without ever celebrating anything.
If I were them, I'd go ahead and have the champagne party when they win the division. It doesn't change the seeding, but it's always great to beat your rivals.
Would Bob Feller have changed his mind about pitching MVPs if he knew the pitcher to get a first place vote only won ten games?
Bob Feller was a truly great pitcher. And Bob Feller was truly inner circle, Mt. Rushmore, pinnacle of Old Man Shouting at Clouds. He hated how the game changed by the 90s and 00s before his death. Now? After pulling out the card from his wallet that shows his projected stats but for his service in the US Navy, then charging an appearance fee at the card show, he'd be bonkers crazed at the modern usage.
...
I was recently along the Gulf Coast and stopped by the USS Alabama battleship museum. There is a small display featuring Feller's service aboard the ship. Kinda cool.
I've always loved that Bob Feller's "projected" stats for the time he missed at war basically conveniently don't mention that, as soon as he returned home, he had that one MONSTER season in '46, and then his arm fell off and he wasn't ever that big of a pitcher again. How much of that was overuse in '46? How much was he ABLE to pitch that well after three years' rest? How much of it was that he just turned into a pumpkin at age 29? We'll never know... and neither did he. But WAR and stats like it reveal that his run from '47-'51 was nowhere near as great as people assumed it to be at the time, based purely on W-L totals. He won 92 games in that 5-year span, which is FABULOUS. But only 15.5 bWAR, which is... like any THREE-season run of Justin Verlander's career. And you don't have to believe in WAR to see that his ERA was in the mid-3.00s rather than the 2.00s during that span. This is not to knock Bob Feller as a pitcher; clearly, one of the greatest of all-time. And incredibly impressive that he gave up a lucrative career as a famous baseball player to fight for his country. Nonetheless, the "projected stats" thing was probably both mathematically unsound... and also a little pathetic.
It’s a little short, but this still might be the best biography of Bob Feller ever written.
;-)
Let's see what the last three weeks bring - if Alvarez pulls out of his swoon and the 'Stros make the playoffs, the writers will give it to him.
I was hoping Miguel Vargas would be higher in overall WAR - if he was in the top ten, I'd vote for him.
The rules say pitchers can win the MVP, yet I’d say the voting class has evolved the award to being for position player. Judge clearly buys into that. I actually find it refreshing he’s basically stated that. Clearly a large enough block of the BBWAA feels similar. I don’t agree with it, but that’s where we’re at.
I'm never getting over Pedro not getting the MVP in '99, and part of that for me is burning resentment for every pitcher who has gotten the MVP since.
I felt that way about Maddux in '95. With the passage of time, I guess I'm glad that Barry Larkin got an award as otherwise, he could have been in the Alan Trammell bin of overlooked greatness. But Doggie was *easily* the best player in the NL that year.
Remember how George King of the New York Post left off Pedro completely in 1999... even though he'd voted for two pitchers the previous year? Almost as if that New York sportswriter had some sort of anti-Red Sox bias...
Also, LaVelle Neal didn't believe in voting for pitchers at all. Which... you know... the rules say you MUST consider. So it's not a great look, that Pedro vote.
There's a real irony that 1999 was one of Jeter's absolute best years (the Yankees won 98 games without an ace starting pitcher, his OPS was basically 1.000, and he led AL hitters in WPA) and he somehow finished *6th* in the MVP vote.
Obviously, Pedro deserved the MVP that year. It's a silly thing to argue about. (The 1999 Red Sox had Pedro, Nomar, and no one else remarkable, and still won 94 games.) But the whole ballot makes no sense.
I love Win Probably Added. Totally underrated statistic.
I’ve had a burning resentment to Ron Guidry not getting the MVP since 1978.
I've had burning resentment for the entire Yankees 1978 season, since...1978.
War Pedro.
I've lost track of when WAR matters and when it doesn't.
I mean, you can't argue that Salvy Perez is a HOFer regardless of WAR and then argue that Yordan Alvarez shouldn't be MVP because of it.
Even my favorite writers now are twisting in the wind when deciding when WAR matters and when it doesn't.
I will contribute to Bill James' theory and attribute at least some of the decline in doubles and triples to the obsession with "launch angle" by players, commentators and coaches. It is a very fickle data point, and its significance is somewhat arbitrary. I wonder how many coaches screw up a hitter's stroke and value by trying to teach players to elevate their launch angle. I don't think Eddie Murray paid a lot of attention to launch angle and instead paid more attention to knocking a line drive through the outfield wall in Baltimore.
A line drive IS a launch angle, though; it's the angle they teach people to swing for. It's the ANGLE at which the ball LAUNCHES off the bat. I truly don't understand why people bring this up. Did Eddie Murray know the numerical value of his average launch angle? Certainly not. But did he try to hit the ball not too high so it pops up and not too low so it isn't a grounder? Definitely.