We were wrong when projecting the playoffs.
The postseason advances and the baseball community reacts surprised by the results. Teams with 100 or more wins were eliminated. The curious thing is that all of them, without exception, were seen as favorites. Of course, we’re talking about the Baltimore Orioles, the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Atlanta Braves.
There is a fault of origin, when the playoffs arrive we give, perhaps rightly, a lot of weight to what happened in the regular season. Depending on the approach, this can be catastrophic to analyze, give a favorite and, most importantly, project the development of a series. That is, it can occur in each of the games considering the matchups between pitchers, the offenses and the environment (stadiums) where it will take place.
What is the error?
When analyzing, we see the series as a whole, when the ideal is the individualization of the matches. That is, go game by game. The sweeps of the Baltimore Orioles and the Los Angeles Dodgers and the fact that the Braves have been eliminated has more than one in shock. The truth is that what we are seeing could happen, it’s just that the way we approach this section, we insist, is not correct.
The Orioles were facing the Texas Rangers, a team with the best offense in the American League. While Baltimore was a great story, its rival had an interesting group; Corey Seager, Marcus Semien, Adolis García, in addition to some pitchers who were in rhythm (Jordan Montgomery) and another with previous success in this stretch (Nathan Eovaldi), so we could presume that it would be a close series. Texas won 3-0. Eovaldi, in the Wild Card and Division Series round: 13.2 IP, 15 K and ERA of 1.32
Nathan Eovaldi
In the case of the Dodgers and Braves things were even clearer. Tomás Cabrera said, prior to the start of these playoffs, that these Dodgers were the weakest team that had reached October in 8-10 years, since they have hegemony of the West division of the National League. Wait, we’re talking about weakness on a team that won 100 games? Yes, they were teams with holes or at least with some obvious weaknesses.
The Dodgers, contrary to previous years, did not have Walker Buehler (Tommy John surgery) and Julio Urías, out due to domestic violence. They relied on Clayton Kershaw and a group of rookie pitchers. An important element, although they have the best point of a lineup in Mookie Betts (0-11) and Freddie Freeman (1-10), with some Will Smith and JD Martínez, outside of that we are talking about marginal players, some of them without a daily role. Of course, we all agree that against the Diamondbacks they should have had better luck. But this sport has its quirks, and it’s possible that Arizona, who is in the Championship Series, is one of those cases. The Diamondbacks relied on Brandon Pfaadt (3-9 and ERA of 5.72), starter of the first game in the Wild Card round and the person responsible for starting the game to complete the sweep against the Dodgers.
Braves vs Phillies, the revenge of what happened in 2022. The Braves are not only a complete team, they collectively had a slugging of 501. To put things in perspective, Bryce Harper was the Phillies’ best hitter and had a slugging of 499. Yes, collectively Atlanta’s offense was better than Harper.
This crash had some peculiarities. Atlanta had two of its starters with injury problems, Max Fried and Charlie Morton, so Spencer Strider would be the only guarantee for the Braves. If we do the proposed exercise, see the series game by game, the scenario was the following:
Spencer Strider vs Ranger Suárez.Max Fried vs Zack Wheeler.Aaron Nola vs Bryce Elder.
Spencer Strider
As we see, of those three games only one favors Atlanta. So why were the Braves widely favored? The answer is simple, we see the series as a whole, we think about the team that won 104 games and hit 307 Home Runs versus a Phillies team without sufficient depth or quality, instead of going game by game, assuming that Philadelphia It has the best head of rotation in Wheeler and Nola, two pitchers with good stuff, with the ability to stop any offense.
The five teams with the best MLB records combined, in those first two playoff rounds, for 1 win and 13 losses. It was not something predictable, but we return to the same thing, it is baseball and if the planets are not aligned extraordinary things can happen. The Atlanta Braves ended up falling to a team that is not better but has enough elements to beat them.
2023-10-13 04:14:50
#PLAYOFFS #SURPRISE
