No Love for Snakes
October 9, 2007 by Geoff Young
Filed under Playoffs, Stats and Analysis
Jim at AZ Snakepit complains that the Diamondbacks aren’t getting their due thanks to a poor regular-season run differential:
Ah, yes: the old “the Diamondbacks were just lucky” argument. First, this demonstrates a basic misunderstanding, very common among statheads, about the game of baseball. It’s not about having the highest team batting average. It’s not about posting the best run-differential. The game is decided simply by scoring more runs than your opponent on the day. That is the only measure of “best” which actually means anything, because playoff spots are not awarded on the basis of Pythagorean Projections.
Bingo. Dismissing a team’s success solely as the product of “luck” is at best intellectually lazy and at worst, well… We touched on this issue a while back, and it’s important to remember that just because a reason doesn’t present itself right away, doesn’t mean there isn’t one. It is not the job of reality to mold itself to any theoretical constructs devised by humans, dig?
