Quote:
Originally Posted by itjclarke
Again, I'm open to advanced metrics, but I think another flaw is this-- I think most these stats are more fully realized over the course of a neverending regular season. Sure, walks equal this.. this equals that.. that equals more wins out of 100... and over the course of an infinite number of games, the math works out.
Problem is, baseball's championship is not determined like this. It's eventually determined by a relatively small sample size of games, against the best talent. If the advanced metrics truly equaled WS titles, that's great... but without looking I'd guess that the majority of "Pythagorean win" leaders have not gone on to win WS over the past 20-30-40 years.
One thing that I've seen in recent WS (Giants wins it was especially true) is that by the post season, of the remaining teams/talent the pitching is just better. Many of the guys who may have been saber super stars over their prior 162 games, are attacked directly and mercilessly as opposed to being walked or whatever. It's a different game and a different set of tactics when you need to win a best of 5 or 7, or in the late innings of those games, as opposed to winning most of 162.
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this is a false equivalency logical fallacy. saber stats don't exist to determine who will win the championship. They exist to increase the accuracy of statistical analysis.
As you stated, playoff baseball is it's own thing, determined mostly by luck, hit sequencing (non-predictable or controllable) good breaks and bad breaks. If you put the two worst teams in the playoffs for 20 years as an experiment, one of them would win the world series every 12 years or so. But this has no bearing on why wRC+ is > than OPS > batting avg