before the third game
Joe Morgan made the same speech all over again.As it turned out
the A’s did everyone in baseball a favor and lost to the Twins
in the fifth game.* Thetwo games they won the scores were 9-1 and 8-3. The three games they lost the scores were 7-5
11-2
and 5-4. These were not the low-scoring games of Ray Durham’s play-off imagination. And yetvirtually all of the noisy second-guessing after their defeat followed the line of reasoning laid downby Ray Durham and Joe Morgan. One of the leading Bay Area baseball columnists
Glenn Dickey ofthe San Francisco Chronicle
explained to his readers that The A’s don’t know how to ’manufacture’runs
which kills them in close games in the postseason. Manager Art Howe
who believed in ’littleball’ before he came to the A’s
has become so accustomed to the walk/homer approach that he can’tadjust in the postseason. In late October
Joe Morgan will summarize the Oakland A’s problems inprint: The A’s lose because they are two-dimensional. They have good pitching and try to hit homeruns. They don’t use speed and don’t try to manufacture runs. They wait for the home run. They arestill waiting.* In the five-game series
Scott Hatteberg went 7-14 with three walks
no strikeouts
a home run
anda pair of doubles. He scored five runs and knocked in three. Chad Bradford faced ten batters and gotnine of them out
seven on ground balls. The tenth batter hit a bloop single. Bradford snapped out ofhis slump after the twentieth win. His confidence returned about the same time Scott Hatteberg startedtelling him what the hitters said on the rare occasions they got to first base against him. AfterAnaheim’s second baseman
Adam Kennedy
blooped a single off Bradford
he turned to Hatty andsaid
Jesus Christ
there’s no way that’s eighty-four miles an hour.All of the commentary struck the Oakland A’s front office as just more of the same. Base-stealing
said Paul DePodesta
after the dust had settled. That’s the one thing everyone points to that we do. Ordon’t. So when we lose
that’s why. He then punched some numbers into his calculator. The OaklandA’s scored 4.9 runs per game during the season. They scored 5.5 runs per game in the five-gameseries against the Twins. They hadn’t manufactured runs and yet they had scored more of them in theplay-offs than they had during the regular season. The real problem
said Paul
was that during theseason we allowed 4.0 runs per game
and during the play-offs we allowed 5.4. The small samplesize makes that insignificant
but it also punctuates the absurdity of the critiques of our offensivephilosophy. The real problem was that Tim Hudson
heretofore flawless in big games
and perfectagainst the Minnesota Twins
had two horrendous outings. No one could have predicted that.The postseason partially explained why baseball was so uniquely resistant to the fruits of scientificresearch: to any purely rational idea about how to run a baseball team. It wasn’t just that the gamewas run by old baseball men who insisted on doing things as they had always been done. It was thatthe season ended in a giant crapshoot. The play-offs frustrate rational management because
unlike thelong regular season
they suffer from the sample size problem. Pete Palmer
the sabermetrician andauthor of The Hidden Game of Baseball
once calculated that the average difference in baseball dueto skill is about one run a game
while the average difference due to luck is about four runs a game.Over a long season the luck evens out
and the skill shines through. But in a series of three out of five
or even four out of seven
anything can happen. In a five-game series
the worst team in baseball willbeat the best about 15 percent of the time; the Devil Rays have a prayer against the Yankees. Baseball
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