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This deserves a letter writing campaign.
a. Greg Maddux was a B+ pitcher?
b. The Braves overall playoff record was pretty good. The wild card era 8-team dance makes it tough to win the trophy very often. Unless you were the Yankees pre-Tony Womack-shoots-the-gap-2001.
c. The Yankees HAD a lot of B+ pitchers in the late 90s/early 00s. Hello! What do you think Pettite was? A guy who would give up 4 runs per 9, but his team scored more. This WORKED for many post-season years? And now they are "doomed"?
edit: I was too slow. tryign to do real work while I read BBTF. Cokes to many.
Greg Frucking Maddux
If I were the Yankees I would try something different with Sabathia. Before his two postseasons, he was worked hard to the end of the season. I would try the new Joba rules with him, letting him only go 4 and then 5 innings his last two starts.
He doesn't mention Beckett at all, unless you're referring to some other prior posts of his I don't know about. Anyway, of course Beckett doesn't come close to the career values of Maddux, Glavine and Smoltz but the guy has great stuff and been dominant through two World Series postseason stretches. I wouldn't blame him if he took Beckett over any of those three to front his postseason rotation despite them being great postseason pitchers in their own right.
You can't say, "Oh, Sabathia can't pitch well in October" because he's had some struggles. He's only pitched 25 postseason innings. That's like saying that Sabathia is a bust because he has a 4.85 ERA on May 2nd... oh wait, they did say that.
Sabathia is more likely than not to be great in the playoffs. There's no magic formula for a player playing well in October.
Which has been shown by the ridiculous number of great rookie playoff performances. The Yankees are the best team in baseball. Still, that only gives them something like a 15-18% chance of winning the WS.
B+ starting pitching. God, that's stupid.
Fact: A.J. Burnett started 4 games for the 2003 Marlins.
Fact: A.J. Burnett has never pitched in an MLB playoff game.
F-.
You know, he might have a point. Teams with two pitchers who can pitch tons of innings, are great, and strike out lots and lots of hitters (which he left out) have an advantage in the playoffs.
Looking back over the last 15 years, that would include the Diamondbacks and uh, uh, uh, anyone?
In other words, every team in the past 15 years other than the Diamondbacks was poorly designed for the playoffs.
Well, in his very next sentence he says, "Generally speaking, the teams in the best shape have two ass-kicking starters." The mid-90s Braves had two, and often three starters who fit that bill. If he's talking about Steve Avery and Kevin Millwood in the sentence right before that and never mentions the Big Three, then he's just an idiot.
This is the dumbest thing I've read in a long, long time. Those B+ starters won 7 Cy Youngs in the 90s.
I know it's piling on to keep pointing it out, but B+? Seriously?
Jeff Pearlman is dumber than ten Tommy LaSordas.
Once again, I think he meant guys who could strike out more than a batter per inning, not just have terrific ERAs and won-lost records. So by this (one) definition, Maddux and Glavine don't cut it. Of course, he didn't say that, but still...
The Braves had 3 a-kicking starters with rubber arms. Though only Smoltz seems like the type who'd ever show anger on the field. For the Diamondbacks, he remembers 2001 but not their quick exit from the playoffs in 2002, after Johnson and Schilling had seasons just as great as they did in 2001. Sometimes great pitching wins for you in the postseason, sometimes it's a Joe Blanton type pitching the game of his life and hitting a homer as well. There is no such thing as secret sauce.
Well, again, if you are going back 15 years, then those mid-90s (say '95-'98) Braves teams should fit unless you are being a real stickler about the strikeouts. Smoltz always struck a lot of guys out. Glavine didn't really, but his K/BB were decent. Maddux didn't strike just a ton of guys out, but he did strike out a few, and his K/BB numbers in those years were awesome because he didn't walk anyone.
It seems he's judging them by their post-season performance.
The 2007 Indians had 2 kick ass starters in Sabathia and Carmona. Lost the ALCS.
The 2005 Astros had 3 kick ass starters and were swept by the White Sox who had none.
If he meant that, then he should have said that. Using the phrase "B+" and secretly meaning pitchers who don't strike out a batter an inning but who are otherwise completely awesome like Maddux and to a lesser extent Glavine and Smoltz is ridiculous.
There are probably factors that make a team more likely to win in the postseason than others, but those factors are totally drowned out by the randomness of a short series.
Sure, you're right, it is baseball. A couple of bad pitches here or there at inopportune times, coupled with bad luck and bad defense and a single, very important start could be ruined, I know, but the concern with Sabathia isn't that he has merely struggled, posting a mediocre 4.00 ERA when the expectations of him is that he should dominate. It's that he has been bombed to smithereens in his last three playoff starts, allowing 17 runs in 14 innings with 11 walks. Hey, I know it's still only three starts no matter how awful they were but someone pitching so far below his talent level at the biggest moments has to make him a question mark until he proves otherwise. Going into his first start, he is question mark.
I am not referring to anything specific that he's written except for this piece which suggests strongly that he completely underrates how good, actually how dominant Maddux, Smoltz and Glavine were. The Sox won a World Series in 2007 and based on his formula because they won, they had at least one pitcher who was not B+, but graded higher. I'm guessing that Beckett's angry man demeanor catapults him in the Pearlman grading scale. Anyway, I could see ranking Beckett close to the level of either of these three going into a short post-season series. He's become an elite pitcher with the Sox. He just has never been as god as they were in their peaks.
Well, that's stupid too, because John Smoltz is well-known as one of the greatest post-season pitchers ever and Greg Maddux, although his career post-season numbers are a little more pedestrian, had a pretty sick run of postseason pitching from about '95 to '98. As did Glavine, from '92 to '96. Starting pitching is not why those Braves teams flamed out so many times in the '90s.
This is one of my favorite typos ever.
Not really a mythmaking campaign to preserve Beckett's postseason stature. He was injured during the 2008 playoffs with a strained oblique. It's just giving him the benefit of the doubt due to injury.
Well what the hell kind of standard is that? How many guys like that are there in baseball history?* If the Yankees today had a front 2 of Lincecum and Santana they'd be in better shape? Well no ####.
*21 pitcher seasons of K/9>9 and W%>.700 in the last 10 years. The only teammates on the list are Johnson and Schilling, and has been pointed out, they were 1 for 2. How the hell did the other 9 champs win?
Fact: Bears eat beets.
Bears. Beets. Battlestar Galactica.
It's not mentioned because Beckett was injured in 2008 (strained oblique muscle). He really struggled with it against Tampa; his Game 6 start was pretty damned good considering how badly he had been hampered by it in Game 2.
EDIT: beaten by Norcan. I'll show myself out.
I'm not changing it. Maddux was called a B+ pitcher. A correction the other way was needed.
I've heard and participated in this, but non-ace playoff starters often get jerked around in the playoffs. What with series ending early or late and travel days, no one starts on strict 5-man rotations in October.
Santana wouldn't be too helpful right now.
"Welcome to (you are) doom?
The late 40s/early 50s Yankees - Raschi (130 wins, 3.72 ERA), Reynolds (180 wins, with great clubs, including all of those games he won in WWII years), Byrne (4.11 ERA), Lopat (166 wins) - no grade A's here! Doomed to lose in the playoffs, every year! DOOMED, I tell ya!
Will it be similar to the "of doom" phase? That lasted for about a week, and was amusing for about three posts.
The French-language announcers here delved into this question during a Yankee broadcast last week. Their sense is that Girardi knows his team is in the playoffs, but still has question about bullpen roles. So he's testing guys out, particularly veterans like Bruney and Marte to see whether they can cut it in game situations. He probably does not want to go into the postseson with a bullpen full of youngsters to support Mariano Rivera, but if his veterans can't do the job in the meaningless games of late-September, he might as well go with Aceves and Melancon et al when the money games start.
Better to test this out now than in the ALDS. Fwiw, the announcers thought Bruney and Marte were in the process of writing their own tickets out of town with their recent performances.
But in the World Series....
Raschi: 11 games, 5-3, 2.24 ERA -- two of those losses were by 1-0 and 3-2
Reynolds: 15 games, 7-2, 2.79
Lopat: 7 games, 4-1, 2.60
Let's see any other group of starters in history match that. They should make a special plaque in the HoF for those three, as a unit rather than individually. Five straight World Championships backs that up.
Oh, and Byrne: 6 games, 1-1, 2.63 -- the loss was by 2-0 to Podres in the 7th game of the 1955 Series
Seems like something that would be very easy to examine with pitch/fx.
25.2% Yankees14.1% Angels
13.7% Dodgers
12.2% Red Sox
11.3% Phillies
9.2% Cardinals
7.0% Rockies
2.0% Tigers
28.0% Yankees22.8% Dodgers
15.6% Red Sox
9.5% Rockies
7.4% Angels
6.2% Phillies
5.6% Cardinals
1.3% Tigers
Wouldn't it be more insulting to say that 10 Pearlmans are dumber than one Tommy Lasorda?
10 Tommy Lasordas would wreak havoc at the buffet line, tho.
Alas.
Your first list gave me a 39.3% chance of being happy at the end of the season. So I take your third order rankings and poop on them.
Bill James 101:
If the MSM or some old baseball guy says something like:
Power pitchers start the year better or
finesse guys last longer
assume the opposite is true (at least until you can do a study.
I'm going to guess now, that if you took every "finesse" guy with an ERA+ of 120 in the regular season, and every power guy with an ERA+ of 120 in the regular season, that the finesse guys on average do better in the postseason- all because the MLB Network guys assume the opposite is true.
What's really going on is
1: Power guys on average are better than Finesse guys
2: Power guys tend to do better in the post season because they tend to be better period.
You like the Angels AND Yankees??
On the B+ thing:
Undergrad intro psych. You'd think this would be a breeze class but it had the hardest damn multiple choice test I've ever seen in my life. As she hands back the test, the prof (a true psychometrician at heart I guess) actually puts the number line of scores on the board.
Now this test was worth something strange like 125 points. The median score was something like a 69. The third highest score was around an 85. She drew a circle around the middle, oh, 75% of the scores (including the 85) and said "these are Bs." A sigh of relief for me. The second highest score was something like a 97 -- "this is a B+". The top score was something like a 117 -- "this _might_ be an A".
I'm pretty sure even she would have given Maddux an A.
It's some sort of ironic doom. The wink is implied.
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