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Baseball Primer Newsblog— The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand
Friday, October 05, 2012
Just make sure one of the pitchers isn’t Brad Bullpennington… Yesterday, during the 162nd game of the regular season, the Atlanta Braves witnessed the best pitching performance they’ve had all season… Atlanta used eight pitchers to dispatch the Pirates. They had no ‘starter.’...
It’s probably rare that Wild Card teams, in this new format, will have the luxury of having an ace to throw out for the sudden-death game….the furious battle down the stretch will be an annual occurrence in the coming years.
Considering that, it’s worth considering some alternate theories on how to maximize one’s chances in the sudden-death game. As I see it, there are numerous advantages to ‘bullpenning’
You can take significant advantage of platoon splits… You are bringing pitchers in pitchers who are fresh, and you can take them out at a moment’s notice… You are able to set a rotation for the next round of the playoffs… Relief Pitchers are better than starters. Okay, that’s not true. What is true is that using a pitcher for one or two innings is vastly more efficient than using a pitcher for 5-6 innings…
The new existence of sudden-death playoff games in baseball presents an interesting new challenge for managers and players. The four Wild Card teams experience a strange ‘shift’ in mindset: they have to go from trying to win a long, 162-game season, to trying to win a 1-game season.
Because there have been so few one-game playoffs in history, no one has spent too much time examining optimal or alternative strategies that a team could use in sudden-death scenarios. Now that a one-game playoff will be a twice annual events, it’s time to start thinking about strategies for a one-game season.
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1. MM1f Posted: October 05, 2012 at 11:37 AM (#4255077)By the way, is there an original article this should link to?
Also, I should have made a Katniss reference.
But for the Braves to go in with this strategy would be absolutely lunacy. You want to have Kris Medlen throw fewer innings, and Cory Gearrin and Luis Avilan throw more innings? That's a recipe for losing, right there, even if it did work in a meaningless game 162 against a below-average offense that had nothing to play for.
7 innings of Saunders vs Darvish, Ranger offense vs Orioles offense, Tex home field; does NOT look good.
Then they have a bunch of lefties and righties that can go a couple innings and deploy in higher leverage situations as needed.
The idea is that if you sub in an opposite-hand pitcher early on, you are able to force Washington to either go to his bench early, or concede some platoon splits. It's probably not a massive edge against a balanced lineup like the Rangers, but it can't hurt.
If you're going with that strategy, it probably makes sense to go with the lesser pitcher first, and hope to get a couple of innings out of him before you go to the better pitcher.
I think the biggest advantage is that you can tell both all of your pitchers not to worry about pitching deep into the game. Put it all out there on every pitch and don't concede at bats.
Day off before is in case they need to play a one game playoff for the division first. Day off after is because the division champ is playing on the road and don't know where they'll need to be.
Yeah, that's how I understand it. Next year this round becomes a best-of-seven, yes?
What, the play-in for the Wild Card becomes a best-of-seven? That tears it, I'm going to start following curling instead :)
I thought the days off was a fluke of this years schedule, and not the plan going forward?
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