If you had to choose....

I agree. as of right now though, there could be a definite argument to be made that those guys at the time were better than lopez.

Its actually about 75% of the time that the truly “best” team wins. I am just talking purely by regular season record. this doesn’t count coaching, hot streaks coming into the playoffs, and how teams match up. it is straight records and seeding. many times, a team with maybe a few wins less in the regular season will beat a team with a few wins more…who really was the clear “best” team? It is hard to say unless you play a 7 game series.

It is extremely rare for a 2 seed to lose toe a # 7, or a 1 to an 8. I think when i looked up all the playoffs since 2000, the biggest lost by a 1 was to a 4. sometimes, between the 1-4 seed there is not a huge difference in records.

the point is I do agree with you. if you are talking about true favorites in a series or clearly better teams, they win at the clip you mentioned.

Yeah i know, the above was because i wasn’t saying that you said basketball teams win because of luck. That was a miscommunication.

I shouldn’t have added the 40 man roster part, i was thinking that you had said that in that thread as well.

My apologies.
 
clarity:

I know that you didn’t say basketball teams win because of luck, that’s not what i was trying to imply.

obviously management plays some role in baseball. if you put ted stepian on the yankees, yeah they would do bad (or Al Davis). obviously management plays some role but like I think danvail said, the higher payroll teams have much larger margin for error. the yankees can screw up and cover it up by spending more. the indians or twins cannot. these are organizations that are run well but do not have the money to be every year contenders.

I said you can’t just pick the biggest payrolls and say that’s why those team will win.

If you don’t believe that, cool. The past 15 years or so shows that it is a damn fine predictor. Yes, maybe a small market team can have every single break go their way and have a shot at winning it all (Indians ’07) but those are very rare cases. Those teams windows are open for maybe 1-2 seasons, and that is if everything breaks right.

Those [high payroll] teams are also the better teams.

Of course they are better. The sign every FA and can afford Boras draft picks. Who was the last top FA that went to a small market?

I think we got mixed as to which points we were trying to prove. I explained myself elsewhere. Your second paragraph sums it up well.

I’m sorry for the confusion. I wrote a paragraph then went back to add a sentence in earlier and I didn’t make myself clear.

No, you are wrong. The whole conversation started with the economics of the sports.

What do you mean “how a team down 2-0 will play”? How does that matter? If you think that means they’re going to try extra hard to win or something then this is where you’re wrong. I know writes love write about a player’s “character” and “will to win” and all that crap but in reality that has very little to do with the outcome of a baseball game. It’s not about “clutch hitting” and crap like that, it’s about randonmness and luck. I know people cringe when they here the word luck in sports — which is why I think you had a hard time understanding me above — but saying a team got lucky doesn’t diminish their accomplishments, it just means that many things can happen in a short series and the team which usually gets the most breaks in their favor will win. Call it luck or randomness of whatever you want.

Yes, you can do the same thing in basketball, but as I have repeatedly shown you the difference in talent in basketball are much greater — and the talents are the same every game as opposed to baseball which is very reliant on the starting pitcher that day — so in basketball the better team has a greater chance of winning any give game and hence a great chance of winning a series. Again, look at the records of the best and worst teams in the NBA and MLB and you can see what I mean. So you can do the same thing for basketball but the probabilities for each game are much different.

And in baseball the opening series is only 5 games so in a short series the lesser team has a greater chance for an upset (because the more games you play the more the actual outcome will match the theoretical outcome — this is called the Law of Large Numbers). So the 5 game series really adds to the randomness of the baseball playoffs. Sure, the extra round in the NBA does give the better team another chance to lose but the top 3 teams in each conference rarely lose in the first round anyways so it’s not much of a difference. It certainly doesn’t balance out the great advantage the NBA teams has in a series compared to the baseball team.

I know you said above that my stats background doesn’t matter but I don’t see how you can say that. As I said before, I think you’re misunderstanding what I meant when I said luck. I tried to explain it to you but gave a poor explanation, but when we say “luck” we don’t necessarily mean good or bad luck just the randomness that happens in a small sample. And there is more of that involved in baseball than in basketball. Whether you want to attribute that to a manager’s strategy or “clutch” play or whatever else you want to call it is irrelevant. But it exists in baseball much more than in basketball just by the nature of the game and that fact is indisputible.

I think Brad’s response and explanation actually sums it up pretty well. Frankly, I don’t know all the specific reasons baseball may be more subject to the ‘luck’ of the draw — it’s not that other sports aren’t, too — but perhaps it can be inferred by looking through all the winners and losers.

I think what it comes down to is that ‘upsets’ that we casually perceive as one in a million are actually much more likely to occur that we realize. In other words, ‘luck’ — or the plain randomness in our world — plays a lot bigger role that we’d like to admit.

I agree, it’s a very interesting read.

The point, then, that I’ve been making all along, is that baseball’s economic imbalance is much worse than basketball’s, but you have to look deeper than only the number of teams who won championships to see it. All a team like the Marlins or Cardinals (not that they’re a small market team) has to do is get to the playoffs and they have a decent chance to win the World Series. So while the Yankees dominate the regular season almost every year they often lose in the playoffs, which hides their financial power and lets Selig claim that baseball has a fair system because they’re not always winning. The Posnanski article which I posted above does a very good job of explaining this further.

That was the whole point of how this debate got started before all these other side issues sprung up. Sure, baseball has more competative balance than basketball if you look at number of teams winning championships, but that’s because of the nature of the game which enables luck to play a great part in the playoffs. But that hides the fact that many teams can’t compete unless their perfect in all their moves. In the NBA, you can build a great team in San Antonio or Cleveland or Oklahoma City (as is happening now) and keep the players together which you can’t do in baseball. Baseball’s system is much, much more unfair than basketball’s.

I take it these are the facts you were referring to above. The reason i didn’t respond to this is because it would start another disagreement.

The conversation started because of the idea that money made baseball inherently unfair, and guaranteed success. From there it became that baseball has different unique champions, contra to the idea that money guarantees success, because of luck.

This I have stated multiple times. The problem is you changed your definition of luck. You can claim you misspoke but the fact is you said the same thing twice and called it two different things. I’m sorry but if your whole premise is based on the idea of luck then i don’t see how you could have misspoke about how you defined luck.

To say can we stop saying luck is more involved is a straw man because of your misspeaking about your definition of luck. Yes there are more variables involved in baseball leading to more randomness, but before WR’s statement you were calling luck something else and then tried to shoehorn that definition on to your prior statements.

You’ve taken my posts out of context and tried to use your new context to support some argument that i was never making. The only reason i posted the list was because i said that you can’t take a list of the best teams and say one of these teams will win because money guarantees success. That is why i posted the number of unique champions. Your response was that the reason baseball had more unique champions was because of luck, i said that MLB involved management (strategy) just as much as the NBA, you chose to label it luck. Then you changed your definition of luck.

It’s there in the thread. You can talk about what you have posted since then, but the problem is you labeled and defined it one thing which is what i responded to and then tried to change it later and tell me i was confused earlier about how stats work, which i have admitted to not being well versed in. The problem is that it wasn’t the stats leading to the confusion it was your words.