Four ways to make 162 games count for more

We're not exactly channeling Alexander Cartwright here, but we do like some new ways to look at baseball, if not new ways to play it. After seeing the regular season devalued more than ever by a  2014 World Series featuring a fourth-place team and a fifth-place team, we're making up ways to juice 162 games.

Alexander Joy Cartwright (1820-1892) wrote the basic rules for the great game (Public domain image).

By BILL PETERSON
Big Leagues in Los Angeles

I shall introduce some ideas here that many baseball fans will regard as inconsiderably whacky. I think they are whacky, too, but I like them, I'm happy to consider them and I believe Major League Baseball should consider some of them, too.

Before starting, though, I should disclaim any preference for new ideas concerning the competitive structure of Major League Baseball, which is precisely what these ideas are. Those who know me a little would call me, in fact, a "traditionalist," which doesn't really capture what I like about the old ways. I like the old ways not so much because they were traditional, but because they worked so well. I only propose these ideas because the Lords of Baseball (in Dick Young's useful phrase) have beaten the old ways so bloody that they might as well finish the job.

If we could go back to two divisions in each league and short playoffs without wild-card teams, if we could get rid of interleague play and the designated hitter, I would run — not walk — to that outcome. But it's never going to happen, so we accept the world as it is. We can't say Bud Selig's innovations haven't been profitable. The major leagues did a shade more than $2 billion in annual revenues right before the 1994 players strike and, now, 20 years later, they are approaching $10 billion. Who's going to listen to me when the other side of the argument says $8 billion?

So, I've capitulated, little by little, waving the white flag here and there, trying to make my peace with the new reality — interleague play and expanded playoffs with wildcards weakening the World Series and severing the connection between 162 games and the World Championship. For me, it stinks to high heaven, though I'm sure the $8 billion smells great at 245 Park Avenue. I believe Major League Baseball (MLB) could still have the $8 billion without mucking up its competitive structure so badly, but we wouldn't expect MLB to risk a penny to prove me wrong.

Whatever the case, we're both right. And wrong. MLB is right and I (might) be wrong because MLB has added about $8 billion in annual revenues with these innovations that I have never liked. I'm right and MLB is (definitely) wrong because Americans now are massively disinterested in the World Series.

Through 1980, the World Series routinely drew shares of more than 50, meaning, literally, that more than half of the television homes in American tuned into the World Series. Those audiences declined as cable television reached every stick in the country during the 1980s, but even into the 1990s the World Series still flirted with 40 shares. Starting with the first expanded playoffs in 1995, though, World Series ratings and shares are in free fall. Today, a 15 share is good for the World Series.

The severing of 162 games from the World Championship doesn't just hurt the World Series. It makes the regular season less meaningful. It is unsatisfying to see six months of a regular season just go away — poof! — over a short-run playoff outcome.  It's not even an upset when the Kansas City Royals knock out the Angels in three games. It's just the slightly less probable outcome, which still takes the superior team out of World Series contention.

I'm willing now to let the playoffs stand alone, because I don't have any real choice. The playoffs already stand alone. But, now, what to do about the regular season?

In my irritation with wild-card playoffs, I have, in recent years, worked up a few other ways to look at the regular season. If I can make the regular season more meaningful and enjoyable, then I can let the playoffs stand alone and not be too upset that they are only tangentially related to 162 games. I wouldn't expect this to work for everyone, but it works for me.

Good taste, of course, requires a fair amount of humility and discretion, so I have kept all of this stuff to myself for the last few years. But now that a fifth-place team has won the World Series with the San Francisco Giants taking it in 2014 (beating a fourth-place team, the Kansas City Royals), I no longer can maintain my silence. And there certainly are limits to my tastefulness.

So, I shall briefly explain four new ways to follow the regular season. They name championships in my imagination only. I follow them as if the teams are fighting for them with all their might, though we all know the teams don't even know they are mentioned in these ribald fantasies.

One of these ideas is specific to my own experience with the great game across more than a half-decade of long life living in all the corners of America, or, at least, visiting them quite frequently. That one, I'll save for last.

The other three ideas could be implemented within MLB, albeit with some adjustments in the way it schedules games. They work well enough with the imbalances in the existing MLB schedules, and it should be emphasized that the imbalances don't thereby create defects that don't already exist in MLB. I have, with all these ideas, attempted to make a virtue of a necessity; that is, the necessity of living with interleague play. Without that awful reality, my whacky fantasies about competitive structure would not be possible.

The West, Central and East Leagues

I shall begin with an idea that I already introduced some years ago concerning the alignments of the major leagues. MLB has kicked around the notion of re-aligning the American and National Leagues from time to time. I shall not repeat some of the plans for league re-alignment, because they are simply ugly. With those plans, the American and National Leagues as we have known them would be so badly wrecked that it would amount to the erasure of history. We already have erased the career home run record through sheer carelessness. Lets not do that with the American and National Leagues.

My idea is to overlay a structure of regional leagues over the existing American and National Leagues and let them play out simultaneously. It's really a simple plan. Just count the count the games between the teams in the West Divisions of the AL and NL as a separate league (we might as well call it the West League) and do the same with the Central and East Divisions.

A full explanation is in the original piece about it from 2012. It actually works a little bit every third year, the years in which the interleague schedules puts West vs. West, Central vs. Central and East vs. East. This season, 2015, will be one of those seasons, as was 2012.

The Traveling Trophies

I've loved the idea of traveling trophies since I was in high school and heard tell of a local high school athletic conference that put one on the line every Friday night during football season. It was the Ear of Corn in the Cornbelt Conference, an alliance of little Western Illinois farm schools. It wasn't the conference championship, but it was something like the world heavyweight championship of the conference.

Suppose, for example, that Rockridge happened to hold the Ear of Corn (And there really was an Ear of Corn, a gold-painted stalk of corn mounted to a trophy base). If Rockridge played Sherrard on Friday night, then the Ear of Corn was on the line. Rockridge kept the ear if it won, and Sherrard took the ear if it won, then put it on the line the following Friday night against, say, Annawan.

I used to keep Ear of Corn standings in college football way back in the days when I set agate at The Minneapolis Tribune, which takes us to the late 1970s and early 1980s. But I left those standings behind when I left the job.

I have been keeping three Ears of Corn in MLB since the start of the 2011 season — one for the National League, one for the American League and another that crosses both leagues. Naturally, the AL and NL ears are on the line only in games between AL and NL teams, respectively, while the interleague ear crosses leagues. Sometimes, then the interleague ear will be united with one of the league ears.

But the principle is the same as the Ear of Corn from the old Cornbelt Conference. If, say, the Cleveland Indians hold the AL Ear and they have a series of games with the Detroit Tigers, then the AL Ear is on the line in that series. Most series these days are three games, so it's usually a best-of-three proposition. Sometimes, the ear will be on the line in a make-up game from a rainout. Sometimes, of course, it's a four-game series, in which case, the outcome will come down to tiebreakers. Those details will be forthcoming as we track the Ears.

I enjoy thinking of these prizes as the Ears of Corn, but that trophy really is specific to the mostly forgotten Cornbelt Conference, which disbanded way back in 1974, and I want to respect that. So, I have renamed these for each competition. (There is, by the way, a newer Cornbelt Conference that's active, but it is Eastern Illinois farm towns.)

Anyway, the American League Ear is renamed the Killebrew after the great Harmon Killebrew, my favorite player when I was a kid. The National League Ear now is the Allen, after Dick Allen, who I revered as Richie Allen during that one year, 1970, when I followed him and the St. Louis Cardinals. And the interleague prize now is the Aaron, after Henry Aaron, who simply is the greatest player ever.

Along with tracking how these awards change hands, I also keep standings for how each team does in games for the ears, as well as how many championships they win and how good they are at defending them. The gist of the award is that a team that can win series after series prevails during the course of the season.

Ordinal Divisions

In American sports, the worst team is rewarded with the No. 1 draft pick and other considerations to ease its way. In soccer, the worst team gets kicked out of the league.

The soccer way has some appeal. Nobody goes from worst to first.

Soccer standings are fun and demanding. It's a long slog from worst to first that way — about four years. That means an organization really has to be solid in order to climb.

Going back to 2010, the 30 major league clubs have been divided into four divisions — eight in the first division, eight in the second, eight in the third and six in the fourth. Each year, the records for each team in games within their divisions are tabulated. Then, the top two teams in each division are promoted to the next highest division for the next season, while the worst two teams in a division are relegated to the next division down.

That's the general plan, with some specific rules to break ties and account for the fact that some teams will play so few games in their divisions from time to time that they can't be fairly promoted or relegated. It's a bit of a kludge, as the old-time developers used to call it, but it works well enough.

It will all make sense as it plays out.

Leagues with Only My Own Teams

I made a mistake briefly when I was a kid. Just one. I thought, when we moved from Minnesota to downstate Illinois, that I was somehow duty bound to switch allegiances from the Minnesota Twins to a more local team. I picked the St. Louis Cardinals.

After a year, of course, I realized that I just couldn't do it, and went back to the Twins. But I also picked up the habit of following the local teams wherever I have lived, which is easier to do, anyway.

As I follow the game, I find myself always following the teams that I have picked up through life — and it's a lot of them now, because I have lived in a lot of places.

First, it was the Twins, then the Cardinals. I discovered in downstate Illinois, though, that it was much easier to follow the Chicago Cubs and the Chicago White Sox (the White Sox were especially fun, with Harry Carey and Jimmy Piersall on the radio).

After college, I took a sports writing job in Cincinnati, which involved me quite a bit with the Reds. And lots of trips to Cleveland to write about the Indians showed me a lot of that club. In those days, I also got out to New York quite a bit in a baseball writing capacity. Even before then, I liked going to New York because ... New York! And there have been times when the baseball scene in The City have made me wonder what it must have been like there in the 1950s. One year, 1985, when the New York Yankees and New York Mets both were in hot divisional races, really dipped me into it.

Then, I moved to Texas, where I followed the Texas Rangers and Houston Astros. And now, it's Los Angeles, with the Dodgers and Angels.

So, when I sit down to watch baseball games for several hours per day, those are the clubs that I track. It doesn't make me especially selective.

Some years ago, just to make it all a little more interesting, I lumped these teams into appropriate leagues and began to keep standings. Originally, I put the National League teams (the Astros, Cardinals, Cubs, Dodgers, Mets and Reds) into the Chub Feeney League, named after the late former NL President. I put the American League teams (the Angels, Indians, Rangers, Twins, White Sox and Yankees) in the Joe Cronin League, named after the late former AL President. Each of the leagues counts only the games played among those teams.

Of course, I couldn't resist factoring in interleague play with an all-inclusive league I call the Bud Selig League, which divided nicely into two divisions — the East (with the Cubs, Indians, Mets, Reds, White Sox and Yankees) and the West (with the Astros, Angels, Cardinals, Dodgers, Rangers and Twins).

In 2013, the Astros moved to the American League, which threw the Chub Feeney and Joe Cronin Leagues out of balance. Regrettably, I had to expand the leagues to bring them even.

I lived in Miami for about half of a year way back when, and I have spent several weeks of my life at spring training in the Tampa area. So, I moved the Astros to the Joe Cronin League, to which I also added the Tampa Bay Rays. I also added the Miami Marlins to the Chub Feeney League. Now, with eight teams in the Joe Cronin League and only six in the Chub Feeney League, I needed two clubs for the latter.

I do have some affinity for Milwaukee. Being Twin Citian means one is somewhat joined at the hip with Wisconsin, for well and ill. We had a cabin in Wisconsin that we often visited when I was a kid, and there was a time in the early 1980s when the Twins were so bad and the Milwaukee Brewers were so good that Brewers fans usually outnumbered Twins fans when those two clubs met at the Metrodome. Hey, my little brother also used to be a Lutheran minister in downtown Milwaukee. Close enough! So, I added the Brewers.

Needing one more team to bring Chub Feeney up to eight, I cheated and added the San Diego Padres. I don't have even a tangential connection with San Diego or the Padres, but San Diego is pretty close to LA, after all, and one does meet a lot of San Diego people living in LA. Adding the Padres also adds a western club to balance out the games among teams a bit. I enjoy watching the Padres, too, especially when Dick Enberg is on TV.

So, that's the Four Ways — the regional league overlay, the Ears of Corn, the ordinal divisions and the teams I've touched. What the hell? And why not? None of it is more ridiculous than a fifth-place team winning the World Series.

Cinderella is dead

We're itching to introduce some new ways to follow the baseball season, but first we want to complain about why the real way has lost so much allure: the lost connection between the regular season and the World Series.

 A rooftop view if the 1903 World Series in Boston (public domain image).

By BILL PETERSON
Big Leagues in Los Angeles

The connection between the 162-game baseball season and the World Championship is broken, and barely hanging together.

No one else seems much bothered by this, but we were just last October treated to a World Series between a fourth-place team and a fifth-place team – and the fifth-place team won. The San Francisco Giants and Kansas City Royals entered the 2014 postseason as wild cards in their leagues. The Royals were the American League's first wildcard (the fourth-place team) and the Giants were the National League's second wildcard (the fifth-place team). We had seen fourth-place teams win the World Series already. That was bad enough. Now, with the Giants taking the 2014 World Championship, we've seen a fifth-place team win the World Series. The World Series. 

Complaints about fifth-place teams in the World Series will strike folks as crotchety. Anybody younger than about 40 by now is likely to think inclusive playoffs are the way of the world, the way God planned it. It's not. It's a creation of the suits and the television executives, which doesn't make playoffs bad. But expanded playoffs do not reward excellence over 162 games, so much as they reward pretty goodness.

Some of us who are a long way past the sunny side of 40 remember when you didn't go to the baseball playoffs without some kind of a meaningful championship, at least a division. There was even a time, for those of us well on the dark side of 50, when they didn't even have playoffs in baseball. They played 162 games, undivided, with the best record in each league entering the World Series. You always knew the two teams in the World Series legitimately were the best in their leagues by the measure of 162 games. The World Series in those days, and for more reasons than that, was a huge event across the national popular culture such as it no longer is.

Everybody loves playoffs, all-or-nothing playoffs in which anything not pertinent to the moment no longer matters. And playoff baseball is exciting. Understood. The task here isn't to complain about that (though we are happy to do it, robustly, and at length) so much as to note the dissolution of 162 games as a measure of a baseball team and, maybe, to do a little tiny something about it.

All of the other big spectator sports have big playoffs. Good for them. The National Hockey League (NHL) and the National Basketball Association (NBA) each has 30 teams, each plays an 82-game regular season, and neither bothers to eliminate even half of its teams before the playoffs. In neither case is there a compelling reason to even follow the regular season, unless you absolutely love those sports – and no one is saying you shouldn't. But the regular season competition simply doesn't matter.

In the NBA right now, they're fighting out the last three weeks of the regular season to work out which two teams that can't even break even are ticketed for a crack at the big prize. Hardly a tournament of champions. In the NBA and the NHL, it is not unprecedented for an eighth-place team – a mediocre team – to heat up during the playoffs, catch a bounce and go to the finals or even win the league championship. Congratulations to those teams. But, then, what's the point of that long regular season? Why invest in it? And what does that championship actually say about itself? If a mediocre team can win the championship, then the championship no longer demands excellence. It demands merely that some team find its way through a good month, the way any team can find its way through a good month in a season.

In the major leagues right now, a team that puts up six excellent months is out of the running after losing three straight games to a fairly good opponent in the playoffs. And we now, much too often, don't see the best teams in the World Series. We too often see teams with little to say about 162 games, except that they weren't terrible.

Expanded playoffs are here to stay. It's where the money is. Playoffs make great seasonal television programming. That's why television networks pay what they pay for the rights. But they don't make great champions. They make "unlikely" champions, which now have become so likely that they have lost their novelty power and no longer are even good stories. When Cinderella gets out more than Paris Hilton, then she's no longer Cinderella. Now, she's Kim Kardashian. Cinderella is dead.

We never like playoff expansion, per se, but we thought, foolishly, that the fifth team in each league would dilute the wild cards. If the wild cards were to play each other in a one-and-done game, needing to probably cook their best starting pitchers before the winner went on the road against the club with its league's best record in the next round ... maybe that would be enough hoops to keep them from darkening the World Series. Good enough, said this corner. Gone, we thought, were the days when some team that didn't win anything all year could whisk through the playoffs on a lark and claim the World Championship.

But it took all of three seasons before that wonderful reverie was smashed. So, the Giants and Royals nudged into the playoffs last fall and we saw what happened. Clubs that made it tick all year, like the Angels and Dodgers, like the St. Louis Cardinals, the Washington Nationals, Detroit Tigers and Baltimore Orioles – clubs that attracted our attention for 162 games – were nowhere to be found near the big stage.

Call an old guy old-fashioned for wanting to see the best teams play for the World Championship. Call him all the bad names you want. He doesn't care, because he remembers when having the best teams play for the championship was the point, and that still makes a damned lot of sense to him.

And now we hear that the central office is concerned that World Series viewership is down because the game isn't national enough. We believe, actually, that baseball's problem is that isn't regional enough, but that's another topic for another day. More to the point, though, how can you expect the World Series to have a national following when the teams that are playing in it didn't develop a national following during the six-month grind of the regular season?

Of course, the Giants have established themselves in the last few years as a great tournament team, but they were just another team grubbing for a desperate playoff spot last September, which is to say they didn't take the imagination captive. And who, except for Royals fans and hard-core baseball fans, really cared about the Royals before the two final weeks of last September? If capturing the largest possible audience for the World Series requires capturing the non-fan who might just hear about baseball on the side, then putting teams in the World Series that haven't even been mentioned to the non-fan long before then won't get it done, because Cinderella is dead.

Televison viewership for World Series now is just a little better than one-third of what it was 30 years ago. Starting from 1985, the five highest years for average World Series viewership all took place between 1985 and 1991 (1985-8, 1991), with a range of 34.5 million to 36.4 million average viewers. The five lowest years for average World Series viewership all have taken place starting in 2008, and four of those are in the last five years (2008, 2010, 2012-4), with a range of 12.7 million to 14.9 viewers. From 1985-8, the average World Series rating ranged from 23.9 to 28.6, and the average share ranged from 39 to 46. In the last four years, the average World Series rating has ranged from 7.6 to 10.0, and the average share has ranged from 12 to 16, setting records for disinterest in the championship of Major League Baseball.

Through 1980, by the way, the World Series routinely drew shares of 50 or better. By contrast, the 2014 World Series of fourth- and fifth-place teams was on track to be the worst rated World Series ever (averaging 7.4 through six games), but that Game 7 was quite something, and it pulled a 13.7 rating to bring the whole enterprise up to 8.3 with a 14 share.

Now, 30 years was a while ago, but it wasn't the Stone Age. We didn't have portable telephones and we didn't have the Internet, but we had cable television and VCRs, we had all the same football, basketball and hockey. People read books more, took in more live music and went to more movies. We had plenty else to do. And we still watched the World Series, going on three times as much as we do today.

So, this idea that people don't watch the World Series now because we have so many more options is unavailing at best, vapid at worst. There are at least four or five better explanations, and one of them is right here. Too often, the World Series doesn't resemble the baseball season into which we have invested every day of the last six months. It feels a bit like a cheat. A guy not far from here is as likely as not to throw his hands into the air during the World Series and say, "Another Cinderella story! How unlikely!"

And he will pay his perfunctory, perhaps dutiful, attention to the World Series, but it all feels rather flat. The Cinderalla story is old and tired now, dead even. And the price we pay to perpetuate it is fifth-place teams in the World Series. It's barely worthwhile for anyone except for the central office, when it cashes those national TV checks – $500 million per year from FOX and $300 million per year from TBS. For ratings of about 7.5 on a good night. (ESPN also pays MLB about $700 million per year, though its postseason is limited to one wild-card game per year.)

It was mentioned here some time ago that we would try to offer something constructive and not spend the whole time complaining about expanded playoffs. Consider that another broken promise. Couldn't help it. But we can still redeem 162 games. Here are a few ideas.

AL 2014 a tale told by Athletics, Royals

One couldn't find two more different clubs in the American League than the Oakland Athletics, who went through much of the year as the team to beat, and the Kansas City Royals, who were unbeatable during the American League playoffs. The Royals will begin the World Series tonight against the San Francisco Giants.

First baseman Eric Hosmer has helped to power the Kansas City Royals to the World Series (Keith Allison/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license).

By BILL PETERSON

Big Leagues in Los Angeles

We wondered if the Angels dodged a bullet on Sept. 30, when the Kansas City Royals took down the Oakland Athletics in the American League widcard playoff game.

Now, we're certain the Angels didn't dodge a bullet. Or, if they did, they just ran into the path of a more deadly bullet. The Royals took the Angels out of the American League Division Series (ALDS) in three games before sweeping the Baltimore Orioles in a four-game American League Championship Series (ALCS). 

Tonight, the Royals begin the World Series against the San Francisco Giants, capping a postseason that has exhilarated baseball fans and confounded numbers crunchers. 

The Giants took a 3-1 lead in games against the St. Louis Cardinals in the National League Championship Series (NLCS) by scoring 12 of their last 22 runs on plays that didn't involve a base hit. The Giants have taken to calling themselves “cockroaches,” because you can't kill them. They polished off the Cardinals in Game 5 of the NLCS with a 6-3 win, scoring all their runs on homers. 

This might not be the World Series that fans of the Oakland Athletics would have wanted. Their rivals across the San Francisco Bay are in, and they're not. The American League club that plays most counter to Oakland's preference for long-run probabilistic reasoning is in, and they're not. 

It was hard, a couple of weeks ago, to imagine a more joyous scenario for the Athletics and a more ugly scenario for the Angels than this: Jon Lester pitches a gem for the Athletics, enabling them to win the wild card game in Kansas City. Then, the A's enter the ALDS with the Angels and prevail with pitching, specifically with Lester. With that, the Athletics would move on to the American League Championship Series, a puzzling midseason trade by Oakland general manager Billy Beane would have been redeemed, and the Angels would have lost the edge they've gain this year in their rivalry with the Athletics.

The next week of games might have been about an Oakland club banished from division contention, then redeemed for the reason of their banishment, a bulked-up pitching staff for which the A's gave away much of their ability to score. It might have been about Lester, made whole by winning the game he needed to win, now setting out to capsize the Angels, who beat them silly during a four-game sweep in Anaheim last month that decided the division early.

It could have been about those things. The narrative could have shifted back to the misunderstood genius of Oakland general manager Billy Beane and his wise men from elite universities, if only Lester could have redeemed a certain trade and held a 7-3 he took to the eighth inning in Kansas City. But all that's off the table. 

The Royals took it off the table quickly, rallying for a 9-8 win against the Athletics in an 12-inning wild card game. Then, they took the Angels off the table. It began on Game 1 of the ALDS, when the Royals won the game Thursday night that had to go into the win column for the Angels, the game with Jered Weaver pitching in the Big A against Jason Vargas. After that, the Royals were on their way.

When the World Series ends and we have contemplated why it went down the way it did, the enduring memory of this season will be the collapse of the Athletics, who endured such a nightmare for two months at the end. They were 72-44 on Aug. 9, and they needed every bit of that to endure their next seven weeks of losing and still have room to barely make the playoffs. Oakland didn't enter the playoffs looking like it would last long, and when the Royals, trailing, 7-3, kicked up a little dust in the eighth inning, one could feel the wind rushing in. The Royals were hitting, stealing, hitting the runner in, then stealing again. Lester left with a 7-4 lead with one out, and the tying run was at the plate. 

As if to mock the sabrmeticians and their darling Athletics, the Royals stole seven bases, including four in that wild eighth inning during which they cut that deficit to 7-6. In the ninth, the Royals tied it by bunting and stealing, which the stat fetishist disdains. In the 12th, the Royals hit the ball hard, and they won the game that way.

Many keystrokes have been expended trying to explain why the Athletics flop in the postseason, and all of them put together didn't say it as well as the Royals said it in the wild card game. The A's lost this game not because they eschew small ball, but because the Royals embrace it.

The stat fetishist struggles against the bleeding reality of baseball and often winds down his keystrokes by introducing a theoretical entity called "luck." At that point, we're not doing science, obviously, as luck neither explains nor predicts anything. But Beane believes in luck, too, as he said in his infamous Moneyball remark, "My shit doesn't work in the playoffs. My job is to get us to the playoffs. What happens after that is f*cking luck." 

Beane is wrong about this. The playoffs aren't about luck. They are about baseball, the game of skill and tactics. And, it appears, there are skills and tactics in baseball, which the numbers discourage, but they're also extremely useful tools for winning baseball games. How can the numbers show that certain tactics are disadvantageous for winning baseball games, yet the team most known for following the numbers never wins in the playoffs and was just now eliminated, in fact, because the team it just played would be nowhere without those tactics?

We've never understood, over here, why anyone would assume that a so-called "Moneyball" team would have to succeed in the playoffs, as if their success during the regular season should be some kind of necessary or sufficient condition for winning in the playoffs. We don't see the mystery. There's nothing that says a Moneyball team couldn't or shouldn't succeed in the playoffs, but the playoffs are such an entirely different competitive environment that we shouldn't expect the large database of the regular season to have any predictive force.

When you're putting together your Moneyball team, you're making a number of calculations. All of those calculations account for the long haul, and the 162-game regular season is nothing if not a long haul. That's a lot of discrete events converging on enough agreement to produce reliable conclusions about how to win x number of games. The book, not the old book but the new one, says you will score more runners from first base with no outs than from second base with one out. Over the long haul. So don't bunt. The book says that if you can't succeed on about 75 percent of your stolen base attempts, then you've probably lost more opportunities to score than you've gained. Over the long haul. So, be very careful with the running game.

So, you follow the principles, along with some others, such as, famously, going for hitters with high on-base averages. You finish off the roster figuring that the secondary numbers will add up to about 90 wins, then you send your team out there and it comes back with about 90 wins and a playoff spot. It works. It's a good system. Ingenious, really. It deserves the acclaim that it gets.

But now you're in the playoffs, and the evidence base on which you built your team to win the most possible games out of 162 can't give you the answers you need, because now your goal isn't to win about 90 games out of 162, but to win this one and only game right now. There is no long haul over which the numbers will even out through time. There is only this game, and there is only right now. 

So when the Royals trail, 7-6, in the bottom of the eighth with Jarrod Dyson on second base as the tying run, they're not thinking, "Over the long haul of 162 games, you will lose more scoring opportunities by running than by not running, so we better not try to steal third base." They're thinking that they need to win this game right now, and their best chance to do it is by stealing third base. When the Royals have a runner on first with nobody out, they're not thinking, "Over the long haul, the runner from first with no outs scores more often than the runner on second with one out, so bunting is the last thing on our mind." They're thinking that if they can get the runner to second with one out, they've got a chance to win this game right now. And they drop a bunt.

When you already know you've got another game tomorrow, you'll come out fine by following the long-haul percentages. When you don't have another game tomorrow unless you win this game right now, those long-haul percentages couldn't be less helpful. And a team that can't or doesn't execute those little ball tools to win this game right now is going to be at a disadvantage. 

During the postseason, the Royals have utilized those tactics to huge advantage, and opponents have been unable to defend against them. Over 162 games, perhaps, those tactics won't optimize your scoring. But you're going to need them in the playoffs. You're not playing the Cubs and Astros fattening up your numbers now. The teams you're playing against are likely to keep a lid on it defensively, so you need every tactic to score.

The Athletics, under Beane, have been one of the most frequent playoff entrants in the American League during this century. But we shouldn't be surprised when a team that's built to optimize in the long haul doesn't have the tools to optimize in the short haul. The playoffs aren't just a different season. The games are substantially different games because there are so few of them. 

The Royals are better right now than they really are, and this is not an unlikely occurrence, either. Kansas City's success with small ball is worth noting, but the Royals are winning with a great deal more. Finishing last in the American League this year with 95 home runs, the Royals have hit seven homers in eight postseason games. The home runs don't explain how the Royals have won each round of these playoffs, but the home runs have a lot to say about how they swept through the American League postseason.

Reliable power hitting by Eric Hosmer and Mike Moustakas isn't normally on the Kansas City menu. But it can be on the menu, it has been on the menu and, in their run against the Angels and Orioles, it happens that their kitchen brought in a shipment of home runs. When the Royals hit home runs, they are an outstanding team that can beat anyone. 

We saw it at the start of June, when the Royals went on a 15-4 tear over a three-week period, hitting 18 homers with a club OPS of .781 in 19 games. So, it's there, but we haven't seen it often. Indeed, we're seeing it again only now, with the Royals crushing four homers in three games against the Angels, then three in four games against the Orioles.

It's not a team we have seen frequently. But when that team shows up at the right time, the playoffs, that team has a chance to live forever.