Schoenfield: O's Starting to Look Like Team of Destiny

[Hank Scorpio]

I agree, the Pythag is the most tiresome argument/debate/discussion on here since the Hunt For Tex.

Yeah... my $.02 on the Pythagorean at this point of the season is: Who gives a s***. I've seen them smoke & mirror their way through 4 months of baseball and they just keep on doing it.

They're 4 weeks of .500 baseball away from a possible playoff berth.

It's absolutely mind boggling and astonishing. I'm gonna just enjoy giving a damn about baseball in September for the first time in a decade and a half.

[CA-ORIOLE]

If it's not 'luck' (i.e. Success or failure apparently brought by chance rather than through one's own actions), don't call it luck.

And it's pretty much irrefutable that this year's Orioles performance in 1-run games directly correlates to the strong BP performance. What has happened in the past is completely and utterly irrelevant.

Luck, unsustainable, not projectable. It's all the same to me. I have no desire to get into a semantics debate. Again, research shows that great BP performance does not correlate to winning a very high percentage of one run games. That we've been able to do that this year (largely attributable to highly leveraged BP performance) does not mean we'll be able to consistently do it going forward.

[Moose Milligan]

I think it's hilarious that so many people are freaking out about the Pythag. For the first time in 15 years, we're playing meaningful baseball to end a season in a playoff race, and people feel they have to justify how or why, instead of just enjoying the season, and not beating each other up over Pythag, or trying to explain why we have the record we have. I really am not concerned if this unsustainable for next season, what matters is now. I have faith that DD is smart enough to realize that this seasons success isn't sustainable, as is, and I'm sure he'll keep adding to the puzzle. I'm going to enjoy this season, and not spend too much time worrying why we are out performing our Pythag, or hammering other people about how foolish and preposterous they are. Seriously, winning baseball into September for the first time in like, forever. Let that sink in, and enjoy it instead of wracking your brain about why.

This post wins.

[Pedro Cerrano]

I feel like my argument got buried very quickly and nobody noticed it, so I'll just sort of drop it here again.

No, your argument has been made before. I offered a similar hypothetical situation in a post a few weeks back when this debate was first catching fire. I'd search for it but I'm hungry and lunch > pythag.

[Moose Milligan]

Yeah... my $.02 on the Pythagorean at this point of the season is: Who gives a s***. I've seen them smoke & mirror their way through 4 months of baseball and they just keep on doing it.

They're 4 weeks of .500 baseball away from a possible playoff berth.

It's absolutely mind boggling and astonishing. I'm gonna just enjoy giving a damn about baseball in September for the first time in a decade and a half.

But Hank!!! For some people the enjoyment IS the Pythag debate!!

[Satyr3206]

I think it's hilarious that so many people are freaking out about the Pythag. For the first time in 15 years, we're playing meaningful baseball to end a season in a playoff race, and people feel they have to justify how or why, instead of just enjoying the season, and not beating each other up over Pythag, or trying to explain why we have the record we have. I really am not concerned if this unsustainable for next season, what matters is now. I have faith that DD is smart enough to realize that this seasons success isn't sustainable, as is, and I'm sure he'll keep adding to the puzzle. I'm going to enjoy this season, and not spend too much time worrying why we are out performing our Pythag, or hammering other people about how foolish and preposterous they are. Seriously, winning baseball into September for the first time in like, forever. Let that sink in, and enjoy it instead of wracking your brain about why.

Isn't this the truth!:agree:

[Lucky Jim]

Time to go back to being silent, I think. I really don't understand why folks are resorting to such elaborate logical gymnastics in order to re-frame this year. This year has been a blast. Whether we're a little bit lucky or not, who really cares? That said, I wrote this earlier, and it's sort-of a value-neutral take on the team's performance.:

A couple of points. I think it's important to qualify what people mean by "luck." They don't mean that the Orioles didn't perform well enough to win. They mean that there is a certain amount of uncontrollable uncertainty in baseball, an uncertainty that is highly-leveraged in close games, that can rear its head even when a team plays well and "deserves to win." The O's have largely avoided that - and, in that sense, have been "lucky" - they've avoided being bitten by uncertainty. In those games that - to echo a cliche - "neither team really deserved the lose," the O's have generally not lost. People blanch at the idea of "luck," I think, because they think it takes agency away from the team. But really it's just an uneven distribution of unknowns, and the avoidance of bad luck that factors in.

Close games are tough because baseball is a game w/ tons of inherent uncertainty. If you need an emblematic event to represent the problem with close games, think of this this duck-fart against Mariano Rivera in the 2001 World Series:

[CA-ORIOLE]

I feel like my argument got buried very quickly and nobody noticed it, so I'll just sort of drop it here again.

I don't think anybody thinks that pythag is a particularly great predictive tool. There are a lot of dynamics, particularly at this stage of the season that make it problematic.

[Mizerooskie]

Luck, unsustainable, not projectable. It's all the same to me. I have no desire to get into a semantics debate. Again, research shows that great BP performance does not correlate to winning a very high percentage of one run games. That we've been able to do that this year (largely attributable to highly leveraged BP performance) does not mean we'll be able to consistently do it going forward.

If it's the same to you, than you don't know the meaning of the term. Luck is not the same as unsustainable or not projectable.

Again, whatever research has shown in the past about 1-run games has zero to do with the Orioles this year. Zip, zilch.

The Orioles are winning on the back of a strong bullpen this season, and there's nothing to suggest that they won't continue to do so the rest of this season.

[Hank Scorpio]

This year has been a blast. Whether we're a little bit lucky or not, who really cares?

I think some people just need to hear this outta you sometimes.

[Lucky Jim]

I think some people just need to hear this outta you sometimes.

This may also be the reason why I'm still single. Hey, if I'm here, it's because I care. Isn't that enough?

[CA-ORIOLE]

If it's the same to you, than you don't know the meaning of the term. Luck is not the same as unsustainable or not projectable..

In the context of this debate/circumstance, they are the same to me. Pick any of the three words you like. As I have explained this, I would say you lack the ability for abstract thought.

Again, whatever research has shown in the past about 1-run games has zero to do with the Orioles this year. Zip, zilch

How does our percentage of winning the highest rate of one run games in moden baseball history not relate to the Orioles this season?

The Orioles are winning on the back of a strong bullpen this season, and there's nothing to suggest that they won't continue to do so the rest of this season

There will be a number of factors that wil contribute to us winning going forward and as strong BP will certainly be one of them. I think Buck has done a good job managing innings and performance this year.

[callahan09]

I don't think anybody thinks that pythag is a particularly great predictive tool. There are a lot of dynamics, particularly at this stage of the season that make it problematic.

If nobody thinks it, then why do we discuss it so much? Why do so many pundits at ESPN and Sports Illustrated, etc., continue to use it as a way of saying that teams are playing above their heads, or can be expected to do much better or worse than they've been doing, etc.?

Here's another example:

The offense averages 4 runs per game.

The bullpen is perfection (0.00 ERA).

4 starters average 3 runs per game, and each goes 32-0. They account for 384 runs allowed.

1 starter averages 8 runs per game, and he goes 0-34. He accounts for 272 runs allowed.

That's good for a record of 128-34, and 648 runs scored to 656 runs allowed.

Which pythag would have as an expected record of 80-82, not even a .500 season.

So you've got a fairly average offense, 4 starters who can win every game, and 1 starter who is pretty poor, and anybody with a brain can see that this is a recipe for winning something like 80% of your games. But pythag has it has not even a .500 record.

I've got a million of these. There are really an infinite number of ways that a team can drastically over- or under-perform their pythag that the pythag is just a meaningless experiment that doesn't give any worthwhile incite. And yet we continue to talk about it at great length. Why?

[LA2]

I really don't get people's animosity towards the Pyth or the people looking at it and being worried that this team is not as good as it's record. It's pretty simple really.. If you look the Angels. They are performing exactly to their Pyth (67-62). The O's are 9 games better than they Pyth. To take math out of it, which team would you suggest has a better chance of reproducing their season next year provided the same rosters? How confident are you that this roster kept largely intact without significant upgrade could go out and win 90 games next year (which is basically the pace they are on)? Would you have more confidence in the Angels as constructed today to get there?

Now obviously rosters change and that clearly highlights the issue with using the Pyth to predict the future. But to me the strength of the Pyth is that it gives some context to your history or your W-L, thats all.

The Pythagorean theorem is, within the limited field of Euclidean geometry, an absolutely precise formulation about a clearly proscribed class of triangles. After Einstein, we are able to specify Euclidean geometry as only one configuration of many possible space-time continuums; that is, specification of context and circumstances is possible--we know the constants, e.g. the speed of light, and many of the relevant parameters. The merely superficially similar formulation in baseball analysis has no way of specifying what for this season's Orioles has been the crucial temporal and situational dynamics and interactions into which the theorem's inert counting stats are fed, but carry no predictive power. So why waste our time on it while some other, far more wondrous process, some other way of winning is unfolding before us? Forget Pythagoras--we need a quantum mechanics of ball and player positioning on the diamond manifold and special theory of roster relativity just to begin to grasp the wonder of the Orioles cosmos and its bending of defeat's arrow.

To model it we would need to understand such paradoxes as the Buck/DD zero-sum, out-fishin', uniquely dedicated, multi-simultaneous processing, quick hook/call-up-the-unready, highly disheveled/supremely punctual, mentally prepared/just focus on the present, convenant-making/yank everyone around, play the slumping/bench the hot management combine and the Adair/Peterson strategem of inducing cognitive conflict in young pitchers. Buck sd in a MASN interview yesterday that even he has a hard time sometimes figuring out what has happened; he's not the dominating mastermind so much as the deft rider of strange and shimmering probabilities. Sorry to write such dreck--I'll post it anyway b/c I've spent some time on it and time changes, I mean, time edits.

[Hank Scorpio]

This may also be the reason why I'm still single. Hey, if I'm here, it's because I care. Isn't that enough?

It's enough for me... but I'm not very demanding.