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=== Good Pitching Beats Good Hitting ===
... except when it doesn't. Dave Fleming, at BJOL, goes over the four Division Series matchups to see if Good Pitching won. He's not trying to prove a case in a court of law. He's just cracking peanuts, and watching baseball. ... Of the Final Eight teams, in four matchups, how many qualified as Pitching vs Hitting matchups?
NYY vs BAL: both teams had 109 ERA's. NYY had a far better offense. No test case here. The better team squeaked out a win.
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A's vs DET: both teams had ERA's of 114 and 112, and both had OPS's of 97-104. Fleming called Oakland the pitching team and Detroit the hitting team, saying that hitting beat pitching. I'd call it a non-test case.
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SF vs CIN: Huge test case. Did you realize that the Reds had an ERA+ of 127 ?! And they had a lousy OPS+ of 90 also, despite Votto, Bruce, Phillips and Ludwick. San Fran, on the other hand, had an excellent offense and below-average pitching.
The Giants won, so that's an In Yo Face against the purists.
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Gnats vs Cards: the Montreal Expos had a sky-high ERA+ of 119. The Expos' offense was league average; the Cards' offense was better than their defense. Legit test case.
The Cardinals, the hitting team, won -- staging a huge comeback against a terrific closer. In Yo Face.
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=== ALCS ===
The Yankees got rolled like a ZigZag paper in Jered Weaver's minibus. Was it a test case for pitching vs hitting?
Well, the Yankees had a 112 and 109 for hitting and pitching, respectively. The Tigers had 104 and 112. I wouldn't call it a clear Arms vs Bats squareoff -- you could say the Tigers are kind of a pitching team, but they do have Miguel Cabrera and Prince Fielder. And we didn't call Oakland a pitching team earlier.
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=== NLCS ===
Neither the Giants nor Cards are pitching teams. No test here either, but when the Tigers face off against St. Louis you might call that a bit of an Arms vs Bats plotline.
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=== Dr's Diagnosis ===
If your idea had ever been to amass brilliant pitching, and ride it to a series of World Series titles, the evidence probably hasn't been coming in on the side of your idea. The 2012 postseason hasn't been an Air Force theater of war, either. It's got to be pretty depressing to amass a 127 ERA+ pitching staff and get powerflushed in the first short series.
Like we said, we're not taking 2012 as the final word on the Grand Strategy investigation. But it's interesting to simply watch the games on the field and see what's going on. A friend of mine, a comic store guy, said something that stuck: "I'm going to go home and watch the debate and just pretend I don't know who the guys are. I'm just going to listen to what they say." On that basis, I was fascinated to hear President Obama say that he doesn't believe that the government creates jobs, and that he thought that our capitalist system was the greatest monetary engine in world history. It was fascinating to hear Romney point out that he'd been a pastor for ten years, working with poor people who needed help with their financial situation.
It was one whale of a lot of fun to just watch the debates. I've found a new light bulb here. Thank you, comic store guy.
Listening to baseball dogma, that's one thing. Watching the games as if never having seen a game before, that's another thing.
It'll be Cabrera, Fielder and Verlander for the junior circuit each making in excess of $20M per year, with Holliday, Berkman, Beltran, Carpenter and Wainwright for the senior circuit. The Cards' top six players, those guys and Lohse, pull down $73M of their $114M payroll. I dunno about Good Pitching Beats Good Hitting, but in the playoffs I'll go with the Stars & Scrubs over the 25 Honda Civics.
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The Gnats' ERA+ without Stras was still good, just not as good as with his ERA+ at 125. They blew their opportunity. I honestly thought they'd save him for the playoffs by regulating his innings, not completely shutting him down. Now there is talk of possibly losing LaRoche (FA), Morse (trade?), and others in the offseason. They still have enough to be good, but great?
I don't buy the designation of Detroit as the hitting team and Oakland as the pitching team in the ALDS. I wouldn't even call it a wash. You have to consider who's actually pitching now: sure, over the full season, the Tigers put up a team ERA+ of 112, but their rotation now is guys who put up 160, 122, 113, and 113. The elimination of fifth starters did the Tigers a huge favor. They're probably the biggest pitching team in these playoffs.
It could be well argued that Detroit was both the better hitting and pitching team in that ALDS. For the season, the A's hit among the worst in the league, though pitching among the best. Detroit has Verlander that few teams can match. To your point, the #5 SP watches from the dugout in the playoffs, or might pitch in relief in a blowout. Advantage Detroit.
Oakland, relative to itself, is a pitching team. But that doesn't make them the pitching team in any matchup against any other team :- )
Detroit has the pitching star power and Oakland, if I recall correctly anyhow, had pitching more based on depth.
With Verlander and, UGH, Doug Fister, Detroit could argue that its PLAYOFF pitching is very elite.
Fister this postseason, two starts and two lockdown starts, the anvil crushing the opponent offense like a piano dropping out of the window. I hate to carp on the past, nobody's perfect, but that Fister deal. Quite an owie.
The candidates lie. All the time. Especially Obama. :)
Anyone who actually BELIEVES that Obama thinks capitalism is awesome and doesn't believe that the government creates jobs could sure use this bridge I have for them in Florida.
Politics has the capability to incite flame wars like no other topic does. I dislike flame wars, and I also find that it colors my perception of people to find out they disagree with my political views, making me less likely to trust their opinions in future cases and coloring biases in things totally unrelated to politics. I'm happy to talk politics on the internet, but I'd like to do it in places where politics is the central theme so that induced biases don't cross over into, say... baseball. They say never to talk about religion and politics in polite company. I'd like to think we're in polite company, here.
'Course it's not my blog. Up to Doc, I guess. Just a personal preference.
Ya Matty. If we were GOING to discuss politics, why would we lead with THAT?
This isn't a blog that deletes posts, but that one was tempting. :: wink ::
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At BJOL, they do a great job of discussing social and cultural issues, sometimes as directly related to baseball, sometimes not. It works amazingly well there. Part of the reason is that the moderator - James - allows NOTHING that isn't 100% intellectual exchange.
But SSI isn't going to splice 10%, 20% politics and culture; Klat has 1,500 sites and if we decide to set up a separate cubicle for that, it's no problem.
My occasional references in the main articles to presidential debates, or what have you, are excruciatingly neutral and not intended to play straight man for Bush Lied, Kids Died food fights. Thirteen has it right on this one; SSI is pretty unlikely to venture much into culture / politics and if it did, it certainly wouldn't do so in that manner.
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Applying a bit of baking soda to the battery acid here: those truly on the far left, the socialist/communist sector of academia and Hollywood, they scoff at President Obama's "bowing to Wall Street." If the President's early career had him leaning toward true socialism, his first few months in the White House quickly disabused him of those notions. Obama is inherently a reasonable man with a very moderate temperament. He favors a certain amount of redistribution, but he's a capitalist, and he pays for it.