I guess the Mariners aren't as good as their record indicates.

In My Humble Opinion
1

They aren’t playing too well against the Yankees and I looked at their game log and noticed their divisional record looked like this:

Texas 15-5
Anaheim 15-4
Oakland 10-9

As you can see, 30 of their 116 wins came against the two weakest teams in their division. Most of their wins against Oakland came at the beginning of the season before Oakland got their act together. They did quite well against other weak teams and actually did well against the strong Yankees (5-1), but that looks to be an aberration. Could it be that their record was inflated because they were in a weak divisison and would have done much worse had they been in the AL East, for example? (I don’t think six games against each East team is enough to tell us how well they would have done against them had they been in that division.)

So what the hell’s going on here? How can a team do so well in the regular season and fall apart in the playoffs? Why did they struggle against the Indians and why are they struggling aginst the Yankees?

2

Do you think seven games against good opposition is a big enough sample to judge how good a team is? It’s not like the Yankees have been pounding the ball over the place. They have won two games by a total of 3 runs. The Mariners had one bad game against Cleveland.

If the AL West is considered a “weak” division despite it having two teams with over 100 wins, then what’s a strong division? The AL Central? The AL East?

The postseason is always a crapshoot. That’s true in every sport.

3

As you said, the M’s played in a weak division. The Yanks usually do well in playoffs. They rise to the occasion. Boone is choking. The Braves usually do well in the season but can’t win the Series, except once. It’s like the Bills in the super bowl.

4

I think they’re trying to revert to their old tactics of ‘Hit the ball hard’. If you watch many of the M’s bat, it isn’t the precision batting that they used throughout the regular season, but out and out attempts (operative word there) to slug the ball out of the park. Boone is an excellent example of this. Anyways, I still have confidence that they’ll beat the Yankees. Go Mariners!!!

5

The AL West was a “weak” division? Can anyone provide objective evidence of that?

The M’s and A’s both 100 games. The Yankees were in a division where the second best team, Boston, barely broke .500 and I don’t even want to think of how bad Toronto, Baltimore, and Tampa Bay are.

6

Let me get this straight–the AL West is a weak division, but the AL East–home of the Devil Rays and the Orioles is not?

Teams win or lose over the regular season based upon how good they are compared to their opponents. They win or lose in the playoffs based largely upon luck, although some teams are particularly well structured for a short series. Some of the best teams ever–the 1906 Cubs, 1954 Indians, and 1995 Indians–have failed to win the World Series. This is not due to any fundamental unsoundness or chokiness on their behalves, but due to the incredibly small sample size. The Yankees lost three of their last four games this season to the Devil Rays!

7

That was something else I couldn’t figger out… I guess everybody gets lucky now and then.

8

The Mariners are choking in the post-season because they are CURSED !

$500 million in stolen ballpark money and five years later… another choke in the ALCS. It’s what the now-Governor did for them in 1995 coming back to kick them in the butt.

That plus, as noted, they’re swinging for the fences because they’re desperate.

9

Yankee fan checking in.
Goodness, they’ve only lost 2 games. They have the best record in baseball --ever! This is reminding me of all the crowing the Yankee bashers did in the beginning of the first round.

The Mariners are a good team. This series will be competetive.

And then the Yanks will go on to win the Championship.

10

Actually, the Yankees were in the weakest division in baseball. They had two mediocre teams (Boston and Toronto) two awful teams (Baltimore and Tampa Bay) and played their interleague games agains the weakest NL division. I’m not sure which is worse, Boston or Toronto, but I’m sure the Devil Rays and the Orioles are worse than most Japanese League teams. The Yankees had an easy ride.

They’ve won two games against Seattle because Seattle’s hitters have just stunk up the joint. Hey, it happens.

I’ll be shocked, frankly, if Seattle comes back and wins the series. But that’s baseball. That’s why ya play the games.

11

Maybe BobT, but its much more a crapshoot in baseball, where for instance a hot pitcher can dominate a short series or where a good hitting team can go into an inexplicable slump, than in the NBA. The 8th seeded NBA playoff team hardly ever beats the top seed. The list of NBA’s champions for the last 20 years is dominated by the usual superstar dominated teams suspects in LA (Magic, Kareem, Worthy, Bryant, O’Neal), Boston (Bird, McHale, Parrish), Chicago (whatshis name, #23) and Detroit (Isiah Thomas, Dumars) with nary an entry by the Cavaliers, Nets, Clippers or Kings.

12

The Mariners are well known with the locals for doing well in season and then choke, choke, choke.
And I like that ballpark-swindle-curse theory. BOY did that piss some people off.

13

I may have jumped the gun. The Mariners are currently ahead 9-2 in the 6th inning, after scoring 7 runs in the 6th.

Of course, it’s only one game.

14

The Mariners have a history of choking? They aren’t even that old. The first time they made the playoffs they overcame an enormous deficit in the final month of the season. Then they fell down 0-2 to the Yankees and rallied to win in 3 very dramatic games. Then they lost out to Cleveland in the ALCS, but they still managed to stretch it out to 6 games.

The Mariners didn’t play well against Baltimore in 1996, but they swept the White Sox last year and gave the Yankees a battle last year in the ALCS.

Rooting for the Mariners is not like rooting for the Red Sox.

15

No, realli! What does this mean?

What skills define a MLB team as good - those that add up to the most success over a long season, or those that enable it to win one or more short series? A lot of the requisite attributes overlap, but a bunch of 'em don’t.

It used to be pretty clear - up through 1968, winning the most games in the long season got you directly into the Series. During the 1969-93 period, that imperative was weakened only slightly: you had to win two short series, not one, to be world champion - but you still had to win more games than anyone else in your division, over a 162-game season, to get to those short series in the first place.

By expanding to a third layer of playoffs, and adding a wildcard entry, MLB has substantially tipped that balance. Each additional level adds one more chance for a ‘better’ team (in terms of the regular season) to be knocked off by a ‘worse’ team (ditto). But doesn’t that just mean that the lords of the game are saying that ‘good’ doesn’t anymore mean regular-season excellence, so much as a combination of regular-year adequacy and short-series ability?

Especially when you look at the effect of the wildcard, which says that you don’t need to be the best in your division, anymore, to go on - which has the effect of telling teams that more regular-season wins than about 90, give or take, will generally be superfluous.

What this says is that if the M’s were designed in a way that resulted in those 116 wins, in a way that left them less than fully prepared for the multilevel chaos of MLB’s postseason, then they weren’t ‘better’ than teams that won fewer reg-season games, but had the right combination of talents for a succession of short, single-elimination series - by the standards of the sport itself.

Of course, this is exactly the combination of circumstances that has caused me to lose interest in the game during July and August, because the way it is now, there’s no point really in a regular season that’s longer than about 100-120 games; the last 40-60 games really don’t decide much of importance. But while that’s a related rant, it’s separate enough that I’ll stop there.

16

Scientists say when the world is near its end, the last creatures still alive will be the cockroaches and New York Yankees.
—Scott Ostler, San Francisco Chronicle

Go Tribe(next year, that is)

17

A lot of analysts have suggested that the Yankees are a team uniquely suited for winning playoff series. Their bench is - and for most of the last five years has been - pretty weak. The back end of the pitching staff is nothing special. But the frontline starters and the 3 go-to guys in the bullpen are awesome, and the starting lineup is patient and can score a consistent number of runs.

The extreme outlier for the Yankees has been Mariano Rivera. During a regular season a stopper isn’t really worth as much as a lot of people think - but during a short series, when your stopper can pitch 4-5 games in a 6-7 game series and you can push him a little, he has a much greater impact. When you then consider that Rivera has taken that chance to make an impact and turned in one of the most awesome stretches of pitching in playoff history - well, let’s be honest; with an average closer, the Yankees don’t win three World Series in a row. Since 1998, Rivera has made at least three appearances in every series except the 1999 ALDS (and the Yankes won that in two.)

In the playoffs, depth and bench strength really isn’t that important; you can overwork your pitchers and play your regulars every day without worrying about rest. The Yankees may lose a few extra games during the regular season because they’re carrying Clay Bellinger, but during the playoffs, the guys don’t need a day off, so what does it matter?

So the difference between Seattle going 116-46 and New York going 95-65 might lie at least in part with Seattle having stronger bench players and backend pitchers who won’t make nearly the impact in a short series as they do during a full season.

18

I wouldn’t say that the’Mariners bench is significantly better than the Yankees’. The Mariners have subs like Al Martin and Ed Sprague.

The Mariners were successful this year for two simple reasons:

  1. They scored a lot of runs
  2. They didn’t give up many runs

Seattle scored more than 300 runs than they gave up. That’s an incredible disparity. The Mariners, until Game 3 of the ALCS, were a patient offense which got lots of runners on base and then used a trio of hitters with above average numbers in power and BA (Boone, Martinez, and Olerud) to knock them in.

The Mariners also have a rotation that had five quality pitchers and there wasn’t a real sharp dropoff with the #5 guy for Seattle (Joel Piniero most of the time) than there was with New York (Lilly and Hitchcock).

Both teams have great relievers and can pretty much lock up any lead from the 7th inning on. Yes, both teams have blown some late leads, but those didn’t happen that often. The difference is which team can do the best against the other team’s starters. Right now, the Yankees’ starters have been a bit better than the Mariners’, although Orlando Hernandez’s seemingly “invincible” postseason reputation has taken a hit. (On the other hand, Randy Johnson’s postseason reputation seems to be getting rehibilitated, especially if Arizona wins tonight in Game 5.)

Finallly, RickJay what did you mean by this?

Did the Rangers give up after two games?

19

Here’s my theory of why baseball is more prone then other sports to have a weaker team win in a short series: baseball is a large set of statistical anomalies, which only even out in the long run. Particularly the offense.

Consider a mediocre outfielder: 15 HR, 70 RBI. A guy like this is a liability as an offensive force. But he will have numerous games in which he gets 2 hits and an RBI. In those games, he will be batting .500, and driving in runs at a 162 per year pace. And he will have certain games in which he drives in two and three runs. In those games, his pace is record setting.

At the same time, even the best all-star player will have many games in which he drives in no runs, and even some in which he gets no hits. This pace - if extended to an entire season, would result in a bad season of historic proportions.

So the point is that in any given baseball game, what is occurring on the field is an anomaly. And this can work in favor of the weaker team. They are only weaker in that over the long haul they do not have enough exceptional performances - but if in any one game their guy happens to hit his three run homer, they will probably win.

By contrast, in football, where the record for passing yards per season is about 300 per game, a mediocre quarterback will have few if any where he exceeds that. And even a great one will have none in which he passes for 2 or three times that number. The same goes for rushing. So football is - to a greater extent than baseball - comprised of good performances week in and week out. Which means that a better team has a better expectation that their guys will perform up to standard in a given game, which makes upsets less likely. The same goes for basketball as well.

I think hockey is somewhat similar to baseball, and I think upsets are indeed more likely in hockey than in basketball series. But I don’t think it is true to the same extent as baseball, because each goal counts as one point, unlike baseball in which multiple runs can be scored at a time.

I would suggest that the above can be tested by comparing the overall scoring rate with the overall winning rate, in baseball versus basketball. Meaning that my theory would predict that a team that outscores its opponents by 10% would have a higher winning percentage in basketball than in baseball, because the scores would be more evenly distributed game by game. Perhaps someone knows if this is so.

20

They may as well have. But of course, its a typo. The Yankees won in three.