This is preposterous.
I have no problem accepting that the Rangers may be the better team, but it does not follow from this that they will win the series in a sweep or even in 5 games. Baseball is baseball. Ask people a week ago if they thought it would be Rangers versus Giants right now, and they would probably laugh at you. Even the doggiest of underdogs have a fighting chance against the best teams.
It is for this reason that I think all predictions should be at least 6 game series.
I agree! Now, of course I am a San Franciscan, and a huge Giants fan, and suffered through so many of those horrible freezing summer nights of mediocre baseball at Candlestick, blah blah, you know how I hope this goes. But it is really exciting that the Giants will be up against a team that has never been in the World Series before. I was living in Chicago in 2005 and although there had been WS champions in Chicago before, it had been such a long freaking time that it felt kind of the same. Just a really exciting series, and so great for the fans of both teams, who had waited so long.
And when the Sox won? MAN that was awesome. I think even the bitterest and craziest of the Cubs fans* couldn’t help but enjoy it a little. I really want to see that for my own team.
*After living on the North Side of Chicago for three years, I came away with the belief that Cubs fans are all just a little cracked in the head. You talk to a Cubs fan about anything but baseball, perfectly normal, pleasant person. Topic switches to baseball, and it’s like they undergo a sort of transition, into a bitter, miserable, angry person who yells a lot. Being a Cubs fan seems to break something in a person’s brain.
Dude. The Padres knocked the Padres out of the playoffs.
There’s no doubt about A-Rod’s greatness and he was awesome in the postseason last year. Really, the difference maker. But when he sucks, which he has in every other post-season with the Yankees, he just vanishes. It’s strange.
As for Swisher, he owns a lifetime post-season average of .162 over 33 games. I’ve heard that stuff about him being great in the clubhouse, but that’s overrated, imho. He comes off as a big phony to me. I hope he’s traded. I really hate that “look at me” pointing to the heavens after every goddamn base hit. Ugh.
It’s understandable that everyone hates the Yankees. I like it. I love the rivalries with the Red Sox, the Rays and now the Rangers. I also notice that none of the other teams turn down the Yankee welfare checks. 
Go Giants. I forgot about Dave Righetti, so now I get to root for a pitching coach.
nm
Well, that’s true at a general level. Of course, you can say that about any team that doesn’t make the playoffs. They all “knock themselves out” by not winning enough games.
My point was simply that the division went down to the final series, which was between the Giants and the Padres, and the Giants did well enough in that series to take the pennant.
The Tigers gave up on Renteria. They felt he had poor range and did not play good defense at all. He hit a bit under his lifetime in all categories. Now,here he is good enough to play in a series. Were we wrong about him?
The Tigers also had Aubrey Huff to finish off the year, 2 years ago. He played terrible. We were glad to get him and we gave up rapidly. In 40 games he hit .189, 2 hrs, 13 rbi, obp .265. Now he is a big time hitter again. A couple game winners would have been enough to win us the league.
What do you mean “good enough to play in a series”?
Renteria played in 72 games for the Giants this year. In those games, his hitting figures were .276/.332/.374 with an OPS+ of 90. This year was, for Renteria, slightly worse than his lifetime average. His numbers this year were almost identical to his numbers with Detroit two years ago, except that the Tigers let him stink up the plate in 138 games instead of 72.
David Eckstein, a guy with a career OPS+ of 87, has two WS rings and a WS MVP. Pedro Feliz, a guy with a career line of .250/.288/.410, won a World Series with the Phillies two years ago. Julio Lugo, who won a ring with the Red Sox, has similarly awful numbers. Plenty of pretty average and below-average hitters make it to the World Series. Very few WS-winning teams are comprised of nothing but superstars. Note that, like Renteria, quite a few of these guys are infielders, where their defense might partially offset their almost complete lack of power.
The answer is: no, Detroit was not wring about Renteria. He just happened to end up at a ballclub where an almost total absence of offense was offset by some of the best pitching in the Major Leagues.
Huff is certainly having one of the best years of his career. He had a spectacularly bad season in 2009, when he was with Baltimore and Detroit.
His presence probably would have improved Detroit’s offense this year, but i’'m still not sure i’d refer to him as a game winner. And there’s no way that Renteria deserves that title.
Um, hello. Okay, not a baseball fan by any stretch of the imagination, not sure why I’m asking this, but…
Oh, what the hell. Two totally random questions involving the gone-but-not-forgotten Yankees. Which I don’t think even ESPN has tackled yet.
Answer: because in a baseball short series, anything can happen. Mediocre ballplayers like Aaron Boone and Jim Leyritz got clutch hits for the Yankees during the 1990s. Were the Yankees great in the late 1990s or very lucky too? They were both, and luck evens out.
Good point but a small nitpick Boone was 2003. Brian Doyle going back to 1978was a great example of a mediocre ballplayers coming up big in the post season.
Because other teams get their catastrophic meltdowns out of the way in September, or July, or in spring training.
Criticizing the Yankees’ postseason performance over the last 10 years makes you sound like one of those people who don’t think a supermodel is beautiful because her toes are too long. Mariano Rivera’s numbers in the postseasons are absurdly good. He will still blow a game every so often (because he’s still human – as his android replacement is still being beta-tested in a Japanese lab, and his clone is still only 13 years old and is just starting his training in the jungles of Panama).
Despite what people love to say, the Yankees haven’t actually bought their World Series rings. They still have to play the games, and .300 hitters are all capable of hitting .100 over the course of a few games, especially when facing high-quality pitching.
I’m a Mets fan and I’d love to have the terrible problems the Yankees have had with the postseason. (I haven’t picked who to root for in the Series yet, but I’m happy it’s not Yanks-Phils again, for a number of reasons.)
The key to making the postseason is generally depth, especially in pitching. But depth doesn’t tend to be as important in a short series. If you lifted any series out of the middle of the season, you could see the same thing happen. It’s just that good baseball teams tend to win more series–they don’t win them all.
I’m really curious about this Yankee Off-season. We all know in the old George world the team would over-react to what adds up to a bad week at a bad time and Cliff Lee would be signed at all costs and Granderson or Gardner or Swisher would be trader away and Crawford brought in with Lee.
I would hope that the team instead realizes Lee is 34 and a 5 year contract is probably not the wisest idea. Crawford is great but not enough greater than Gardner or Granderson to make a switch. That they need to decide if Montero is taking over catching duties next year or if they need a bridge as you can’t expect Jorge to catch 100 games next year and even if he could you probably don’t want him to.
The Yanks are famous for over-reacting. I really want to see what this year brings.
One thing that Teixeira reminded us is that just one infield position having more range makes the whole infield better. Teixeira turned Jeter into a better shortstop the past 2 years. While A-Rod is no longer a viable shortstop, he was in 2004. His range and overall defense, which was unquestionably better than Jeter’s, would have made slight daily incremental impacts (but huge overall, much like Teixeira this year).
Secondly, by asking A-Rod to adjust to NY and learn a new position was unfair. He spent way too much time focusing on 3rd base (which he played well). But I believe it took away from his hitting. And no one has any idea how this affected him during the playoffs. Who knows how much time he would have spent tweaking his swing instead of working on his fielding.
This completely misses the point.
Yes, it’s clear that anything can happen over the course of short series. There is a certain amount of good fortune involved in winning a 5-game and even a 7-game series. As RickJay noted earlier in the thread, it would be perfectly possible for the Pittsburgh Pirates to beat the Yankees or the Phillies over a series like that. And as jsgoddess observes, take a look at the regular season, and every team will have a stretch where it has a bunch of losses in quick succession. I just looked in the Yankees’ list of results for 2010, and saw quite a few places where they went 2-3, 2-5, 4-7, and even 2-7 and 2-8. This stuff happens, even to the best teams.
The $200-million lineup is not guarantee of anything in the playoffs, as evidenced by the fact that the Yankees have been in the playoffs 9 out of the last 10 seasons, but have only won 1 WS in that time.
Where the “buying” comes in is getting to the playoffs in the first place, and that’s where the Yankees big spending has paid off in spades. The more games you play, the more sheer talent becomes a factor, and luck plays a diminishing role. Over a 162-game season, the little things that can fuck you up in a short series tend to even out, and the sheer depth of a lineup like New York’s makes a huge difference.
To be quite honest, although they would never do it, the most reasonable and fair way to determine the champion would be to have a completely balanced schedule, where every team plays every other team exactly the same number of times, and where the winner is simply the team with the best W-L record at the end. The English Premier League soccer season works this way. I’m not saying this would be better, and i love the excitement and the drama and the uncertainty of the playoffs, but it would probably be a better measure of which team is the best.
The fact that the Yankees have only won 1 WS in the last 10 seasons is really just a measure of the fact that the playoffs are a bit of a crapshoot. The fact that they’ve been to the playoffs 9 of the last 10 years is a measure of how powerful the team has been.
I think we’re making the same point. The Yankees’ payroll can “buy” a long run of 90- to 100-win seasons, but not 150-win seasons. I can imagine an imbalance that would all but guarantee a team winning every short series, but that’s not what we have at the moment. Winning one World Series in 9 postseason appearances isn’t a notable choke but kind of exactly what the (say) Cardinals and Braves have done with the same number of opportunities in recent memory.
When the Yankees rattled off 4 of 5 World Series they had perhaps the best bullpen in the history of Baseball, plenty of good to great starting pitchers and a well balanced team that was nowhere near as top heavy as the last 10 years.
Also oddly they did have the pronounce Payroll advantage in the time. Of those 5 years I believe they were only #1 is salary twice and never by a large margin like the last 10 years.
The Yanks were actually poorly built in 00s. Giambi’s defense probably hurt more than his offense helped. (Now if he hit like he hit for Oakland, I will concede that would have made up for it. But the Yanks screwed up and bid against themselves for too long and too expensive of a contract. Extending the A-Rod contract really did not make sense though the trade did. Then there are the dozens of other contractual mistakes that they did indeed just try to buy their way out of culminating in overpaying for AJ as they failed to produce enough pitching fast enough in the farm system. Also they could never recapture the bullpen of the 90s and that sure did make Joe Torre look like a genius back then.
Don’t forget the unique pressure of playing in the New York fishbowl - with fans who consider anything less than a World Series ring a completely failed season, 3 newspapers ready to shred you for any mistakes you make, and (up to this year) the ever-present Eye of Sauron Steinbrenner.
I think the Phillies, who had even more superstars than the Yankees this year, may have succumbed to similar pressure.
Even using only the last 10 years (which of course cuts off the single most successful playoff run since the system moved to multiple rounds), the Yankees are 9-8 in playoff series; not quite as good as you might expect from a team that was favored in most of those series, but not horrible either.