2018 Trade Deadline ROSTERBATION

[nsacpi]

This whole "the playoffs are a crap shoot" cliche is silly.

Yes, there is a luck component to winning in the playoffs, but we all know the formula for increasing a team's odds of succeeding in the postseason. To claim otherwise is bordering on moronic.

Get 2-3 dominant SPs, 2-3 dominant BP arms, good defense, and as many impact hitters as possible...then hope those hitters don't get shut down by the other team's dominant pitchers.

Declaring something a "crap shoot" is what losers do. The winners talk about how awesome they are.

Dominant pitching does increase the odds of winning a short series. But by how much. It seems to me that teams with less than dominant pitching make it and win the WS a fair amount of the time. Most recently the Royals. And dominant pitching is no guarantee. See the Tigers when they had Verlander and Scherzer plus some pretty good hitters. See the gnats who haven't even made the WS.

There is enough randomness in a 5 or 7 game series so that inferior teams often go deep in the playoffs and sometimes win it all. This is one of the reasons I don't think it makes sense to pay the contender's premium. Build a good solid club in the off-season. Make sure you have good depth including the "second bench" in AAA. Add judiciously at the deadline. Avoid paying that contender's premium. Its main effect is to shorten a contending team's window.