GDT: 4/7/'15 - Atlanta Braves (Wood) @ Miami Marlins (Latos) 7:35PM EST

Just seems to me as you wouldn't enjoy winning a World Series as much if you think luck plays into it that much. I think winning a championship is hard and teams should be praised for doing what it takes to win one. Especially when you do it as much as the Giants have. My guess is the reaction would be a lot different around here if the Braves won more. We are a regular season team and choke in the playoffs so our opinions are influenced by that. I used to feel the way you guys do, I don't anymore. I don't care how many regular season games we win if we keep getting knocked out in the 1st round.
 
sturg33 said:
Think about in 2012 when we had to play the Cards in a 1 game playoff, after winning I think 8 more games than them in the regular season...

I guess they were just better and more clutch because they won that single game
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Chipper throwing the ball into RF didn't help, neither did the infield fly rule call.
 
I think its a lazy cop out to say that teams just get lucky.

Conversely, I think its also foolish to discount what a team does in the regular season.
 
ChapelHillMatt said:
Just seems to me as you wouldn't enjoy winning a World Series as much if you think luck plays into it that much. I think winning a championship is hard and teams should be praised for doing what it takes to win one. Especially when you do it as much as the Giants have. My guess is the reaction would be a lot different around here if the Braves won more. We are a regular season team and choke in the playoffs so our opinions are influenced by that. I used to feel the way you guys do, I don't anymore. I don't care how many regular season games we win if we keep getting knocked out in the 1st round.
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So you don't want to believe in luck because it would diminish your enjoyment if the Braves won it all?

How many times over the past 15 years have the Braves had the best team in baseball?
 
thethe said:
I think its a lazy cop out to say that teams just get lucky.

Conversely, I think its also foolish to discount what a team does in the regular season.
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It's not all luck but getting hot at the right time does have a good amount of luck involved. There was a time in the summer of 2013 that if the playoffs started I have no doubt the Braves would have steamrolled through the playoffs. They were hot and playing the best at the time. The current format gives too much leeway for non great teams to play at that level for a few weeks.

You can call it whatever you like but the best teams in baseball aren't rewarded anymore for being the best. They are punished. And I understand why when you look at this from a business stand point. But that doesn't change the fact that over time the sport of baseball has gone from winning the marathon to merely being good enough to be in the top 5 and winning the sprint.
 
gilesfan said:
What about the infield fly rule?
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Bad call

Part of the game

Not everything that happens in a game is going to go perfectly.

Errors and bad calls are not luck.

If they are then put an asterisk next to every win a team gets because of an error from the opposing team.
 
There's definitely luck involved in the SSS that is the playoffs.
But, the Giants weren't just lucky 3 out of the last 5 years. Having Bochy certainly plays a role as well. The Cardinals, Giants, and Royals were not power teams last year. Yet they did pretty well. You do not need big power. The way our team was built was not working. We were eaten alive by good pitching and there's a lot of that in the playoffs. That certainly plays a role too. Good pitchers beat good hitters a large majority of the time.
 
gilesfan said:
why not?
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Because at some point every team is the victim of them. The game is played and officiated by humans, humans are imperfect. At some point you'll get bad calls to go your way and at other times you'll have them go against you. How you respond says a lot about the character of your team. It's what you call mental toughness. The great teams are able to overcome the bad calls. Another word people use is 'makeup'. Fans like to focus on the bad calls that they feel cost them a game but sports are made up of games that have a lot of twist and turns. You can do other things in the game that can win or lose a game, one bad call should not be the reason you win or lose.
 
JCarbo76 said:
To lump 2013 and 2014 together as two teams that "scored less than 700 runs" is completely illogical. In 2013 we scored 688 runs and were fourth in the NL in runs scored. But in 2014 we scored 573 runs ONE HUNDRED FIFTEEN runs fewer than in 2013 and were 14th in the NL in runs scored. In fact in both seasons only 2 of 15 NL teams scored 700 runs. The average runs per NL team was 648 in 2013 and 640 in 2014. So, the Braves scored 40 more runs than the league average in 2013 and 67 fewer runs than the league average in 2014.

Those two seasons were far more dissimilar than similar any way you cut it.
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I was trying to justify the downward trend in run scoring in baseball as part of the overall discussion. Your synopsis is correct. The question will always be which year was the aberration. If our swing-and-miss at strike ratio didn't improve, I think we look more like the latter team than the former team. A whole year of La Stella instead of Uggla may have helped, but as long as Chris Johnson and Melvin Upton were in the line-up, it was going to be a problem.
 
thewupk said:
The batting average doesn't matter stems from the fact you can't tell how good a hitter is just from batting average alone. That's why people say it doesn't matter. But the best hitters in the league generally have non crappy batting averages.
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Thank you.
 
I feel like the word "luck" sort of throws these conversations off track, because it implicitly removes any sense of responsibility for the outcome of a game. People hear "luck" and they think you're saying that no player or coach can be criticized for what happened in a a playoff game, and that's just not the case.

"Luck," in this case, is really just a one-word stand-in for the idea that small sample sizes are a bitch in baseball, and that a postseason series is the ultimate in high-stakes small sample sizes. Was it "luck" that the Cardinals beat us in the wild card game? Was it luck that the Dodgers took three of four from us in 2013? Not really- those teams out-played us in those games. That wasn't lucky or unlucky, it was just how the teams played in those series (using the word "series" loosely in the 2012 context).

The conflict is whether or not those results really have any significance beyond the games in which they occurred. I, and a lot of other people, basically think that four games (and certainly one game) tell us nothing about the strength of the teams involved. We've out-scored the Marlins 14-3 in two games this season. We're probably going to be worse than them once the entire season is played. We took the season series from the Nationals last year, and we finished approximately 723 games behind them in the standings.

It's not at all unlikely for a noticeably worse team to win one game, as the Cardinals did in 2012. And it's barely more unlikely for a worse team to win three of four, as the Dodgers did in 2013. I mean, we see things like this in the regular season all the time, don't we? Inferior teams wins a series in June, no one blinks an eye. It happens in October, and all of a sudden that says something deep and significant about the teams involved.
 
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