Sometimes, you lose. Other times, the opponent wins. Last night, Roy Halladay beat the Reds, and they should just tip their hat to him and say congratulations. He threw one of the great pitching performances in postseason history, and no one would have been able to muster any offense against him last night. It was an epic performance of which the Reds just happened to be the victims.

That said, on any other night, the Reds probably would have had a chance to win. Despite getting dominated at the plate, the distance between victory and defeat was pretty small.

1st inning: Shane Victorino doubles, steals third, scores on a sac fly.

Credit to Victorino, who had a great at-bat and a ballsy steal of third base to get himself in position to score on a fly ball. He had two really good plays in a row, and created that run by himself. But a better throw from Ramon Hernandez has a good chance at getting him. He bounced it in front of the base, and if the throw had been on target, the result might have been quite different.

2nd inning: Carlos Ruiz walks, Wilson Valdez “singles”, Roy Halladay “singles”.

No question, Volquez struggled to find his command yesterday, but the beginning of the big rally was pretty innocuous. He couldn’t find the strike zone to Ruiz, but with a bad hitter and the pitcher due up, that’s not the end of the world. Valdes then hit a soft bouncer up the middle that Orlando Cabrera misplayed. I don’t know if he could have gotten Valdes at first base, but Cabrera’s decision to flip to second was misguided even before he missed Brandon Phillips by a couple of feet.

Then, the big hit, which was only a hit because Jonny Gomes started in left field. Halladay hit a sinking line drive, but I’d venture to guess that almost every left fielder in baseball catches that ball – Jayson Werth made the play on a similar line drive by Travis Wood a few innings later, in fact. Gomes’s lack of athleticism turned an inning ending out into an RBI single, and forced Volquez to face the top of the Phillies order with men on base.

This isn’t to make excuses for Volquez, who had trouble putting the ball in the strike zone and was pitching behind in the count too frequently. But the only legitimate hit he gave up in the second inning was Victorino’s single, and even that was more of a blooper than a line drive. Cabrera and Gomes let him down on balls that could have easily ended the inning.

Those three plays – a bad throw on a steal of third, a poor decision by Cabrera, and a lack of ability from Gomes – are why the Phillies scored. They weren’t launching bombs and driving the ball all over the park. They didn’t tee off on Volquez. It was a couple of inches here, a snap judgment there. The Phillies won, but the Reds kept their offense in check, and they don’t have to face Roy Halladay again until Monday. Those two facts alone provide some reasons for optimism.

28 batters faced. 25 balls. No hits.

That was amazing. Thanks for one of the best games I’ve ever seen. This is why baseball is just so awesome.

What better way to celebrate roughly 11 hours of playoff baseball than by bringing back the all day chat session? None, I say, so that’s what we’re doing. Your favorite FanGraphs authors, and myself, will be hanging out, watching baseball, and talking about the goings on and happenings with you all. Festivities begin at 1:30 and end when our fingers hurt. Come hang with us. It will be fun.

Game One of the Phillies-Reds series kicks off tomorrow, and Cincinnati gets the unenviable task of trying to beat the best pitcher in baseball to kick things off. With Roy Halladay on the mound for Philadelphia, the Reds will have to keep the Phillies from scoring runs, and attempt to get Halladay out of the game as early as possible. The latter will be difficult, so Dusty Baker’s game plan for tomorrow’s contest should be to do whatever it takes to keep the Phillies off the board.

He’s already made the right call by going with Edinson Volquez as his starting pitcher. Despite his inconsistencies while returning from surgery, Volquez is the Reds best starter, and he was among the best in the league in September. His final month performance (2.60 BB/9, 10.08 K/9, 54.1% GB%, 2.69 xFIP) was nothing short of dominating, and while it was just a handful of starts, he showed enough of his 2008 form to get the nod in the series opener.

While no one questions Volquez’s stuff, his command is always a concern. His career BB/9 is 4.68, and only 40 percent of his pitches were in the strike zone this year. He’s the definition of effectively wild, as his ability to get both groundballs and strikeouts allow him to get out of jams that he creates through walks, but he will find himself pitching in a lot of high stress situations.

The solution – tell him he’s only going to bat once (unless the Reds rally and his spot comes up in the first or second inning, which seems unlikely), and that he’ll only be responsible for four to five innings tomorrow. Tell him to throw max effort on every pitch, and if it tires him out after 75 pitches, so be it.

Because of the way the series schedule is setup, they can – and should – be very liberal with their bullpen usage. The series is set to be played on Wednesday, Friday, Sunday, Monday, and Wednesday, so only one game will be played without an off day before it. Not only does this allow both teams to just use three starting pitchers, but it also gives the teams a chance to get a lot of innings from their bullpens without overworking individual relievers.

The Reds will likely want to hold back LHP Arthur Rhodes (3.24 FIP) and RHP Nick Masset (3.38 FIP) for 7th and 8th innings of close games, but they should still be able to bridge the 4th-5th-6th gap if they need to pull Volquez early tomorrow. With both Homer Bailey and Travis Wood available out of the pen, they’ll have a guy capable of going multiple innings and pitching well, and Aroldis Chapman looms for any high leverage situation where Ryan Howard and Raul Ibanez will be coming to the plate.

If I’m Dusty Baker, my innings plan for tomorrow goes something like this:

1st – 4th: Volquez
5th – 6th: Wood/Bailey
7th – 8th: Chapman/Massett/Rhodes
9th: Cordero

If handled correctly, the Reds can probably get by only having to let their pitcher hit once, and can ensure that they have a platoon advantage in nearly every high leverage situation they might face. Rather than looking for Volquez to match Halladay by pitching deep into the game, the Reds need to take advantage of their bullpen depth and the copious amount of off-days. Remember, relievers outperform starting pitchers almost across the board because they don’t have to pace themselves, so getting more innings from your relievers is a good idea if you can do it without wearing them out.

Dusty Baker should have the quickest hook of any manager in the playoffs. This schedule gives them a chance to reduce the amount of work that has to be carried by the weak link on this roster – the starting pitching – and they should take full advantage of it.

This morning, Matt Klaassen and I sat at Carson Cistulli’s incredibly round table and gave our thoughts on each first round playoff match-up. You’ll hear the results of that in podcast form shortly, but I wanted to expound on a point of disagreement between Matt and I in one series in particular – the Reds/Phillies contest.

Matt jokingly referred to the series as a question of whether the Phillies would win in three games or just two, pointing to the team’s starting rotations as the reason that the series is a pretty big mismatch. And he’s right – the Phillies rotation is vastly superior to that of Cincinnati’s.

But, if you look at the other aspects of the rosters, I think the Reds not only hold their own, but they probably have the advantage.

The Reds posted a .339 wOBA this year, third best in baseball. Yes, they play in a pretty decent offensive environment, but so do the Phillies, who posted a .328 wOBA. No, you shouldn’t rely on just one year of data when looking at player abilities, but even a current true talent estimation will suggest that the Reds can hit, and probably hit better than the Phillies.

Everyone knows about Joey Votto – he’s a monster, and the best offensive player in this series by a good margin. Surrounding him, they have a number of good hitters, including guys at positions where you don’t generally expect offense. Few teams got better production from their up-the-middle spots than the Reds got from Ryan Hanigan, Brandon Phillips, Paul Janish, and Drew Stubbs.

These guys aren’t just lumbering sluggers, either. Including studly defenders Scott Rolen and Jay Bruce, the Reds position players are generally some of the better glove guys at their positions in the league. In fact, of the 21 position players the Reds used this year, only three posted a negative UZR on the season – Miguel Cairo, Jim Edmonds, and Jonny Gomes. You probably won’t see a ton of those guys the playoffs.

They might not be household names, but the Reds lead all of MLB in WAR by position players this year. That wasn’t an accident – they have a lot of talent there. Of course, pitching counts too, and the Phillies do have a huge edge in the rotation, but some of that gets eliminated when we look at the bullpens. Everyone knows about Aroldis Chapman’s crazy velocity, but Arthur Rhodes, Nick Masset, and Francisco Cordero are pretty good themselves, and they’ll get the benefit of whichever starter they don’t choose from the Homer Bailey/Travis Wood combo.

For me, the only place the Phillies are better than the Reds is in the starting rotation. It’s a huge advantage, and clearly the biggest discrepancy of any area between the two teams, but I don’t think it’s such a large gap that we should expect Philadelphia to roll in this series. The Reds can hit, they can field, and they’ve got a pretty good crop of relievers that they can turn to early in games.

This probably isn’t going to be a cake walk for the Phillies. Halladay-Hamels-Oswalt make them the favorites, but this series will likely be a lot more competitive than people expect. Don’t sleep on the Reds. They’re a good baseball team.

When the Wild Card was introduced, one of the main critiques of the idea is that it would cheapen pennant races, which historically had been fought down to the last week, as teams battled for their division’s only trip to the playoffs. While the benefits have generally outweighed the costs and the four team playoff has become accepted, we saw the downside of the system in full force yesterday. On the final day of the season, the Yankees and Rays had identical records and shared the top spot in the American League East. And no one cared.

Sure, a few Tampa players gave a fist pump when the Yankees loss was shown on their big screen, but a raucous celebration it was not. Both teams knew that they were in the playoffs regardless of the outcome of yesterday’s affairs, and the resulting lack of drama reflected that fact. While I like the current playoff system more than the old one, its hard to watch the final month of baseball in the AL East and not feel like it could be improved. Those games should have meant something. They could have been fantastic theatre, but instead, they were glorified exhibitions. There has to be a better way.

One popular idea, floated by Jayson Stark a few weeks ago and discussed in a community post here recently, is to make the Wild Card a play-in spot. Pick the two best teams that didn’t win their division, and once the regular season ends, make them square off for one playoff spot, with the winner of that moving on to face the best of the division champs. The three division winners would get a legitimate advantage over the Wild Card, which would put some meaning back in those races once again.

It’s a pretty good idea, honestly. It fixes the biggest problem with the current system and would serve to keep more fans interested in the final weeks of the MLB season, even after the NFL returned and started competing for attention. However, it presents a problem best summed by up Matthew Carruth in response to the community post:

Say going into the final day the standings are:

New York 95-66
Tampa 95-66
Minnesota 93-68
Boston 90-71 (2nd Wild Card)
Texas 88-73

Under your proposal,
New York and Tampa: have large incentive to win their final game so as to avoid the one game Wild Card playoff with Boston.
Minnesota, Boston, Texas: no incentive on final day.

So NY and TB play their best available starters to try and win. Say NY wins. The playoff match ups are then:

NY vs TEX
MIN vs (TB/BOS)
If seeds are done strictly on reg season record or

NY vs (TB/BOS)
MIN vs TEX
If done where Wild Card = 4th seed.

Here’s the problem. In the first scenario, NY and TB used their best starters in their final game to avoid the WC playoff. That gives an advantage to TEX, MIN and –most importantly– Boston, who had no such incentive and thus rested their best starters. You’ve punished Tampa to the favor of Boston, the worse Wild Card.

In the second scenario the advantage is limited to just BOS, but it’s still present. You’ve put the teams with the better record at a disadvantage by giving them incentives to win until the end of the season while not providing the same motivation to the lower teams.

Matthew’s right. We want the division races to be meaningful, but not at the expense of penalizing a team for trying to win a division. The one game play-in model could hurt a franchise that plays to win on the final Sunday. If MLB was going to add a second Wild Card, they would either have to go to a three game series or take more days off to expand the gap between the end of the regular season and the beginning of the division series, thus allowing division winners that played to the end to have a ready-to-go rotation for the division series.

That drawback makes the plan less appealing to me, and has me looking for alternatives. One idea that I haven’t seen get too much consideration is far simpler, and perhaps is even more of a potential reward for teams to finish with the best record – each division series could be played in just one city.

Home Field Advantage is smaller in baseball than in any other sport, with just a 54/46 split. Giving the team with an advantage just one extra game in their home city, where their odds of winning aren’t that much better than they are on the road, isn’t a huge motivator. But what if they got to host the entire series?

Now you’ve given them a tangible (even if small) advantage in each game, and in a full length series, that can add up. In addition, the home franchise gets a significant revenue boost, so ownership would almost certainly push their teams to try and make sure they were one of the teams hosting in the first round. You’d eliminate the need for travel days, so the first round could either be expanded to seven games or simply be condensed into a shorter time frame, shortening the overall playoff schedule and helping the season end before November.

The goal is to incentivize winning games in the last week of the regular season. By forcing the wild card and the worst division winner to play entirely on the road in the first round, you give teams a real reason to rack up as many wins as possible. Under this system, not only would Tampa Bay and New York have been fighting for a real home field advantage yesterday, the Reds would have had motivation to win out as well.

I think this system would give teams a legitimate reason to play for a division title and not settle for the Wild Card without creating the moral hazard of the play-in game. It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s one that I’d like to see get a little more notice, at least.

This post builds on the one I wrote a few hours ago, so I’d encourage you to read that if you haven’t yet. If you really don’t want to follow the link, this is the paragraph where we’re picking up from:

In the end, we had to choose between two different methods – assuming that the pitcher had no responsibility for the outcome of a ball in play, or attempting to approximate the amount of time that the result was due to the pitcher or the fielder. Ideally, we’d be able to do the latter – which is how Sean approaches it – but I just don’t think we currently have the tools available to make an accurate enough judgment on how to apportion that responsibility.

Clearly, some hits on balls on play are the “fault” of the pitcher. He throws a fastball down the middle in a 3-1 count and the hitter whacks it for a double in the gap – that’s on him, certainly. However, most hits are not of that variety. Instead, they’re ground balls in between two defenders or fly balls that fall near a chasing outfielder before he can get to it. In those instances, we don’t really know how much responsibility for the hit should go to the pitcher or the fielder. Would Elvis Andrus have gotten to that grounder up the middle that Yuniesky Betancourt didn’t get close to? Maybe, maybe not. Did Carl Crawford run down a shallow popup that Juan Rivera would have had to pick up on the third bounce? Perhaps. We don’t have the luxury of having a control group for each ball in play. All we know is whether the guy who happened to be the defender on duty at the time was able to make the play or not.

So, what do we do a specific pitcher’s results on balls in play? This was the thing that I wrestled with the most while we were designing WAR for pitchers a few years ago. I can see an argument for doing it in one of two ways, though I think both have problems.

1. FIP-based WAR, which is what we ended up using, essentially admits that we don’t have enough information about dividing responsibility for the results of balls in play, and so it ignores them.

2. RA-based WAR, which is what Sean ended up using, attempts to adjust for defensive contribution by taking a team’s overall Total Zone rating and assigning an expected defensive debit or credit to each pitcher based on how the team performed on the season as a whole.

I get why Sean did it the way he did it, and I understand why there are people who prefer that path. It appeals to our inherent sense of runs allowed being a record of what actually happened, and presents the possibility of achieving the ultimate goal – a pitcher’s total contribution to run prevention with the effects of his teammates factored out. The problem, though, is a pretty big one, and the one that caused me to lean away from RA-based WAR for our purposes here. It assumes that the distribution of defensive performance was even for each pitcher on every team, which is quite obviously not going to be true. Simply put, it is not a record of what actually happened – it is an assumption of what might have happened if all defenders on a team were evenly skilled and were perfectly consistent on a day-to-day basis.

We can simply look at the distribution of run support for a pitcher on any given team to see that the assumption of even performance is not going to be true. If we use the Yankees rotation as an example, we see that the Yankees averaged 5.30 runs per game this year. Their distribution by starting pitcher is below:

CC Sabathia – 5.89 R/G
A.J. Burnett – 4.29 R/G
Phil Hughes – 6.75 R/G
Andy Pettitte – 6.00 R/G
Javier Vazquez – 4.12 R/G

No pitcher is actually within half a run of the team average. Burnett and Vazquez are over a run per game lower than the overall total, while Pettitte is nearly three quarters of a run per game higher and Hughes is a run and a half per game higher. If you built a metric that worked off the assumption that the Yankees offense scored the same amount of runs per game when Vazquez was on the mound as when Hughes was on the mound, you’d probably draw some pretty inaccurate conclusions. There is no reason to think that defensive performance is any more consistent on a day-to-day basis. If anything, there are reasons to believe that it would vary even more than offense.

In general, a team will run out a similar line-up on a day-to-day basis, and each guy will get about the same number of plate appearances per day, as required by having batters take turns in order. That boundary does not hold with defenders, however. There is no rule that says each player on the field get an equal number of opportunities each day. In fact, given that pitchers have different tendencies in terms of groundball and flyball rates, it’s nearly guaranteed that the defensive opportunities will not be equal between pitchers.

Using aggregate stats from a team’s entire season simply won’t give you the kind of detail needed to accurately determine the quality of defense that was played behind a given pitcher in a season. Doing pitcher WAR that way provides an end result that does not match what actually happened. It is not an accounting of what actually happened.

Since neither method gets us to that goal of accurate accounting, we’re left with a choice of two paths, both with structural problems that can’t be avoided based on the data we currently have access to. Personally, I prefer FIP-based WAR because it is easier to adjust for what we know is not included – BABIP and sequencing, essentially – than it is to take a defense-adjusted RA based WAR and make adjustments for places where the assumption of defensive distribution equality does not hold.

Let’s use Francisco Liriano and Cliff Lee as examples. Liriano’s RA results don’t match his FIP in large part because he has a .340 batting average on balls in play. Since our version of WAR doesn’t hold that against him, he comes out looking really good. An RA-based version not only holds his actual BABIP against him (by starting with runs allowed), but it then penalizes him further because the Twins have an above-average defense, and the assumption is that he got proportionate help from the guys behind him.

What is more likely – that Liriano gave up contacted balls that should have resulted in a .350 to .360 BABIP, and the good glove Twins helped bring that down to .340, or that the guys behind him didn’t make as many plays for him as they did when Carl Pavano or Brian Duensing was pitching? Considering that he posted a basically league average 19.1% line drive rate, I’m more inclined to believe that the latter is closer to the truth. We don’t know exactly what kind of defensive support Liriano got this year, but based on what we know about a pitcher’s control over BABIP, I think we’re better off assuming that there were some issues behind him that hurt him than we are assuming that the Twins defense supported him equally as well as they supported his fellow pitchers.

Lee’s case shows the other side of the coin that FIP ignores – when those hits occur. While he has a normal .302 batting average on balls in play, it is not at evenly distributed within the base-out states. His BABIP is just .257 with the bases empty, but jumps to .350 with men on base, and is .333 with runners in scoring position. Because of that split in when his balls are being turned into outs, he has a LOB% of just 67.9%, well below average and far below what pitchers of his quality have posted this year.

For Lee, it hasn’t been a problem of too many finding holes, but simply those balls finding holes at the wrong times. It’s possible that those hits were a result of poor location, but given that he ran a 10.00 K/BB ratio with men in scoring position, it doesn’t seem like Lee suddenly lost his command when men got on base this year. Maybe he did – I don’t know. But should we assume that a pitcher’s BABIP with RISP is under his control? That’s really the driving force of Lee’s ERA this year, we have to acknowledge that it is certainly possible that his defenders let him down in those critical situations.

It is also possible that he let himself down. We just don’t really know who is at fault – pitcher or defenders. FIP blames BABIP entirely on defense. That’s definitely wrong. Defense-adjusted RA assumes that each pitcher got the same support from their teammates. That is also definitely wrong.

So, we’re left with two imperfect options. Which should you prefer? I can’t answer that for you. They both have strengths and weaknesses, and both are valid attempts to answer the question that we’re really trying to get at. I prefer the FIP-based implementation because it’s easier to make mental adjustments from that number, knowing that BABIP and sequencing are not included, than it is to try and back out of a metric that is already attempting to account for defensive support and find out where it might have missed the mark, but that’s a personal preference more than it’s a right or wrong thing.

WAR is not perfect, and it’s less perfect for pitchers than it is for hitters. Separating out defense from pitching is hard, and we don’t have it all figured out yet. We don’t encourage you to use any version of WAR as the be-all, end-all of analysis. We think its a pretty nifty tool, especially if you understand its limitations, and it does a good in most instances. However, it’s not perfect. Our version isn’t perfect, and Sean’s version isn’t perfect. We’re both trying, and we’re trying from different angles. Rather than focusing on why the differences make both “wrong,” maybe we should admit that its nice to have both perspectives?

Yesterday, respected scribe Joe Posnanski put out the following message on his Twitter account:

Fangraphs WAR has Cliff Lee at 6.6, best in AL. Baseball Ref WAR has Cliff Lee at 4.2, not even in Top 10. We need a summit.

Since Baseball Reference implemented Sean Smith’s version of Wins Above Replacement, people have been pointing out the differences between the two systems. While they use the same basic framework, they have different inputs which naturally lead to different results. For position players, the defensive system is the main driver of the discrepancies, as we use UZR while Sean uses Total Zone. For pitchers, however, it’s not just a different system, but a fundamental difference of what is being measured, and this is what drives the big gaps in WAR for pitchers like Lee.

Our version of pitcher WAR is essentially based on FIP, meaning that a pitcher is judged by his walk rate, strikeout rate, and home run rate (and, of course, the quantity of innings that he throws and the role in which he throws them). Sean takes a pitcher’s actual runs allowed, then makes adjustments to try to compensate for the defense behind him. The two systems might have the same goal, but they’re measuring two different things. Over the last few months, I’ve seen plenty of comments about how some people don’t like our FIP-based version of pitcher WAR for various reasons, so today I thought I’d explain the thought process of why we decided to build it like we did.

There is essentially one big problem that anyone evaluating pitchers has to deal with: how do you separate responsibility for hits allowed? There are usually four or five variables at work on any ball that is put in play – the quality of the pitch, the quality of the swing, the quality of the defensive play, the effects of the ballpark that game is being played in, and sometimes weather. All of these factors influence whether that ball ends up as a hit or an out, and, obviously, they don’t all have to do with the pitcher. So, in creating a statistic that attempts to isolate just the pitcher’s contribution, you have to figure out how you want to deal with the other factors.

Pretty much everyone just assumes that the quality of the opposing hitter essentially evens out over the course of a season, and it likely does most of the time, at least enough to where it doesn’t make a huge difference whether that is factored in or not. The two environmental factors, park and weather, are usually lumped together in one estimate of how a park plays, which is part of the adjustment in pitcher WAR for both our version and Sean Smith’s version. I have some issues with using a single park factor for every player, and I think before too long we’ll have a better way of adjusting for those things, but that’s another post entirely.

The last issue – quality of defensive contribution – is where we do something quite different. When we sat down and talked about how to handle this issue, I essentially realized that there is no right way to do this, based on the statistics we currently have available. There are compromises that have to be made, as we simply don’t have the tools available to really allow us to correctly assign responsibility between a pitcher, hitter, or defender on each hit or out in play. So, no matter what we did, there’d be a problem, and we’d just have to acknowledge that issue.

In the end, we had to choose between two different methods – assuming that the pitcher had no responsibility for the outcome of a ball in play, or attempting to approximate the amount of time that the result was due to the pitcher or the fielder. Ideally, we’d be able to do the latter – which is how Sean approaches it – but I just don’t think we currently have the tools available to make an accurate enough judgment on how to apportion that responsibility.

The why for that last paragraph deserves its own post, so I’ll have a follow-up here on the site in a few hours, where we’ll go through the problems with using both defense-adjusted RA and FIP for pitcher WAR, and show why I think that the FIP model is preferable for now.

It is widely expected that this weekend will be Omar Minaya’s last stand as the General Manager of the Mets. A disappointing team performance will almost certainly lead to changes in the front office and on the field, with the franchise looking for a new direction. The new guy, whoever he is, will have some interesting choices to make.

The first thing he’ll notice is just how many players he will inherit that are going into their final season under contract to the Mets. After next year, Carlos Beltran, Oliver Perez, Jose Reyes, and Luis Castillo will be eligible for free agency. In addition, the club will almost certainly decline their option on Francisco Rodriguez, setting him free as well. Of those five, only Reyes seems like he has any chance of staying in Queens long term, but even that is not a given.

Those guys represent a huge chunk of the Mets committed salaries. For next year, they don’t have a lot of money to spend without expanding the budget, as they’ve already guaranteed $109 million in salaries for 2011, and that doesn’t include arbitration raises for Angel Pagan or Mike Pelfrey. Yet they have only$61 million in guaranteed money for 2012. Next winter seems to be the time when the new administration will really be able to put their mark on the roster with wholesale changes.

The opportunities for change will leave the new guy in an interesting spot. He’s essentially going to inherit a roster that he didn’t put together and that he can’t do much about. There’s just not going to be much flexibility in how the team is constructed for 2011, unless the organization is willing to eat money in order to move Castillo, Beltran, or Rodriguez a year early, and even then, none of them will be in high demand.

Based on the legacy contracts given out by Minaya, his influence will extend even after he’s gone. Mets fans are going to have to be patient with the new guy, who simply won’t be able to work miracles and transform this roster overnight. The 2011 team is what it is. For the most part, they’ll have to ride out this roster for one more year before they can get into the work of building it right. It won’t be a quick fix in Queens.

I had a radio spot on ESPN 1500 in Minneapolis today, and during the interview, I repeated something that I’ve been saying for a month or so now – I think the Twins are the best team in baseball. I get why people don’t see it that way, as they aren’t as star studded as the Yankees, Rays, or even the Rangers, but what they lack in name value, they make up for with sheer quantity of useful players.

Really, who is the worst player on the Twins who will see significant playing time in October? Probably Jason Kubel, who doesn’t hit enough to make up for his defensive problems in the outfield. But Kubel, while not a good player, is also not a terrible one. He’s a league average hitter, maybe a little bit better, and on days when the ball isn’t hit towards him, he’s just fine. He isn’t actively taking wins off the board, and there’s reason to think he may perform better in the playoffs than he did during the 2010 season.

The same goes for Michael Cuddyer, who is basically the same kind of player – decent bat, bad defense. Both of them have their uses, and yet, they’re the worst players the Twins put out there on a daily basis. Where most teams have offensive holes, the Twins have J.J. Hardy, Orlando Hudson, and Denard Span, who have each put up about a +3 win season this year. Even their reserve middle infielders, Alexi Casilla and Nick Punto, are valuable role players.

The same is true of the pitching staff. Maybe Carl Pavano isn’t the sexiest #2 starter in the league, but very few of the other teams headed to the playoffs can throw a more effective game 4 starter than Kevin Slowey or Scott Baker. The Twins have four average or better starting pitchers, plus Brian Duensing, who has pitched like one even if he’s probably been a bit over his head.

Relievers? The Twins have a bunch of solid arms down in the bullpen too. Jon Rauch, Jesse Crain, and Matt Capps might not come with theme songs and overpowering fastballs, but they’re good pitchers. Toss in Brian Fuentes as a good situational reliever, Jose Mijares as a quality second LHP, and whatever starter they don’t choose for the #4 spot, and the Twins won’t have any lemons coming on in relief.

The old cliche that you’re only as strong as your weakest link isn’t really true unless you’re in the business of building fences, but the Twins didn’t run away with the AL Central through smoke and mirrors. They put a good team on the field every night with a deep batting order that can score runs no matter what three hitters are due up, starting pitchers who throw strikes, and relievers that can get out of jams. There is no soft underbelly to the Minnesota roster. You can’t pitch around one guy and then go on cruise control.

If this was a 5-on-5 competition, the Twins might be in trouble. However, since every game involves 10+ players, the Twins depth of talent gives them an advantage over all of their competitors. When your worst player is Jason Kubel, you’re doing pretty good. Don’t underestimate the Twins just because they didn’t build a top heavy roster. They can win with this team.