Balancing Talent and Chaos in October

Two things you’re sure to find this time of year are unpredictable baseball outcomes and women and men who failed to predict those results. While I’ve managed to accidentally correctly predict the 2015 postseason so far, one need not look further than the present author’s own preseason predictions to find evidence of very incorrect baseball prognostication.  They’re everywhere because predicting baseball is inherently challenging. In order to do it well, you have to accurately predict the quality of the players and then the order in which events unfold in games involving those players.

Due to the nature of baseball, it’s relatively common for teams that are objectively worse than their opponent to win playoff series. If you put this year’s Tigers into a five game series against the Royals and let them play over and over, the Tigers would win a decent number of those series even though it’s pretty clear the Royals are the better team. Unfortunately, because the world is not yet an interactive computer simulation, we only get to observe one series between each set of opponents per year. Even if we knew for sure which team was better, that still wouldn’t ensure that we could predict the outcome. A .500 true talent team can outplay a .550 true talent team for a week. That’s just the nature of the game.

Every year, a debate like this pops up during the postseason. When a team that is perceived to be less impressive wins a game or a series, there are calls to remember the facts I laid before you in the previous paragraph. And those facts are correct. Objectively better baseball teams lose in the postseason just like they lose games in the regular season, and that doesn’t and shouldn’t change our impressions of either team. Each series is a very small number of games that wouldn’t augment your view of either team if the games took place in June.

This year’s discussion surrounds the Mets and Cubs and the 2-0 series lead the Mets take into Game 3 tonight at Wrigley. I’m not particularly interested in litigating the good-natured Twitter snarking that took place yesterday about which club is better. I would probably lean toward the Cubs as the team that would win more than 50% of head-to-head matchups in the long run, but it’s a relatively close call. The broader question, however, interests me a great deal: what does it mean to be the best baseball team?

At the outset, no matter what you think about baseball, sabermetrics, the Mets, or the Cubs, any rational person would acknowledge that the outcome of a single postseason tournament does not reflect which team is likely to win the most games over a full season or even which team is most likely to win a do-over of the same postseason tournament. Twenty games in October is not a big enough sample to determine true team quality. Additionally, we can all agree that teams don’t set out with the goal of having the best BaseRuns record when the season opens. The goal is to win four World Series games.

But this is largely a social construct. Major League Baseball has decided that they want to reward teams based on a 162-game regular season and then a three-round, single elimination tournament. The current playoff structure wasn’t handed down from on high and it used to be quite different. There was a time when the most successful regular season team from each league went to the World Series and the winner was determined by a seven or nine game series. Then MLB added divisions and went to four playoff teams. Then the league divided up again and we got eight playoff teams. Now ten teams get at least one game after the regular season ends.

These reorganizations have fundamentally changed the way we crown the season’s champion. The postseason in 1993 was very different than the 2014 version. The rules of the competition in individual games and in the season more generally set goals for teams. How we design the rules determines what the participants try to achieve. This is a long way of saying that we have to decide what we want to reward when we design a method of crowning a champion.

At its core, the league is profit-driven. The owners want returns on their investments, but they earn those by creating a compelling sport that fans want to watch. So in essence, it comes down to creating an interesting product. As Dave and Carson discussed on FanGraphs Audio recently, people generally wouldn’t want to watch competitive coin flipping because there’s no skill involved. It would just be random trials with no intrigue. This is why people don’t watch roulette on television but poker is reasonably popular. You have to have a game of skill in which more talented players win more often in order to generate ratings. But on the other hand, you don’t want more talented players to win all of the time, lest the sport become entirely predictable and, therefore, not compelling.

You want talent to win, but not all the time. It’s a balancing act. In the NBA, talent wins more often than it does in MLB. The way the season is designed makes it easier for the better teams to separate themselves. Millions of people love the NBA, so it’s not a one-size-fits-all thing. It’s a choice between rewarding ability and building drama.

In general, baseball seems to check both boxes. You basically never see bad teams win the World Series, and while the best regular season team doesn’t always win in October, good teams do win. On the other hand, there is plenty of excitement as games and series swing back and forth with reckless abandon.

From an overall “health of the sport” standpoint, baseball is doing very well. Good teams make the playoffs and then chaos breaks out. I suspect it is exactly what the league wants. The extra wild cards give many teams hope for most of the season and then ten of the best teams get thrown into an octagon and one emerges. It’s exciting to watch and you rarely get results that totally discredit the process.

So if the system works well for achieving what the league is after, why do we routinely wind up in debates about the “best” team even though we know the system is designed to flatten the hierarchy among the pretty good teams in the name of exciting postseasons?

My belief is that this argument springs up in the nexus of our two baseball brains. The intellectual part of our brain, or the one that enjoys baseball purely as a game of skill, is trying to solve the puzzle of the game. We want to figure the game out and reach a level of understanding. The intellectual part of the brain wants to gather as much information as it can about the participants so that it can better interpret the sport. It’s about sorting the players, teams, and coaches into categories of ability.

But the emotional part of our brain sees the game differently. It’s where your fandom exists and it’s the part of you that struggles to breathe when there are two outs in the eighth inning of a 2-1 winner-take-all game. It’s the part of you that cares about the outcome. The emotional part of your brain doesn’t care about determining what should happen, it cares about the level of excitement, joy, and despair that baseball can bring.

We could design a game that the intellectual finds more pleasing. We could extend the season to 250 games, balance the schedule, and do away with the postseason. It would increase the odds of the most talented team winning and it would limit the highs and lows where chaos takes over.

On the other hand, to feed the emotional side of us, we could play 20 game regular seasons followed by four sudden-death games to pick a champion. My guess is that neither sounds great to you, but that’s mostly because you’re anchored to the world as it is.

From a personal perspective, I would be happier if there was a little less madness in the postseason. I’d like to see fewer playoff teams and a more balanced regular season schedule. I find the game more interesting when teams are given enough time to show their true talent. There are practical limitations to that, of course, but I find the playoffs to be rather unrepresentative of the parts of the game I enjoy. But this is a matter of taste. I understand why so many people only tune in for the playoffs and love the drama of the wild card game. These moments when everything is on tilt and crowd goes wild make for great viewing.

It comes down to a question about the structure we put in place and the goals teams take from that structure. The goal is to win a World Series and the World Series is determined by getting into the playoffs and then surviving a slew of similarly talented teams. The best way to do that is to be the “best” team. The “best” team should make the playoffs more often than any other team and should win more playoff series than any other team. There are certain things you can do to build for the postseason rather than the regular season, but it’s basically the same game inside each nine inning window.

We obsess over the “best” team because it’s the only thing onto which our intellectual brain can latch. The World Series is one part talent and one part chaos. Chaos isn’t something you can analyze or predict. It just happens. We train ourselves to look at the game analytically and you can’t really do that over postseason-sized samples. So our intellectual brain simply defaults to what it knows: taking lots of information and using it to assess team quality. But team quality only gets you so far in baseball.

Perhaps the lesson is quite simple: you can attempt to determine a team’s quality, and study the game over the long run, but baseball intentionally places a ton of value on a postseason that boils down to which team happens to play best for a trivial period of time. As a result, the rational thing to do is to sit back and let your emotional brain steer the ship for a month while your intellectual brain starts planning for the Winter Meetings.