JABO: Will a Long Break Cool the Mets Off?
We know the New York Mets dominated the Chicago Cubs in the National League Championship Series. the Cubs never held the lead; the Mets scored in the first inning in all four games; they were aggressive on the basepaths; their pitching was outstanding; Daniel Murphy homered, then homered again, then homered a few more times. We could list many more ways the Mets were historically successful in the NLCS. Let’s just say this instead: while the Cubs are set up for a very successful future, the Mets deserve to be in the World Series.
Because of the level of supremacy they showed against the Cubs, the Mets are enjoying a lengthy break between the NLCS and World Series: a five day lull, to be exact. That’s usually something that happens when one of the Championship Series results in a sweep, as the sweeping team has to wait around for the prescheduled first day of the World Series to start (which can be a lengthy interval). When Game One begins tomorrow, will that five days have mattered for the Mets?
Naturally, this is a topic that elicits differing viewpoints: one side might say the extra rest is beneficial for recharging tired arms and bodies, while the other side might say that rust accumulates with too much down time. Starting pitchers might get to rest elbows and shoulders that already have over 200 innings on them, but a hot-hitting team (as the Mets were in both the NLDS and NLCS) might cool off with an extended break leading up to the World Series. If you’ve watched or heard postseason baseball talking heads, you’ve almost surely witnessed both of these arguments being made.
That’s most likely because we have easily graspable examples that fit those narratives. There were the 2007 Colorado Rockies, who won 21 out of 22 games leading up to the World Series and were about as hot as any team has ever been over that number of games. Then they had an eight-day break before the Fall Classic: swept by the Boston Red Sox, they scored only 10 runs in four World Series games.
Fixating on those types of examples is easy to do: most of all, they’re memorable. But is what they tell us true? Do longer breaks between the LCS and World Series negatively or positively impact how teams perform? Let’s find out.
Using Baseball Reference’s playoff section, I’ve pulled all of the playoff series since 1969, the first year that baseball had League Championships (i.e. playoffs with four total teams). I then calculated how many days off each team that made it to the Fall Classic had between the Championship Series and the World Series. I then crunched some of the results in a number of ways.
First, let’s start by looking at how much rest teams usually get before the World Series, and how that has changed over time. Here’s a chart of how many days teams had off before the start of the Series for our time period:
Owen Watson writes for FanGraphs and The Hardball Times. Follow him on Twitter @ohwatson.
If all of the 1/2/3 day rest teams are from the olden days, then it’s not really relevant to the present comparison.
An easy comparison would be to look at the average # of rest days of the WS winners and losers. That way you don’t have to throw away any outliers, either.
Finally, you don’t account for the fact that a team that sweeps the LCS is more likely to be a very very good team. Not always, but certainly more likely.