Baseball Playoffs: Entertaining, but Mostly a Waste of Time

It's a little known fact that they are basically a waste of time. The difference between the teams is so minimal that a sample size of only 7 games is not enough to accurately represent which team is truly better. So, in the end, the playoffs do prove something: you can show some really exciting games on TV. But they are not representative of who has the best team: the season records prove that.

If you take a look at the final league standings (http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/standings), the best teams in the league won barely 62% of their games. The worst teams (if you don't count the hopelessly futile Detroit Tigers who won on 27% of their games) fared no worse than a 39% winning percentage. The spread between these teams is so small that a 5 or 7 game series does it little justice.

Consider a series between the Tigers (who beat the Yankees in 5 out of 19 meetings this year) and the Yankees. What % would they win each series, assuming they are likely to win 5/19 (26%) of each game against them? (This calculator is nice to run through the prob's: http://www.stat.umn.edu/geyer/playoff.html . I modified it to work for longer series as well.)

5 game series: 11%
7 game series: 8%
9 game series: 6%
11 game series: 5%

Not so bad. The worst team in baseball will likely win 11% of the time in a Best of 5 against the best team in Baseball.

Things get ugly when you take a team like Toronto and compare it to the Yankees in 5, 7, 9 and 11 game series. During the year, Toronto won 53% of their games during the regular season. They beat the Yankees 9 times out of 20 meetings, for a win percentage of 45%.

Given they have a 45% chance of beating the Yankees on a given day, what's the probability that Toronto would win a...

5 game series: 41%
7 game series: 39%
9 game series: 38%
11 game series: 36%

It's ugly! The series are toss-ups. They don't really prove much at all.

The counter-argument to this logic is that "it's a different game in the post-season" and you can't use the winning percentages of each team during the year to predict the play-offs. Fair enough. (And there isn't really a good set of data to disprove or prove that explanation, though my belief is that it's rubbish -- see my rant on luck below.)

Even if the play-offs are different from the regular season, it begs the question: What are the playoffs then really proving? Who is the better team in a seven game series? If so, why is the selecting mechanism for the playoffs the best record in a given season? The teams with the best season-long records go to the playoffs. But, the ability to win games over the span of a season has little to do with the ability to dominate a series.

My belief is that this whole dilemma there is just too much luck involved in baseball (as opposed to basketball for example where the better team is much more likely to dominate and win a series). For me, the role of luck in baseball is best explained by watching the games. Infinitesimal differences, such as those caused by a gust of wind, can change the entire outcome of a game. For example, a breeze causes a ball to drift two feet on an outfield fly, which causes the outfielder to miss it. Or, the example of the Cubs fan who caused the foul ball to be missed by the outfielder (and potentially sink the Cubs). And so on. This explains the real inability to win any more than 63% of their games...