Quote:
Originally Posted by NoOne
having the best probability of winning doesn't gaurantee anything.
next time something like that happens and you think it is anything beside luck, re-run the playoffs 10-20 times. while i wouldn't say this with confidence about a 123 win team, some times a better playoff team can have significantly fewer wins.
there are some differences between regular season success and playoff success. e.g. your 5th pitcher and possibly 4th won't even be starters in the playoffs. it's very possible a team with fewer wins has a better top-3 SPs. your bench is virtually meaningless, except for platoon situations or needing some speed on the basepaths in very select situations. most of the benefits of a good bench are realized during the regular season and not the playoffs. rest is not a problem anymore.
123 wins is no joke. that has to be a solid team top-to-bottom. even taking into consideration that the regular season is different animal than the playoffs. i'm pretty sure your team would win more times than not, if you replayed those playoffs a bunch of times.
if they have a 60% chance of winning each series, that's only a 21.6% chance of winning the WS. .75 * .66 *.6 = 29.7% in that situation which assumes increasing difficulty and a ?great team?. so, if you replay it and they win 1/5 to 1/3 of the time in a large sample, it's a really good team regardless of winning the WS or not. 1 year's playoff is not a good sample size, so anythign should be expected.
this is actually one reason why i limit who gets into my playoffs to the top ~1/3 of teams (4 of 14 teams in each league in my case). i rarely get teams that struggle to maintain a .500 win% in the playoffs, if at all. i'm happy with whomever wins the WS, because they are all worthy teams, regardless of how much good fortune any one team receives.
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I used log5 (assuming the "true talent" of the teams were the same as their records; that may not be true, but given that they overperformed their pythagorean expectation, that seems pretty fair) and a binomial calculator, and there was something like a 5% chance that I would lose this series in less than the full seven games.
There was another time where a team was getting so ridiculous that I ended up having a salary cap established (to put it in perspective, this team had a 5-WAR starter moved to the bullpen because they didn't have room for him in the rotation) won an average of 122 games a year for three years, yet only even made the WS for one year in that stretch. It'll be interesting how often this team wins it all.