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National Baseball Debate -- What Makes a Team Most Successful in The Playoffs?
I posted this topic a few years ago. Now that baseball is in their post season, I'd figure it's time to revive the topic.
*The credit goes to the guys at Baseball Prospectus*
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Baseball, particularly in the postseason, has one thing in common: It's very hard to predict. Every supposed rule -- "defense wins championships," "you have to play smallball to win," "an experienced team performs better in the playoffs" -- has far to many exceptions. Want examples?
- The 2003 Marlins rated as a below-average defensive club. - The 2004 Red Sox disdained Smallball. - The 2005 White Sox had almost no postseason experience.
Those teams won the World Series in those years.
This piece will discuss which components work best in the postseason. The Oakland A's of recent vintage will be used as my primary example to demonstrate my points.
There is a great deal of luck involved in the playoffs. That is a mathematical fact. While it takes 162 games to sort out which teams are the best in the regular season, a playoff series can be decided in as few as three games. Moreover, while there are both good and bad teams in the regular season, those teams that reach the playoffs are closely bunched together in ability level.
I can estimate the probability of one team beating another using something known as the log-5 method, introduced by Bill James in the 1981 Baseball Abstract. The log-5 method has been demonstrated empirically to be a highly accurate method of predicting the likelihood of one team beating the other. Log-5 estimates, for example, that a great team that goes 100-62 in the regular season will beat a good team that goes 90-72 about 56 percent of the time. This is before accounting for home-field advantage. Home-field advantage in baseball is small compared with other sports but it is very consistent throughout time. Historically, the home team has won roughly an extra 4 percent of the time; about 54 percent of all baseball games are won by the home team. Thus, I'll add 4 percent to the win probability of whichever team is playing at home.
As an example, a 100-win team with home-field advantage should win a 5-game series against a 90-win team 63.1 percent of the time. This is a discernible advantage, but the lesser team will still prevail more than one-third of the time as a result of luck alone. The overall short-series win probabilities, given teams of various ability levels, are shown in Table 1.
Table 1 -- Win Probabilities of Different Teams in Playoff Series ________
Five-Game Series: Probability of Home Team Winning (%)
Seven-Game Series: Probability of Home Team Winning (%) Home Team vs. Road Team .700 (113-49) vs. .700 = 51.3, .650 = 63.5, .600 = 73.8, .550 = 82.0, .500 = 88.2 .650 (105-57) vs. .700 = 38.9, .650 = 51.3, .600 = 62.7, .550 = 72.8, .500 = 81.0 .600 (97-65) vs. .700 = 28.3, .650 = 39.7, .600 = 51.3, .550 = 62.3, .500 = 72.2 .550 (89-73) vs. .700 = 19.8, .650 = 29.4, .600 = 40.1, .550 = 51.3, .500 = 62.1 .500 (81-81) vs. .700 = 13.3, .650 = 20.9, .600 = 30.0, .500 = 40.4, .500 = 51.3
Although the advantage can become more substantial when a particularly good team faces a particularly mediocre one, there are few big upsets in postseason play. I can also evaluate the various permutations to estimate a team's odds of winning the World Series. Table 2 presents these estimates for the 2005 postseason.
Table 2 -- Teams Odds at End of Regular Season of Winning 2005 World Series
Team -- Regular Season Record -- Win LDS (%) -- Win LCS (%) -- Win WS (%)
Under the current playoff format, it is rare for any team to have more than a 25 or 30 percent chance of winning the whole enchilada. This is something that first-place-or-bust owners like George Steinbrenner would do well to keep in mind.
The Oakland A's didn't merely fail to win it all -- they lost four straight times in the first round of the playoffs. While none of their opponents were pushovers, the A's were favored based on regular-season winning percentage on all four occasions (Table 3).
Table 3 -- Oakland A's Playoff Odds, 2000-2003
Year -- Record -- Opponent -- A's Win %
2000 -- 91-70 -- vs. Yankees (87-74) -- 56.2 2001 -- 102-60 -- at Yankees (95-65) -- 55.7 2002 -- 103-59 -- vs. Twins (94-67) -- 61.6 2003 -- 96-66 -- vs. Red Sox (95-67) -- 52.7
The probability of the A's losing all four of these series consecutively is 3.5 percent, or odds of about 27-to-1 against. Since I'm only talking about four playoffs series, I've got a small sample size that limits my ability to extrapolate meaning from these loses. But a 27-to-1 shot is unlikely enough that it's still worth exploring whether there was something in particular about the A's that made them less equipped for postseason play than their regular season record would suggest.
First, however, we need to settle on a definition of postseason success. Ideally, it's best to give the highest scores to teams that win the World Series but also give partial credit to teams that win a series or two before bowing out. On a similar note, it would be useful to account for the margin of victory; the 2005 White Sox, who lost just 1 game in their postseason run, should get more credit than the 1985 Royals, who managed to squeak by the Blue Jays and the Cardinals by a 4-3 margin. The metric I'll use is Playoff Success Points (PSP), a handy invention that assigns credit to teams as follows:
* 3 points for making the playoffs * 3 points for winning the LDS * 4 points for winning the LCS * 4 points for winning the World Series * 1 point for each postseason win * -1 point for each postseason loss
The highest possible PSP is 25, for a team that sweeps through all 11 postseason games. The lowest is 0, for a team that gets its 3-point spot for making the playoffs, but fritters it away by being swept out of the LDS in 3 games. The system is intuitively consistent. The "worst" possible World Series team, a team that plays the maximum number of games in each of its postseason series, receives 17 points. Meanwhile, a team that sweeps through the LDS and LCS but loses the World Series in 7 games receives a PSP of 16. Playoffs Success Points for teams in the memorable 2003 postseason are listed in Table 4.
Let's start the study of the Correlates of Playoff Success by looking at the most fundamental of all measures: wins and losses, and runs scored and runs allowed during the regular season. (Runs scored and allowed are normalized for league and park effects. For example, the 1972 A's, who scored 3.9 runs a game in a league that averaged 3.5 runs per game, had a better offense than the 2005 White Sox, who scored 4.6 runs per game in a league that averaged 4.8) The study covers the 180 teams that made the postseason between 1972 and 1995. The relationships between these statistics and Playoff Success Points are as follows:
The correlation coefficient is a measure of the correspondence between two variables, and runs on a scale from -1.0 to 1.0, where 1.0 represents a perfectly linear relationship, -1.0 represents a perfect *inverse* relationship, and zero represents no relationship at all (randomness). The first thing to notice is that the relationship between regular-season and playoff success is not very strong. The correlation between winning percentage and PSP is .22, which is a lot closer to zero than it is to 1. However, this should not be a big surprise given the high degree of luck the structure of postseason play introduces. Still, we shouldn't be too quick to discard small but positive statistical relationships, given all the possible variables that could be in play.
Besides, there's something far more interesting going on here. While *preventing* runs correlates with postseason success, *scoring* them does not. There is literally no relationship between regular-season offense and postseason success in the data set; the relationship is 0.0014 -- in other words, it doesn't exist.
As far as I'm aware, this finding has never been reported. What's strange is that it isn't that hard to detect, even without the sophisticated math:
-- Since 1972, there have been twenty-seven teams that made the postseason in spite of having below-average offenses. Of these, seven won the World Series: the 1985 Royals, 1987 Twins, 1990 Reds, 1995 Braves, 1996 Yankees, 2000 Yankees, and 2005 White Sox. All of these teams (except for the 1987 Twins) had excellent pitching staffs; it's hard to make the playoffs with a below-average offense *unless* you have an excellent pitching staff.
-- Conversely, twenty team made the postseason with below-average defense. *None* of them won the World Series, and only two (the 1982 Brewers and 1993 Phillies) even played for the championship. Sixteen of those twenty lost the first playoff series in which they played.
Does this mean that defense really does win championships after all? The short answer is yes, probably.
The long answer requires a bit of qualification. First, I don't buy that the quality of an offense is of *no* importance in the playoffs. If the World Series were played tomorrow between a team that scored 6 runs a game in the regular season and a team that scored 4, it would take an awful lot of difference to get me to bet on the Little Engine That Could. What has probably happened is that offense was swallowed up by the myriad other factors that come into play in the playoffs.
What seems clear is the *diminished* importance of offense in the playoffs. When I realized that defense tends to prevail in the playoffs, I wanted to think about its implications. The consensus was that the playoff schedule provides for extra off days, since teams get a day off any time they travel from city to city. These off days then tip the balance in favor of pitching, since the staff is better rested and the team can assign more innings to its best pitchers.
Unfortunately, this does not really help me. It's true that extra off days are an important structural element of the playoffs. However, that should reward top-heavy pitching staffs like that of the 2005 Astros, as opposed to well balanced ones. It should not make Roy Oswalt pitch any better against Paul Konerko in October than he would in July.
What else is different between the regular season and the playoffs? Well, the weather is cooler in October. That should lower run scoring a bit, since hitters prefer hot, humid days. But that should affect everyone just about evenly. It shouldn't reward great defensive teams at the expense of great offense.
In fact, the most important structural difference between the playoffs and the regular season is so obvious that people often fail to consider it: *There aren't any bad team in the playoffs*. There are teams with average offense but great pitching and teams with average pitching but great offenses. But you'll almost never see a legitimately bad offense or a legitimately bad pitching staff in the playoffs; those teams don't make the cut.
The question we should ask is what happens when great pitching faces off against great hitting in the *regular* season. Does defense tend to dominate too? I did a research for teams that had great pitching but average offense and a parallel search for teams that had great offenses but average pitching. The idea is to see what happened when these teams played against one another. This is not as easy as you think; you need to find a "great pitching, average offense" team in the same year and league as a "great offense, average pitching" team. Still, I was able to identify twenty-eight pitching-versus-hitting pairings from 1901 through 2005. The pairings are listed in Table 5, along with the regular-season records of the teams in question. The table compares what actually happened in the season series against what I would have expected based on the log-5 method. For example, I would have expected the 1924 Pirates, a great pitching team, to go 11-11 against the New York Giants, an evenly matched hitting team. Instead, the Pirates won the season series 13-9.
Table 5 Pitching-Heavy vs. Offense Heavy Regular-Season Team Matchups, 1901-2005
Year -- Team (W-L) -- Expected Wins -- Actual Wins Great Pitching vs. Great Hitting
TOTAL -- Great Pitching (230-241) / Great Offense (238-227)
All told, I would have expected the great pitching teams to go 230-238 against great offense (the offense-oriented teams in the sample were slightly stronger on average). Instead, the went 241-227. That represents a swing of 11 games, or an extra win 2 to 3 percent of the time. That is not a large advantage, but it's consistent with what's expected in our study of the postseason.
The difference probably has to do with the nonlinear nature of run scoring. Scoring runs in baseball requires stringing together singles, walks, and extra-base hits; it doesn't do any good to draw a leadoff walk if you get stuck at first base. Research has indicated that good pitchers do allow their fair share of extra hits and walks when they're facing good hitters. However, the pitchers may be able to distribute those hits evenly enough to mitigate the damage and avoid them from translating into increased run scoring; they can render the hitters less than the sum of their parts. It isn't that good pitchers have a structural advantage against good *hitters*, but that good pitchers have a structural advantage against good-hitting *teams*. That advantage comes to the forefront in the playoffs, when all the teams can hit pretty well.
Perhaps offense as a whole isn't quite as important in the playoffs, but some particular offensive statistics are? For that matter, which pitching statistics are the greatest drivers of playoff success? Figure 1 presents the relationships between PSP and twenty-six different measures of team quality. All statistics are normalized for league and park effects.
Figure 1 Relationships between Playoff Success Points and twenty-six measures of team quality NOTE: * means negative effects
Summary Measures -- Relationship
W-L % -- .22 Pythagorean W-L % -- .20
Runs Scored -- .00 Runs Allowed -- .22
OFFENSE Batting Average -- .04 Isolated Power -- .01 Unintentional Walk Rate -- .02 *Strikeout Rate -- -.01
% of Runds Scored on HR -- .04 *VORP of Top Three Hitters -- -.01 Clutch-Hitting Wins -- .00
PITCHING AND DEFENSE VORP of All Starting Pitchers -- .20 VORP of Top Three Starters -- .18 VORP of #1 Starter -- .15 Reliever WXRL -- .13 Closer WXRL -- .22
Opponents Batting Average -- .23 Pitcher Strikeout Rate -- .13 *Pitcher Walk Rate -- -.06 Home Runs Allowed -- .09
Feilding Runs Above Average -- .16 Unearned Runs/Game -- .16
MISCELLANEOUS *W-L% After August 31 -- -.09 W-L% in 1-Run Games -- .04 Team Age -- .04 Team Playoff Experience -- .12
SUMMARY MEASURES of TEAM QUALITY
The Pythagorean won-lost record is an estimate of what a team's winning percentage "should" be based on its runs scored and allowed. Pythagorean record doesn't relate any better than with PSP than your regular old winning percentage. This might be considered surprising, since Pythagorean record has been demonstrated to be a slightly more accurate predictor of *regular-season* performance than straight won-lost record. But we should not make too much out of this, as the difference between the two figures is small. Also, teams that out-perform their Pythagorean record tend to have good bullpens, while teams that underperform it have poor ones. If the bullpen takes on extra importance in the playoffs, then Pythagorean record may be misleading.
OFFENSIVE MEASURES
Just as offense as a whole hasn't had much relationship with playoff success, neither have any of the individual offensive metrics. The A's postseason struggles have sometimes been attributed to their tendency to rely on walks and home runs, but there's NO evidence that teams that play Smallball instead fare better in the postseason. Although stolen-bases attempts have a slight (but statistically insignificant) positive relationship with PSP, sacrifice-hit attempts have a slightly negative one. Speed Score is a composite of five offensive statistics that provides evidence about a player's wheels. That has no relationship with PSP at all. Nor do teams that hit well in the clutch in the regular season see that advantage carry forward into the playoffs.
PITCHING and DEFENSE
There is a lot more to look at here. We can first try to test the proposition that it's especially important to have three great starters in the postseason, since the extra off days the schedule provides will allow those three to make a disproportionate number of starts. The top three starters are relatively more important in the playoffs, but we still do a bit better if we look at the starting pitching as a whole:
1. Relationship between top-three starting pitcher VORP (Value Over Replacement Player) and PSP: .18 2. Relationship between non-top-three pitcher VORP and PSP: .11 3. Relationship between all starting pitcher VORP and PSP: .20
It's worth remembering that the "other" starting pitchers do pitch some in the playoffs. Most of today's playoff teams prefer a four-man rotation to trotting pitchers out on short rest, and extraneous starters may be useful out of the bullpen.
Where I see a stronger effect is in the bullpen. The relationship between the closer's Win Expectancy (adjusted for replacement level and the opposing lineup) and PSP is quite strong -- stronger in fact than when we look at the bullpen as a whole. Put differently, the performance of *non-closer* relievers is of very little importance in the playoffs; the relationship between non-closers and PSP is just .02. Between the absence of fourth and fifth starters who often require bullpen help and the willingness of managers to stretch their closers into multiple-inning stints, it is the secondary relief pitchers who get squeezed into the playoffs.
Of all the statistics in our study, the one with the highest correlation to postseason success is opponents batting average. Certainly, preventing hits is very important in the playoffs -- when you're matched up against good offensive clubs, it's vital to stop them from stringing together hits and starting rallies. But we also need to think about how a team can go about preventing hits. All baseball fans know that the best way to prevent hits are striking a batter out, so that he doesn't put the ball in play in the first place and to catch the ball when it's put into play. The relationship between strikeouts, defense, and hit prevention is complicated. It takes a more sophisticated type of analysis to sort everything out, which we'll get to in a moment.
The other interesting finding is that avoiding walks does not seem to have much relationship with playoff success. A good rule of thumb for pitchers is: Let bad hitters beat themselves, but don't let good hitters beat you. While walking a hitter who can't hit the ball out of the infield is tragic, pitching around a guy who can crush the ball out of the park can be advisable. Pitchers can encounter a lot more of the latter kind than the former in the playoffs. Finally, we see that the two defensive metrics examined here -- Fielding Runs Above Average (FRAA) and unearned runs -- show a promising correlation with PSP. We'll get back to that in a moment too.
MISCELLANEOUS METRICS
The final section is reserved for testing some commonly held precepts about the playoffs. Finishing the year hot does NOT matter (unless you're the 2007 Colorado Rockies). In fact, there is a slight inverse relationship between W-L record from September 1 onward and the playoff success. This may be because the best teams can afford to rest their starters late in the season, while merely good teams will be scratching and clawing for every victory and many come into the postseason tired. Playing well in 1-run games, meanwhile, has no particular effect on how a team faces in the postseason.
I also looked at two measures of experience: chronological age and the average number of postseason at-bats or innings pitched for the players on the roster. Although age made no difference, there was a slight relationship between playoff experience and PSP. A good deal of that relationship was the result of the Yankees dynasty not too long ago, a team that was both very experienced (especially in its last couple of years) and very successful. Although I don't think the "experience counts" hypothesis can be dismissed out of hand, the relationship is not statistically significant, especially if it's considered that those who have accumulated a lot of postseason experience tend to be better players.
There's a axiom that goes, "Correlation does not imply causation." For example, we might find that the stock market is closed on days beginning with the letter S; there is a correlation between these two things. However, it is not because Saturday and Sunday begin with an S that the stock market is closed on weekends. This axiom isn't quite correct; correlation can *imply* causation, but it does not *prove* causation. Nevertheless, to get a better sense for causation, we need to use a more sophisticated tool: regression analysis. Regression analysis is designed precisely for assessing causation; its goal is to see which independent variables can explain a resultant one (in our case, Playoff Success Points).
Regression analysis is particularly helpful when evaluating a number of interrelated variables, as we're doing in the study of the postseason. For example, both opponents' batting average and pitcher strikeout rate are related with postseason success, but they're also closely related to each other. Which variable is the real driver of good postseason success? I'd rather look at runs allowed than winning percentage, since winning games results in part from allowing fewer runs. But I'd rather still look at strikeout rate, since preventing runs results in part from striking batters out.
After any number of the twenty-six variables in the database, I identified three factors that have the most fundamental and direct relationship with Playoff Success Points. These are:
1. Closer WXRL 2. Pitcher srikeout rate 3. FRAA
CLOSER WXRL (Win Expectation, adjusted for Replacement Level)
Of the 180 teams in our sample, 53 managed to reach the playoffs with a below-average closer. However, only five of those teams went on to win the World Series. The reason for the importance of the closer is simple: Postseason games are usually close contests between evenly matched teams, and that provides many more opportunities for the closer to pitch in high-Leverage situations. For example, between 1996 and 2004, Mariano Rivera pitched 5.1 percent of the Yankees' regular-season innings. Over the same period, he pitched 10.4 percent of their postseason innings, more than twice as many.
It's also worth noting that managers use closers more optimally in the playoffs than they do in the regular season. They'll have them enter the game in the seventh- or eighth inning, pitch for multiple innings at a time, and come into a tie game or even one in which their team is trailing. My advice to the managers: *We've seen over the last thirty years how important a good closer can be in the playoffs. So let's pay attention and start using them that way in the regular season.*
In any event, this particular conjecture about postseason play is true: It's very difficult to win close games against good offensive teams if you don't have a an ace reliever to finish things off.
PITCHER STRIKEOUT RATE
This is always very important for a pitcher. Striking hitters out becomes particularly important, however, when facing good offensive ones like the ones seen in postseason play. The reason is because good hitters tend to tee off against finess pitchers while losing some of their advantage against power pitchers who can throw an unhittable pitch.
FIELDING RUNS ABOVE AVERAGE
In general, there is an inverse relationship between FRAA and pitcher strikeout rate. This makes a certain amount of sense: The defense becomes important when you have a staff of finess pitchers who like to put the ball in play, so you're liable to pay more attention. That's less true when you have a strikeout pitchers who can get the job done all by themselves. (It's also possible that pitchers feel more comfortable challenging hitters when they have a good defense to back them up).
However, when a team has both a strikeout-heavy pitching staff and a great defense at its disposal, it can become nearly impossible for its opponents to get hits and generate rallies. There are two layers of security -- the hitter first has to find a pitch to hit; then he has to hope that the defense doesn't catch it. It's not that defense is inherently more important in close games, but it almost certainly is more important against good offense, since good offense put hard-hit balls in play and test the defense far more frequently. Of the thirty-three teams to win the World Series from 1972-2005, only five had a below-average defense and *none* had an FRAA worse than -10.
NOTE: *Fielding Runs Above Average is the number of runs a defender has saved his team compared to an average player at the same position. Fielding Runs are determined through a very complicated process that begins by separating the team's defensive performance into pitching and fielding components. The teams fielding is separated into catching, infield, and outfield portions; each of those is then split into separate positions; finally, each position is split into all of the players who played there during the regular season. At each step, the players defensive stats are compared to standards defined by the league and modified by the team's pitching. The best player at any position in a given year is usually around 20 runs above average -- typically a little higher for shortstops and catchers and a little lower for first basemen and left fielders.*
It would be misleading to suggest that this is some kind of secret sauce. Collectively, these three factors -- the quality of the closer, the defense, and the strikeout rate of the pitching staff -- account for only about 11 percent of playoff success. The majority of the time, it's luck that prevails. But when these three elements are aligned together, they can become quite powerful. I came across the rankings of the 180 playoff teams from first to worst in each of these categories, and the average of the rankings into a composite score. Table 6 lists the 10 teams with the best and worst composite rankings.
Table 6 Ten Teams with Best and Worst Composite Rankings Rank out of 180 Teams
Highest Composite Rankings Team-- Closer -- FRAA -- K Rate -- Average -- Result
1. 1979 Orioles -- 31 -- 9 -- 48 -- 29.3 -- Lost in World Series 2. 1990 Reds -- 38 -- 15 -- 49 -- 34.0 -- Won World Series 3. 2001 D'backs -- 37 -- 61 -- 10 -- 36.0 -- Won World Series 4. 1998 Yankees -- 23 -- 17 --72 -- 37.3 -- Won World Series 5. 1984 Tigers -- 1 -- 63 -- 51 -- 38.3 -- Won World Series 6. 1979 Pirates -- 20 -- 29 -- 70 -- 39.7 -- Won World Series 7. 1979 Mets -- 36 -- 32 -- 63 -- 43.7 -- Lost in NLCS 8. 2002 Angels -- 24 -- 5 -- 106 -- 45.0 -- Won World Series 9. 1995 Indians -- 12 -- 62 -- 67 -- 47.0 -- Lost in World Series 10. 1978 Yankees -- 53 -- 47 -- 47 -- 49.0 -- Won World Series
Lowest Composite Rankings Team -- Closer -- FRAA -- K Rate -- Average -- Result
180. 1997 Giants -- 167 -- 152 -- 167 -- 162.0 -- Lost in NLDS 179. 2005 Red Sox -- 164 -- 141 -- 131 -- 145.3 -- Lost in ALDS 178. 1989 Blue Jays -- 120 -- 166 -- 144 -- 143.3 -- Lost in ALCS 177. 2000 Athletics -- 155 -- 107 -- 150 -- 137.3 -- Lost in ALDS 176. 1974 Orioles -- 66 -- 168 -- 173 -- 135.7 -- Lost in ALCS 175. 1995 Rockies -- 161 -- 109 -- 136 -- 135.3 -- Lost in NLDS 174. 1981 Expos -- 118 -- 173 -- 111 -- 134.0 -- Lost in NLCS 173. 1996 Orioles -- 160 -- 138 -- 102 -- 133.3 -- Lost in ALCS 172. 1981 Brewers -- 143 -- 83 -- 172 -- 132.7 -- Lost in ALCS 171. 1979 Reds -- 91 -- 150 -- 151 -- 130.7 -- Lost in NLCS
Of the ten teams with the highest composite rankings, nine played in the World Series and seven of them won it. One of those loses that's worth noting is the 1979 Orioles. They lost in seven games to the Pirates, who also appear in the top-ten list. Some of these teams, like the 1984 Tigers and the 1998 Yankees, were powerful powerful clubs that had a lot going for them anyway. But this helps explain the success of teams like the 1990 Reds, an unimpressive squad that happened to have the perfect combination of talent for postseason play, including their defense and the Nasty Boys bullpen of Randy Meyers, Norm Charlton, and Rob Dibble.
On the other hand, none of the ten *worst* composite teams so much as played in the World Series. Collectively, they compiled a postseason record of just 16-35.
What does this mean for the Oakland A's? We see that one of its clubs, the 2000 version, ranked fourth from the bottom in composite ranking. That team featured a young offense with budding stars like Eric Chavez, Miguel Tejada, and Jason Giambi, coupled with a cheap veteran pitching staff that had been cobbled together from the waiver wire. The starter in the decisive ALDS Game 5 was Gil Heredia, a finess pitcher who treaded water by avoiding mistakes and doing just enough to give his offense a chance. However, he was no match for the Yankees, who crushed him for 6 runs in one-third of an inning in Game 5. Meanwhile, A's closer Jason Isringhausen had yet to really establish himself. And while the infield defense was reasonable, the outfield of Ben Grieve, Terrence Long, and Matt Stairs was one of the worst defensive groups in recent history. Things got a little better in the seasons to come, as we see in Table 7. The Big Three of Barry Zito, Tim Hudson, and Mark Mulder established themselves, and learning from that experience, the franchise began to pay more attention to relief pitching and outfield defense.
Table 7 Oakland A's Composite Rankings by Category 2000-2003
Rank out of 180 Teams Composite Ranking -- Closer -- FRAA -- Average -- Result
177. 2000 A's -- 155 -- 107 -- 150 -- 137.3 -- Lost in ALDS 97. 2001 A's -- 81 -- 148 -- 62 -- 97.0 -- Lost in ALDS 57. 2002 A's -- 111 -- 19 -- 103 -- 77.7 -- Lost in ALDS 30. 2003 A's -- 92 -- 17 -- 80 -- 63.0 -- Lost in ALDS
By 2003, the A's had become a legitimately strong postseason club, but they still succumbed in 5 games to the Red Sox. It was neither bad luck or a design ill suited for the postseason play that did the Athletics in but a combination of the two. Miguel Tejada and Keith Foulke left after 2003, and Tim Hudson and Mark Mulder the year after. Shortstop Bobby Crosby and 2005 Rookie of the Year closer Houston Street have since emerged. But in 2004 and 2005 at least, the A's window of opportunity had closed.
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