Baseball Prospectus Secret Sauce: Their Rationale for Ending It Was Incorrect

[NOTE: wrote most of this up before, just getting around to posting now]

Baseball Prospectus did a study for their great book, "Baseball Between the Numbers", of how teams historically, during the divisional baseball era, got deep into the playoffs, answering the question Billy Beane had, of why his sh!t didn't work in the playoffs.

They found, on an overall basis, that offensive stats was random and all over the place, meaning that it is defensively how teams got deep into the playoffs, that is, pitching and fielding.  They narrowed down the variables to three key metrics:  K/9 for the pitching staff, WRXL for their closer, and their Fielding Defense metric, FRAA.  The only offensive metric that seemed tied to going deep was stolen base attempts, which they attributed to the link of team speed to stolen base attempts.

For a few years, BP published analysis based on their "secret sauce".  But after a number of failures, they decided to end the analysis, making the assumption that the playoffs had changed in some way to make it fail as a strategy.

Thoughts on Championships and Dynasties

Saw a column on Fox Sports, about how the season teaches us nothing, about how the season don't matter much anymore, how the best team no longer wins the World Series championship, about how there's no dynasties anymore, and I just couldn't let it go without comment.  My comment is below, unchanged, other than that size limits forced me to break it up into, like, five comments, plus I put in what seems to be the right breakpoint for a header.