Sunday Discussion: Sports as Morality Play

to adapt to changing circumstance. Early in the season it was 100% clear that Lackey was historically awful, and that there was no possible way he should be allowed to hit triple digits for innings. Matsuzaka was already out for the year, with Buchholz’s injury as question mark. Seeing as how we had zero depth at starting pitching, it should have been a priority to create a contingency plan for additional depth, even if said depth was along the lines of a 2008 Paul Byrd.

Instead, the team rested on their then-success, as July was an incredible month. However, clearly no team on earth is as good as we were then, and obtaining a single SP, an oft-injured one at that, was inadequate. Should any of our major pitchers suffer another injury, we would be forced to rely on Kyle Weiland, Andrew Miller, Felix Doubront and John Lackey to get us through.

We were overconfident and underprepared, so we got stomped. Last year’s club should have been a 100-105 win club, as the initial roster construction was as good as any I’ve ever seen. It took a concerted effort from management, the front office and players to miss the playoffs.

My hope is that we would’ve learned from this failure and done everything possible to avoid making the same mistake, and it is a good step that Theo is gone, and Tito had to go. However this roster construction is beyond incompetent, with us creating holes where there were none, adding depth at positions where we need it little, and completely avoiding the problem of our duct tape rotation.

Teams with crappy construction and no plan don’t make the playoffs in the AL East, no matter how many Pedroias and Lesters you have.

absolutely adores these “explanations” for why a particular hometown team lost (or a cute, coming-together story for why they won). I tend to think these “Shaughnessyisms” are BS, which i try to explain to her but, as a non-statistical person by nature, she could never accept. My belief is that yes, discontinuity and malcontent among a team may play a small role in the teams performance, but the incredible majority of success or lack thereof comes from the skill of the players.
Just to throw an example out there: my college soccer team was bad in 2010. We expected to be better in 2011 because of some good new freshman and the loss of only 3 seniors. Instead we played even worse. While many of my teammates were throwing out theories related to us having an inferior formation, or most popularly that our coach had no idea what he was doing, from my comfortable seat on the bench i concluded that it was simply a lack of skill. We don’t have a consistent goal-scorer. Our anchor in central midfield was one of the aforementioned graduates.
And even if we had all played beyond our potential, we were nowhere near as talented as many of the other schools in our conference. Period. We just weren’t that good.
But people feel compelled to come up with off-the-field reasons for defeat.

When faced with a bunch of data that isn’t clearly connected, we are forced to use imagination to fill in the blanks. Most people are aware that we have a blind spot, but our brains do such a seamless job of synthesis that it takes effort on our part to actually notice the gap. Our brains work much the same way for more than just visual stimuli. We think we have a pretty firm grasp on how skilled players and teams are, based on past performance and whatnot. Especially in baseball, where there are scads of advanced metrics that we can use to “prove” what we want to be true, you can build a narrative where inexplicable outcomes like 2011 just don’t make any kind of sense mathematically. From a statistical point of view, the events of September (not just the Red Sox in isolation, either) are pretty highly improbable. Since the stats suggest a very different outcome should have resulted more often than not, it seems reasonable to assume that the real reason must lie in something the stats don’t cover, something off the field. By the time someone has reached this conclusion, they’re usually looking for a scapegoat or three. So you wind up with the belief that whenever something happens that the stats suggest is unlikely enough, it must be the character of the player or the team that defied the odds, and it’s pretty much impossible to prove this is wrong since the situation has arisen because the math already got too fuzzy. Most people seem to find that idea more palatable, or at least more comprehensible, than enough sheer dumb luck (which is probably even less able to be modeled than character) to account for things like dropping a 9 game lead in one month. Besides, if it really is all or mostly dumb luck, there’s nowhere to direct anger, resentment, or whatever, which seems to change into despair for some reason, which is rather worse. Further, there’s not really anything you can do to make yourself more lucky, so tilting at the possible windmills of bad character may be better than shrugging and doing nothing. At least if you try to tackle a problem, even one that doesn’t really exist, you might accidentally improve yourself in some other way.

… and has relatively few consequences.

Has generated the longest comment responses I’ve ever seen strung together on OTM