New Blog and some ALDS thoughts

This is my first time blogging; I figure I might as well get a head start before I head to Korea. But first I want to talk about what is on my mind now, well really always on my mind: baseball.

Much has been made about how overly matched the Twins are in the 2009 ALDS. The chances of an upset are really low...so low that you'd have to bet $5 on the Yankees to win $4. They're 3/2 favorites to go to the World Series. But this a playoff series and flukey things happen.

That being said, I think the Vegas oddmakers have it close and the chances of an upset are probably even lower than they have it. And most "upsets" in the World Series have been by teams very close in talent level, based on the Wins Above Replacement (WAR) statistic. When there have been upsets, often parts of the teams' talents are the same. Let's look at some the biggest playoff upsets in recent memory:

The 2006 World Series that one sportswriter said would be "Tigers in 3":
Cardinals: 28.3 WAR
Tigers: 43 WAR
Difference of -14.7. But if you remove pitching from the equation, the Cards and their 21.5 WAR hitting beat the 22.1 WAR hitting Tigers. Good pitchers have off games, and the talent difference over a whole season can be neutralized with a short series. And it shouldn't be much of a surprise that Verlander posted a 5.82 ERA in the postseason, with a 5.73 ERA in the World Series after pitching 186 innings his rookie season.


2004 ALCS:
Red Sox: 55.9 WAR
Yankees: 44.1 WAR
Difference of +11.8 for the team doing the upset

The 2003 World Series:
Marlins: 42.3
Yankees: 57.2 (note: the Red Sox were 61 WAR, so the Yankees beating the Sox was a smaller upset)
Difference of -15. But Josh Beckett and his +3.9 wins got to make two starts, so again over a short series overall talent differences between the pitchers can be reduced. The Marins 22.4 WAR hitters were able to beat the Yanks 27.0 WAR hitters.

2001 World Series:
There is no WAR data for this year, but the Yankees had a team OPS+ of 100 and the Diamondbacks were 94. Yankees team ERA+ was 111 and the Diamondbacks 120 (with Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling posting 157 and 188 ERA+ seasons respectively). It looks like the D-Backs a slightly better team, especially when you factor in that Schilling and Johnson had two starts each. The real upset was the Yankees beating the A's in the ALDS, with their 106 OPS+ and 121 ERA+. Oh, and the A's were leading 2-0 in that series.

There's a clear trend here: when an inferior team beats a superior team, they are usually close in some way or they get lucky (2001).

The Yankees and Twins are not close at all in talent level: The 2009 Yankees fielded a team that is worth 57 WAR, the Twins a 38.2 WAR team. Over the course of a season that predicts a difference of around 19 wins, which is almost exactly what their final record reflects: 103 wins for the Yanks and 86 for the Twins (87 if you count their one game playoff). The Twins won't be able to close the gap with their pitching and the hitting is worse at every position, except of course catcher. But this talent gap is even greater when you consider that the Twins can't use their best pitcher, Scott Baker (+3.5 WAR), until game 4. By then the Yankees should have clinched at the Metrodome anyway. If the Twins beat the Yankees it will be one of the biggest upsets in recent playoffs history, if not the biggest.