The Pirates had a better winning pct in 1972....by a game really but still better....and they had to play 3 in a row in Cincy.
How lucky were the Reds in 1975 not to lose the 1st two games? NOT to have the DH be in play and not have to face Jim Rice?
There was some luck in the BRM, even in their excellence.
I'd call them the definition of "good", not great or anything. But I don't think mediocre would describe them. If so, the name certainly wouldn't escape teams like Detroit or Texas, either.
All my posts are my opinion - just like yours are. If I forget to state it and you're too dense to see the obvious, look here!
All my posts are my opinion - just like yours are. If I forget to state it and you're too dense to see the obvious, look here!
You're right, Cardinals are a good team, I was wrong to use the term mediocre, but definitely not a great team. Not one that deserves to be in the playoffs. I also think that the Rangers aren't much better. The Tigers have a great offense, better than the Cardinals, the best starting pitcher in baseball, and one of the best managers ever. Hard to say they're a great team, but hard to say that they don't deserve to be in the playoffs.
Hoping to change my username to 75769024
The Reds are closer to being the Cardinals than you think.
How long did it take the Tony LaRussa Cardinals to get to this point?
Cardinals are a good team, 5th best in the NL means you're good. But it doesn't mean you should be in the playoffs.
“I don’t care,” Votto said of passing his friend and former teammate. “He’s in the past. Bye-bye, Jay.”
So you would be prouder of an "accomplishment" that has more to do with outright luck than with skill and talent. I see.
It's kind of like being proud of a coin-flipping championship. It has nothing to do with skill. Just pure luck.
The playoffs are based on luck. That is why the best team rarely wins the World Series and the wild card 2nd-place teams have won it regularly lately. The team with the best record has only a 50-50 chance of winning each series in the playoffs. The talent and skill of a team does not have time to manifest and assert itself in a 5 or 7 game series. All of us have known since childhood that it takes a large number of baseball games to figure out which team is better. Even the best teams in baseball only win 65% of their games over the course of a full season. A series is just a crapshoot. Even the best teams lose many series over the course of a season. It is not like football where the best team can go without losing a single game in an entire season. That is why baseball has a 162 game season -- because 16 or 30 games (like in other sports) is simply not enough to determine the best team.
Last edited by AtomicDumpling; 10-20-2012 at 03:48 AM.
The Cards would have lost to the Nationals in Game 5 if that pitch that David Freese looked at in the bottom of the 9th had been called strike 3 like PitchFx said it should have been. Just another lucky break for the Cardinals that allowed them to advance over a better team.
I agree the 2012 Cardinals are not the best example of a bad team doing well in the playoffs, but just look at the last 15 years and you can find a whole bunch of mediocre teams winning championships. Has any team ever gotten beaten so badly in their own division and gone on to win the World Series as the 2012 Cardinals?
Run differential is a very rough and crude indication of how good a team could be, not a metric of how good they really are or how well they actually played on the field during all the unique scenarios and challenges that presented themselves over a six-month season. There is a lot of strategy, skill, talent, craft and experience that goes into winning 95+ baseball games.
The ultimate measure of how good a team played is how many games they won over a meaningful sample size. 5-7 games is not a meaningful sample size in the sport of baseball. 162 games is certainly much more indicative of a team's true talent level.
And let's not pretend that this issue just arose this week. This debate over the luck-based postseason has been going on for 15 years, ever since the first 2nd-place team won a World Series. Writing it off simply as Reds fans having sour grapes this year is way off base. Heck, we had a big thread about it right here on Redszone last year when the Reds didn't even come close to making the playoffs.
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