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October 20, 2006

Playoff Prospectus

Have You Ever Been Experienced?

by Mike Carminati

Undermining experience, embellishing experience, rearranging and enlarging experience into a species of mythology.
—Philip Roth

The Yankees-Tigers series opened, just as expected, with an overwhelming New York win. The FOX commentators, Joe Buck and Tim McCarver, gleefully rained down on the viewer choruses of the ever-cloying "Murderer's Row and Cano," referring to the Yanks' tremendous offense. They pointed out that all nine batters in the lineup had been an All-Star at least once and that the Yankees had a great deal more experience in the postseason than did the largely untried Tiger lineup.

The FOX "Loser cam," the device used to pan the faces of the trailing team once it is apparent that they will very likely lose the game, tried to plumb the depths of their pathetic souls. The Detroit players were montaged as the Yankees batting in the seventh leading 7-4, with the only question whether the series would end in a sweep and whether Mariano Rivera would be allowed to pitch more than one inning to save each victory. This was even before Yankee captain Derek Jeter capped his five-for-five night with a home run to center and made a celebratory curtail call.

Four days later--you may have heard--the Tigers registered three straight wins and the Yankees offense shut down for over twenty straight innings, reviving in time for some meaningless runs at the end of game four. Depending on the prevailing winds on the given day, Joe Torre's job hung in the balance, perhaps to be replaced with a more "fiery" manager be it Lou Piniella, Larry Bowa, or the spirit of Billy Martin.

After the series, the pundits quickly cited the old adage that pitching beat hitting, that the Tigers' superior pitching shut down the Yankee offense, albeit a great one. I addressed this and found that there was not much in the historical record to support this contention. If anything, good hitting (at least high on-base percentage) seems to do a bit better than good pitching. Quoting the old cliché apparently serves as little more than a salve to the conscience of those who predicted an easy New York victory, or maybe as an homage to Crash Davis.

However, the fact that the Yankees were more experienced, a point held very much in their favor as the series began, was no longer addressed even though--or maybe especially because--three of Detroit's pitching stars for the series were youngsters. Justin Verlander, Jeremy Bonderman, and Joel Zumaya are all still short of their twenty-fourth birthdays. Either the Yankees got less experienced as the series wore on, or the issue of superiority in postseason experience became less meaningful. Of course, the former is impossible, but given that the as the World Series opens, we will undoubtedly be told that experience provides one team or the other with a distinct edge in the postseason, could it be that the importance of playoff experience waxes and wanes with the commentator's enthusiasm?