Post-season baseball is a wholly different animal. Teams play like there's no tomorrow, which, for half of them each time, there isn't. This attitude change manifests itself mainly in pitching usage; struggling starters are pulled immediately, marginal relievers are skipped, top relievers are used more often and for longer stints. In many respects, it's the kind of baseball teams played long ago before the effects of pitching fatigue was appreciated or quantified.

It's a crapshoot.

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As expected, last week's discussion of clutch hitting generated more than the usual share of reader e-mail. BP readers, an intelligent group, pointed out a few problems with both the methodology and conclusions drawn from the data. Thus, this week will be a follow-up, taking those suggestions into account.

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Win probability is not a new concept. Events in a baseball game have long been analyzed by not only the number of runs they produce, but by their impact on a team's probability of winning the game. The Mills brothers were some of the earlier analysts to discuss the concept in depth with their metric Player Win Average (PWA), but it has been refined many times and various frameworks are employed both here at Baseball Prospectus and elsewhere. Currently, our version--discussed in depth by Keith Woolner in Baseball Prospectus 2005--is employed in our pitching metrics, particularly the reliever evaluation tools like WXRL.

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Let's just get this out of the way now: Derrek Lee is not going to win the MVP award. Andruw Jones set a well-publicized franchise record by hitting his 50th home run, his sterling defensive reputation is still intact, and he's perceived as leading a dynasty reborn back to its rightful place atop the division. If that's not good enough for the writers, Albert Pujols is once again the best player on the best team in the league and he'll likely garner the sympathy vote from those writers who know that in a Barry Bonds-free world, Pujols would already be a three-time MVP.

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In his discussion of the likely NL MVP race shaping up, Joe Sheehan pointed out that if you look at the most prominent contenders--Derrek Lee, Albert Pujols, and Andruw Jones--Lee distances himself from the field in WARP by a vast margin. Looking at the traditional stats, Lee leads the league in batting average, Jones leads in home runs and RBI, and Pujols is second, third and second in those categories, respectively. It's easy to see why those three would be the favorites headed into the final month of the season.

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The length of the baseball season can easily obscure some important trends that are developing. Teams like the A's get noticed because their rise from the depths has been so dramatic that it breaks free of the mass of information built before its arrival. But there are may other trends that can easily escape our eyes because so much of the season has already passed.

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Not unlike the old Sports Illustrated Jinx, it seems that as soon as we talk about something here at BP, things turn around. Jonah Keri covered Sunday's A's game yesterday in his Game of the Week column, but it's safe to say that my last two columns--about the Royals' losing streak and the A's winning ways--have made large U-turns in the last week. The Royals' managed to finally break out of their near-record slump and it's this subject that deserves a little more of our attention.

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To start, let's get some perspective. The Royals' streak of 18 straight losses is not the worst run of baseball of all time. The worst losing streak in the major leagues since 1901 was the 1961 Phillies who managed to lose 23 games in a row from 7/29/61 to 8/20/61. Interestingly, it could have been a lot worse; the Phillies lost five in a row just before the streak, so they actually lost 28 of 29 games in what may very well be the worst month any team has ever had. Here are the rest of the worst:

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While the rest of the league usually attaches the adjective "walk-off" to things like home runs or doubles, the A's seem more inclined to use it before things like "bunts" and "return throws to pitchers too busy acting like five-year old children who aren't allowed to buy what they see in the local Toys 'R Us to bother catching the ball." While Ramon Hernandez's impersonation of Jake Taylor in Game 1 of the 2003 ALDS certainly carried more weight, Jason Kendall's scamper down the line to cap off yesterday's A's-Angels battle royale was equally as improbable and equally as exciting.

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Three months ago, I took a look at the struggles of the A's, Indians and Pirates with regards to their complete and utter inability to get runners home once they'd put them on base, a light stat called runner scoring percentage. While the Indians' offensive struggles were more a result of overall struggles (they were batting .226/.296/.379 at the time and were plating a more respectable 35.4% of their baserunners), the A's and Pirates were plating a lower percentage of their runners on base than any team since 1990, and it wasn't particularly close.

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Jumping right in today, reader Benjamin Lauderdale sent this question Will Carroll's way; he was kind enough to forward it to me:

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