Some thoughts on sample size and perspective
Or, how to watch a 162-game season and not hate it.
There’s no kind way to describe the last week of baseball. It’s been really bad. No, West Coast road trips have rarely been kind to the Braves. And yes, the Mariners and Dodgers are good teams; the latter is probably really, really good.
But I’m not going to come here and tell you that a 29 wRC+ (league average: 100) since last Monday entering today’s game is anything but horrific. The pitching has been a saving grace (6th leaguewide in xFIP over the week, though merely 12th in ERA), but when the offense is collectively hitting like 9 non-Shohei Ohtani pitchers, even a two-run deficit feels insurmountable. While the offensive peripherals were better than the outputs, they weren’t actually good; it was a week with a ton of strikeouts, not very many walks, and not much hard contact.
You know all of that. So I’m not here to tell you your eyes have deceived you over the last week. I’m here to tell you that this happens all of the time, to good and even great teams, and it just doesn’t mean very much.
The proof
Exhibit A is the 2023 Braves, an indisputably great regular season team. 104 wins, leading the division wire-to-wire, breaking all sorts of records - it’s difficult to remember that this team ever struggled before reaching the postseason. And yet, just under a year ago -
This was an awful week of baseball. Three straight games where the team couldn’t hit if its life depended upon it, an ugly walk-off loss to Toronto in which the defense couldn’t field a simple fly ball, and a poorly managed Jared Shuster game against Texas. There was the ‘let’s spoil an anonymous rookie’s debut’ 12-0 win against the eventual champion Rangers in between, but this set of games mostly sucked.
So they put this behind them and then mostly dominated the rest of the way, right? Not so fast, because less than a week later:
Narrowly avoiding a sweep to the Dodgers, then a messy split of the Phillies and a series loss to the worst team in baseball.
And we’re not done. Because straight out of the All-Star Break, we got this:
Is it hard to remember that the Braves looked this lifeless for stretches last year? They absolutely did.
If you want a non-Braves example, here’s a favorite of mine. The 2021 Dodgers were an incredibly talented team fresh off a World Series title. The won 106 games in the regular season (amazingly, not enough to win their division) and were just as good as the 2023 Braves, for my money. They started the season hot, running up a 13-2 record. And then this happened:
The Los Angeles Dodgers - maybe the best-managed, best-funded franchise in the sport - had a 20-game stretch in which they went 5-15. That included a 5-game stretch in which they scored 9 combined runs. It included a 3-game stretch in which they allowed 26 runs. To add insult to injury, only one of their opponents in that stretch went on to make the playoffs.
Finding meaning
When I point out that it’s a fool’s errand to draw a conclusion about a team from a weeklong stretch of baseball (even if it’s playoff baseball), I’m sometimes met with hostility.
Here’s why I think the folks who don’t like my worldview feel that way: fans want to believe that success is entirely within their favorite team’s control. Victory is the result of some combination of hard work, talent, good strategy, and some vague je ne sais quoi we can call ‘clutch ability’ or ‘poise’ or ‘mental resilience’. Thus, defeat - especially recurring defeat - must be the result of an absence of at least one of those factors. Most fans know better than to suggest without evidence that their team’s players are lazy (let alone try to make the argument that those players are lazy this week, but weren’t lazy when they played much better the previous week), and most fans recognize that talent doesn’t evaporate overnight. And game-to-game tactical strategy plays an extremely small role in a team’s success.
So fans of a talented team end up lighting the je ne sais quoi in effigy every time something goes wrong. Players who have played integral roles in World Series runs become ‘mentally weak’. A hitter who walked off an NLCS game less than three years ago has a ‘clutch problem’. Statistics that carry no predictive value - ‘why aren’t we hitting better with RISP?’ - take on talismanic value.
This is a shame, for the same reason that it’s a shame to buy shares in blue-chip companies and fret each day about whether their prices have risen or fallen. Because over a short period of time, the je ne sais quoi is almost always just random variance. Six different hitters all having bad stretches at the same time? Sure, if they were all a little better, they’d probably be playing better, but they’re still good hitters and that’s probably awful luck. The high-leverage portion of the bullpen pitching well all week but faltering with a one-run lead in the ninth inning? Bad timing. Marcell Ozuna hitting his homer immediately after Matt Olson gets thrown out trying to stretch a single into a double? You get the point.
And look, I’m not saying it’s always nothing. It’s still early in the year, but Ronald Acuña Jr.’s strikeout rate has increased enough that I feel confident saying he won’t keep the same ridiculously low K rate he maintained last season. Some statistics stabilize quicker than others, and you can draw meaning from those results. Obviously, some of the past week’s performance has been a matter of skill. The hitters have swung through some very hittable fastballs; maybe there’s an approach issue.
But taking your lumps over the course of a 162-game season isn’t proof of anything, really. It’s not proof of a precipitous skill decline, and it’s certainly not proof of mental weakness. It’s mostly just proof of human fallibility, even if it sucks to watch our favorite humans fail.
The Braves have another five months to define themselves.
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Needed this right now! Thanks for the perspective.