Envoi: Predicting The Playoffs

Here’s an actual sentence from an actual e-mail message from one actual Birchwood Brother to the other. Date: October 18, 2014. Subject: Why to Take KC over SF at Even Money in the 2014 World Series. Rationale: “I think KC will figure out how to hit Bumgarner.”

It’s this kind of prescience, we feel, that will impel you to listen to what we have to say about the Fantasy dimensions of the 2015 MLB playoffs. And not for us the tepid, game-by-game forecasts that make DFS go. No–when we say playoffs, we mean the whole month-long thing: a start-to-finish prediction that we are making before the first pitch of the first wild card game is thrown. And as ever, we are putting our money where our opinions are. We are competing in the NFBC Post-Season Contest, which entails picking a lineup for the first round of the playoffs, resetting for the second round, and resetting again for the World Series. Rosters consist of ten hitters and six pitchers, with at least one guy and no more than three from each of the playoff teams in the first round. There’s a premium on picking players who make it to the succeeding rounds, which means you want to be right about which teams win. It also seems to us that the NFBC scoring system overvalues home runs. Here’s a link to the rules if you’re curious: http://nfbc.stats.com/baseball/leagues/rules/nfbcholdem.asp?id=1507 We’ve got as much chance of winning this as we do of knocking over the Milk Bottle Pyramid at the County Fair Carnival, but we’re undeterred.

Before we share our thoughts, though, let’s close the books on the regular season. In the NFBC Main Event, we wound up, as we’ve known we would for a distressingly long time, in the middle of the pack, undone mostly by our poor choice of starting pitchers. In our NFBC Slow Draft, astonishingly, we came back from near-total immersion in the Slough of Mediocrity to finish 2nd, one point out of 1st. Most importantly, we must sing hosannas to Matt Cunningham, helmsperson of Release the Kracken [sic], wire-to-wire winner of the Birchwood-Brothers-curated Fangraphs Midseason League. He didn’t do anything exotic; just drafted some blue-chip players in the early rounds, followed in the middle rounds by some first-half underperformers (Belt, Carpenter, Eaton, Kang, Granderson) who figured to improve. His instinct for both was unerring, which is why he won. Drafting Jake Arrieta in the fifth round may also have had something to do with it. We ourselves finished a distant 3rd.

Back to the future. Here’s the team we’ve put together for the first round of the playoffs. (The lineup is tweakable right up to the start of tonight’s game, and we may well do some tweaking, depending on what our astrologer tells us):

C: Francisco Cervelli
1B: Edwin Encarnacion
2B: Matt Carpenter
SS: Elvis Andrus
3B: Josh Donaldson
OF: Jose Bautista
OF: Carlos Beltran
OF: Lorenzo Cain
OF: Yoenis Cespedes
UT: Kris Bryant
P: Jake Arrieta
P: Wade Davis
P: Kenley Jansen
P: Zack Greinke
P: Clayton Kershaw
P: Dallas Keuchel

Here are the insights that animated, or, if you prefer, contaminated, our selections:

–Even though we like the Astros (who figure to jump all over Tanaka, whereas the Yankees should have trouble with Keuchel) and the Cubs (the Pirates have been helpless against Arrieta) a lot, we recognize that anything can happen in one game, so we don’t want to load up on Wild Card players.

–Nonetheless, it’s impossible not to take Arrieta, and we think that the Cubs will beat the Cardinals. For all their success, the Cards are pretty helpless against left-handed pitching, and they will face not only Arrieta but Lester, who’s had a couple of good outings (and, er, a couple of not so good ones) against them.

–The Astros won the season series against the Royals. But they match up very badly against Yordano Ventura, whom they may well see twice in the series; that’s up to Ned Yost. Also, these are two very carefully put-together teams that are designed to dominate in their own very different ballparks, and the Royals have the home-field advantage. If Yost instead wants to get two starts out of Cueto (whom we expect the Astros to tattoo) but only one from Ventura, all bets are off.

–Toronto dominates left-handed pitchers, whereas the Rangers rely on them.

–The Mets have done fine against the Dodgers this year. But the Mets, insofar as they win with hitting rather than pitching and defense, do so by dint of power, and the Dodgers’ Big Two are very stingy with home runs. Moreover, assuming that the Dodgers are willing to pitch Kershaw on short rest, which they’ve done successfully in the playoffs before, the Mets will face Kershaw or Greinke four times in five games. So we’re not eager to take Mets hitters.

–Thus, we’re envisioning Dodgers-Cubs and Blue Jays-Royals in the LCS. We like the Blue Jays and the Dodgers. But we can’t load up on Dodger hitters at this point because there’s a statistically significant possibility that the Mets will shut them down. We can’t use more Cubs hitters because of the wild card trap. We’re maxed out on Blue Jays. And we don’t have room for more than one of Cain, Hosmer, and Morales, all of whom we like, if we keep all the other guys where they are.

–If we’re right this far, we will be very happy. We invite your encouragement or persiflage, especially if you also tell us what lineup you’re using or would use. We have no idea who wins a Dodgers-Jays World Series or how many games it lasts. We’re pretty confident, though, that whoever wins will have figured out how to hit Bumgarner.

This will probably be the last you hear from us in this space until early 2016. In the interim, we’ll tweet (@Birchwoodbroth2) with our playoff lineup resets (assuming we still care after the first round), and also when the urge for self-expression gets the better of us. Otherwise, we’ll spend the winter in a web of thought, hoping to discover better ways to identify good starting pitchers. Indeed, we’re already back in the lab conducting carefully controlled experiments, and we wouldn’t be the Birchwood Brothers without mentioning, one more time before we wish you Happy Trails, a cheap player we like—Alex Colome.