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Nah, that's a famous quote "the playoffs being a crapshoot", which makes the point you attribute (ie, you may well lose 3 games if you have a 55% chance of winning each, despite the probabilities suggesting you wouldn't if you played the same team say, 300 times). Playoff baseball has some changes (for example, the value of a #5 starter is much higher in the regular season than the post-season, because he will never start in the latter; same with a deep bullpen), but that's common in playoffs of all sports - you're less likely to use your depth, and more likely to increase the playing time of core talent. Luhnow is good, and he did basically play a big role in the Cardinals rebuilding, but Green simplifies this a bit - the Cardinals also happened to have the one of the 3 best players in baseball at that time at well below market value, and the previous GM (Jocketty, who is now in Cincinnati), made some astute trades (Adam Wainright, the pick of Chris Carpenter). Baseball, for all that I love it, is fundementally a reactionary, conservative sport - unlike the NFL, which changes rules every week (or so it seems), and doesn't seem to bear any burden from the media to provide the "national pasttime", baseball is relatively slow moving and cautious, and seems to carry a higher intrinsic burden from the media and itself. Radical change is thus much harder to pull off in this sport, which is both a good and bad thing. |