It is the sovereign right of every sports fan to question--loudly, if need be--the decisions of those who are lucky enough to coach professional teams. For the same reason I have little sympathy for celebrities who complain about the paparazzi even as they build their brands, I have little sympathy for managers whose bad decisions are second-guessed.

Without a doubt, the peak sofa-managing month is October. With seasons hanging in the balance, every pinch runner, relief pitcher, and bunt call is intensely scrutinized. With quantitative methods sufficiently developed, you'd think the answers would be as obvious to managers as they are to you and me.

And yet, the second-guessing continues.

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Playoff baseball is excellent. Does anyone deny that? Even casual fans become glued to the TV come October. For sheer excitement value, you really can't beat the playoffs.

But a question lurks behind the playoffs. The answer to the question seems so obvious that it almost always goes unasked. Because I'm the sort of person who cares about questions no one has bothered to ask, this question has been bothering me.

The question is, what do we learn from the playoffs about the quality of the participating teams?

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The playoffs are underway, and there have already been some exciting moments. The old refrain that the playoffs are a crapshoot is as tired as it is common (even in its more expletive-peppered variety). 

Forgive me for stating the obvious, but in a straight casino, a crapshoot really is random. The odds may have been jiggered so that a savvy craps player has a 1-2% disadvantage against the house, but the dice are not weighted. The outcomes truly are random.

In the playoffs, we all know that isn't true. But we also realize that the best team does not win 100% of the time. So how can we fix a point somewhere in the middle?

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One of my biggest pet peeves in professional sports announcing is when, at the end of a very close game, the announcers ascribe the victor's outcome to the fact that they "wanted it more." Or that they "played harder."

At the end of a game, if the center fielder misses the catch, then guess what? That was the proximate cause of the loss. Were there other things that could have contributed? Sure. But we can't forget that certain situations just matter more, and how teams perform in those situations is determinative of the outcome.

In all the hoopla about whether or not the Wild Card is a good thing, or whether or not baseball has parity, we can forget this sometimes. But tomorrow, it will be unmistakeable that some games matter more than others.

That's right, we've got a one-game playoff, which means free baseball!

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Once upon a time in the west on the internet, there was trio of sheriffs whose only job was to law up the ravine, and afterward to stand valiantly for low-angle shots while tumbleweeds rolled past. Sure, they still live down by the old church, and occasionally they stop by the burlesque house.

But today, the world of baseball commentary on the internet is a wild and untamed frontier. The only remedy in a lawless world is self-help, but even self-help has its limitations.

Listen up, cowpokes, I need a posse.

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The last time I wrote about game theory, I discussed the strategy involved in bunting for a hit. One surprising observation was that the payoffs for bunting for a hit and swinging away appear not to be equalized. The reason this was surprising was because if the payoffs were not equal, we expect a rational decision maker always to choose the one with the higher payoff unless and until the payoffs equalize.

Surely this surprising bit of non-rationality in baseball is limited to the rare case of bunting for a hit? No, and don't call me Shirley.

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We don't talk much about traditional sportswriters here on Beyond the Box Score. Part of that, I think, is appropriate. Our approach is so wildly different from those of beat writers that anything we say about them would either be negative or unrelated.

But beat writers have been with us since baseball became a popular sport. Now, many of them are faced with buy-outs and layoffs. The result is fewer local daily newspapers and greater reliance on national media. What will come of this?

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The notion of consistency, that bugaboo of thinking baseball fans everywhere, has eluded our frontal attacks for decades. 

What conclusions can we draw from the fact that player's performance has been stable from year to year? Is it a mere trivial fluke or parlor trick? Or does it betray some deeper ability? Is it possible consistency bodes poorly for a player's projection?

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