Kepner (NY Times): Ryan Looks to recapture past success

When you look at the World Series, or any baseball playoff, MVP you see a lot of players who have elevated their games beyond what they have ever done before, and sometimes ever again. It is neither a crapshoot, or a crabshoot. It is a bout a half dozen players playing very well for a strech when it counts. Some good players can't do it, others can.

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Originally Posted by The Wise One

When you look at the World Series, or any baseball playoff, MVP you see a lot of players who have elevated their games beyond what they have ever done before, and sometimes ever again. It is neither a crapshoot, or a crabshoot. It is a bout a half dozen players playing very well for a strech when it counts. Some good players can't do it, others can.

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A-Rod is prime example (apparantly he forgot to bring the juice to the playoffs) of a player who is great/MVP caliber player and can't do it in the playoffs. Delmon Young on the otherhand, played great two straight playoffs, while Miguel Cabrera played very average in playoffs.

Does anyone want to argue that Delmonte is a better player than two sure fire hall of famers...no. You win in the playoffs by being hot and yes (when Delmon fricken' Young gets you into the world series) a lot of luck.

According to my sources, Thyroidlos98 thinks TR and Gardy should have sold their souls to Satan so that they could have made a world series during the 00's, my brother.

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Originally Posted by TheLeviathan

Sure, that's one definition. I think "random" is being used here in terms of there not being one set method/formula/recipe etc for winning. So the idea that you can sit, pre-playoffs - and call the winner is not easy to do. The other factors in baseball come into play on a game-by-game basis, but the idea that you can solve the World Series by having a particular roster construction is WAY overplayed.

There have been plenty of WS winners in the last ten years that were FAR from ideal on paper and still found a way to win.

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One of my favorites in that category was Arizona. Two star-quality starting pitchers and a cast of decent but unspectactular ML-quality players as a supporting cast. True, Schilling and Johnson were "overpaid" by TD posters standards (not by mine!), but the rest of the cast was quite affordable such that AZ was a "popularly-priced" team. Two star SPs can effect a huge influence in a 7 game series--when their manager relaxes the "pitch-count" rules!