What wins in October? How is the answer to that question different from the answer to ‘What wins from April through September’? The conversation started with empty bromides. “Pitching wins championships,” they said. “Good pitching beats good hitting.” Until this site (and sites like it) came along, sports debates and discourse were dominated by such platitudes. If something held together logically and sounded good to people who flattered themselves as comprehending the game in its best form, it became conventional wisdom. It’s not hard to build a narrative around the notion that strong frontline starters or selfless small ball become disproportionately valuable in October. In fact, that’s both tempting and satisfying. For a long time, no one tried especially hard to resist that temptation.
Baseball Prospectus was part of the vanguard. We (and several predecessors and contemporaries) put our foot down, and demanded that such chatter be dismissed and derided, unless it could be shown to match the actual progress of the game. The pesky problem of reality not fitting the stories we tell ourselves should not be treated as a hurdle to be cleared, we said, but as a wall that forces a real change of direction. If you try to amass evidence for a claim and only find either inconclusive data or a rebuff of your theory, the theory needs to be rebuilt. For a while, there, we even applied that stringent standard to ourselves. Nate Silver and Dayn Perry tried to build a Secret Sauce for playoff success, but when it failed to actually predict playoff success, Nate, Dayn and the rest walked away from it.
After a few such failures throughout the sabermetric community, almost 20 years ago, a new consensus congealed: the playoffs are a crapshoot. Billy Beane scooped us, of course. “My shit doesn’t work in the playoffs,” he told Michael Lewis while Lewis was writing Moneyball. That quip became the news peg for the piece in which Silver and Perry first tried to find a secret playoff sauce. However, it also became the rallying cry of a generation of smart baseball people: Stop telling us what wins in October, you pundits on FOX Sports. Stop insisting on a particular style or roster-build, Tim McCarver. There’s no right answer. The postseason is pure chaos.
In my opinion, we haven’t actually gotten any closer to understanding the playoffs than that, even in late 2026. It’s clear that the playoffs aren’t a true crapshoot, but the things that differentiate one team from another countervail one another and run into the problem of a best-of-5 or best-of-7 series’ inherent variance. There’s no reliable way to build a team that wins World Series, other than to build 10 teams that all make the playoffs and keep things fresh along the way. Initially, saying that made one sound smart enough online to stand as the new sabermetric orthodoxy. You could score points just by decrying false certainty. You just had to slay the narrative dragons.
