Think the Red Sox came back because of the utter humiliation of being beaten 19-8 in third game. If they had lost 3-2 or 2-1 they may not have been jolted enough to come back. Yankees may have even did them a favor of giving Red Sox a wakeup call. Also, the Yankee bats quieted down the rest of the way as they may have been overconfident after the easy third game win. Terry Francona should get a lot of the credit for keeping his composure after being three games behind. David Ortiz, Curt Schilling, Derek Lowe and Johnny Damon and others were the key to them beating the Yankees. Seeing blood in Curt Schilling's sock had to inspire the team figuring if he can go to the mound with such a bad injury they were not going to lose the league championship to the Yankees.

Coming right after James's comments on the fog of clutch hitting, I think this is great. There have been a lot of self-congratulatory sabermetric manifestos claiming baseball has been figured out; and probably it hasn't. I think these kind of statements, regarding complexity are important. It leaves space for the "magic" of baseball to still exist for those fans that appreciate the gains of sabermetrics in understanding the game, but reminding us we'll never totally know baseball.

The odds of winning four in a row might be 1 in 16, but don't you have to calculate the odds of winning four in a row after losing three in a row?

We statheads are far better off arguing that things like clutch hitting and veteran leadership are vastly overrated than that they don't exist.

why should this shock anybody? history provides us with several occasions where a team lost the first two, won the third, lost the fourth, and then won the last three to take the series. (two examples off top of head: kc royals 1985, yankees 1958).

boston's comeback followed this exact sequence, except the order of games three and four was reversed. big f'ing deal, right?

not to diminish the accomplishment --- phenomenal comeback. but 0-3 was/is never as hopeless as we all make it out. this will happen again.

bound to happen sooner or later.

Rob...
That depends on whether you are asking the hard question or the easy one.

If you assume that the teams are evenly matched, and treat each game as an independent event, you can write that the odds of a comeback from down three games are 1 in 64, or you can write that the odds of a comeback, given being in the whole by three games, are 1 in 16. That's the answer if you are asking the easy question.

The harder question is essentially "does it make sense to model the teams as being equally matched, when one has already won three straight?" This is a Bayes Theorem problem, and the answer is going to depend on what assumptions you make about the pool of playoff teams.

But it's going to give the answer that you anticipate - assuming playoff teams are pulled from a range of talent centered around the mean, a team that has lost 3 in a row is less than 50% to win game 4.

It's interesting seeing Bill James defend the concept of intangibles being a major value in baseball, considering how some of his earlier contentious public comments were about how players like Enos Cabell, Doug Flynn, and Rodney Scott--who all tended to be lauded as great on "intangibles"--were useless wastes of valuable roster space. In fairness, those players *were* genuinely awful, and it may have just been a case of even a valuable trait not being useful enough to justify taking up a roster space. Nonetheless, it's an interesting change from what he was saying twenty years ago.

Perhaps what's happening is that James is rebelling against the people he sees as his "enemies." 20 years ago, it was those claiming that "intangibles" won games and that a good pitcher was the one with the most wins. But after Win Shares, most of the ridicule directed at James has come from the sabermetric community. James made a buffoon out of himself with a poor system that really made no sense and was completely contrived. James has responded adversely and my best guess is that he is trying to discredit the current sabermetric community by spouting off a bunch off giberish that he knows many will take as gospel. That's at least a possibility.

Bill James is a blowhard. He probably never got a single hit in Little League, and he knows nothing of baseball outside of math. He was probably a great mathlete in his high school, at home playing with a slide rule and some lube while the other kids did "intangeable" things like actually stepping onto grass, joining a team, dating girls, sex, and fun. I don't have a statistic for this, but I would say that if you spend all your teenage years playing with a calculator, and there is no proper algebraic equation for sex, you never got any. As far as baseball being played, Bill James would never understand the idea that fielding, defense, and even things like attitude, concentration, runners annoying pitchers, moving runners, bunts, and running up pitch counts is how baseball games are won. When a player goes 5-for5, and hits two homeruns and his team wins 25-3, Bill F'n James would tell you that his contribution is superior to a player who had an 1-for-5 day, but whose clutch homer in the bottom of the ninth inning won the game, 4-3. Bill James and A-Rod should sleep together. A-Rod is a great example of a guy who will get into the Hall of Fame because of all the "tangeables." Meanwhile, he plays like a girl and strikes out far too often when the team needs him most. Give a team of nine guys who know how to win, and I don't care what their "total average" is, they are going to beat the A-Rod teams. Sports are not about numbers, you nerds, except for wins.

Bill James is a blowhard. He probably never got a single hit in Little League, and he knows nothing of baseball outside of math. He was probably a great mathlete in his high school, at home playing with a slide rule and some lube while the other kids did "intangeable" things like actually stepping onto grass, joining a team, dating girls, sex, and fun. I don't have a statistic for this, but I would say that if you spend all your teenage years playing with a calculator, and there is no proper algebraic equation for sex, you never got any. As far as baseball being played, Bill James would never understand the idea that fielding, defense, and even things like attitude, concentration, runners annoying pitchers, moving runners, bunts, and running up pitch counts is how baseball games are won. When a player goes 5-for5, and hits two homeruns and his team wins 25-3, Bill F'n James would tell you that his contribution is superior to a player who had an 1-for-5 day, but whose clutch homer in the bottom of the ninth inning won the game, 4-3. Bill James and A-Rod should sleep together. A-Rod is a great example of a guy who will get into the Hall of Fame because of all the "tangeables." Meanwhile, he plays like a girl and strikes out far too often when the team needs him most. Give a team of nine guys who know how to win, and I don't care what their "total average" is, they are going to beat the A-Rod teams. Sports are not about numbers, you nerds, except for wins. P.S. Doug Flynn was an excellent fielder and bunter and ballplayer, although he was not a power hitter. He probably won a lot of games with his glove. He did recieve a Gold Glove award and he backed up Joe Morgan on the Big Red Machine. He was, at worst, a good backup player. He was also traded, in part, for Tom Seaver--who I think is considered to have been a pretty good pitcher...I guess we'd have to check with Bill James on Seaver's total-super-tangeable-average-mean percentage or "TSTAMP" Meanwhile, Bill James has probably never even kissed a girl.

Yeah, the A Rod comments are right. Just look at what he's done in his career.

http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/players/5275/career;_ylt=Aropd5wOWDnevqdf7kzPTuqFCLcF

Look at the runs scored and RBI's. How could he have been helping his team with those numbers?

Give me doug Flynn any day. Because, Bill James couldn't get a date in high school and no team wants a guy who scores a bunch of runs and knocks in a bunch of runs because only guys who played ball in high school know anything.

Willie Mays wasn't really any good either.