What is this supposed to mean? The season gives you a 162-game sample. The playoffs are a coin-flip, by comparison. It's just too small of a sample to draw any conclusions, which is why both old- and new-school baseball guys have an endless array of cliches about how anybody who makes it in to the playoffs has a chance to win.
In short, the A's roster was actually constructed to succeed over 162 games but the compromises he had to make on defense and power pitching to get extra value are particularly fraught in the playoffs, where you're battling the better offensive teams in the league. Of course, the playoffs are a crapshoot (the Cardinals had no business being in, let alone winning in 2011), but the compromises Beane had a direct effect on their heartbreaking playoff losses in the early 2000s.
These are not inherently better offensive teams. That's the whole point. The 2002 A's were a good offensive team because they were better at evaluating offense than the rest of the league.
The reason the A's didn't win the World Series is the same reason the Cardinals won the World Series in 2011 and 2006, but not 2004. It's the reason the Giants won it in 2010. The playoffs are a crapshoot. It has nothing to do with whether or not sabermetric analysis is valid for regular season games, but not for playoff games.
This is not true at all, though - what compromises exactly did they make in power pitching? At most, the team structure would decrease their chances in the playoffs by a few percent. Any analysis based on strictly playoff results is going to be rife with small sample size problems...you can come up with pretty much any conclusion you want based on a sample of a few series.
I don't know if you read the book (Moneyball) but the main point that I took away from it was that the Oakland A's roster was made to win games.
The whole point of the book was that winning games was done by getting on base and the people who get on base more were better to have on a team than someone who was good at fielding (which the book said didn't matter).
The reason the playoffs were such a crapshoot wasn't because Oakland had a worse defense or pitchers but because the amount of games being played was so small that the results could go either way. as the teams in the playoffs were generally of similar quality.
I agree. Even a 162-game sample isn't enough to get any great level of confidence, but it is certainly better than a 3-5 game sample of the first round or 4-7 of subsequent rounds.
Beane and the A's were mostly focusing on offense, because that's were they could find value. It's significantly harder to find value in pitchers, and pitchers can help damper some of the "luck" factors in the postseason, though it's very much open to randomness.
Modern baseball management is focused on building your team to win enough regular seasons to make the postseason, and then hope luck falls in your direction. If you can couple that with great starting pitching, you can reduce the amount of luck you need.
I'm not sure how relevant the techniques in Moneyball still are. At this point, every team is looking at Sabermetrics, and some of the high-value stuff isn't there any more. For example, getting on base isn't worth as many runs in 2011 as it was in 2002 because there are less home runs hit.
"Beane and the A's were mostly focusing on offense, because that's were they could find value."
This is not true. One, the big three of Zito, Hudson, and Mulder is one of the best front ends to a pitching staff in baseball history. Moreover, Isringhausen, Bradford, Mecir, and others on that staff were all players undervalued by the traditional ways of evaluating players. They had a team ERA+ 122. That is not a team which is "mostly focussing on offense."
I worded my post poorly. I meant to imply that their big value finds in free agency came through offense. They were able to adequately replace Damon and Giambi (Jason) with much cheaper counterparts. It would have been much more difficult to find cheap replacements for the big three.
Zito, Hudson, and Mulder were all draft picks. I think Moneyball did discuss the A's strategy to draft college pitchers instead of high school, as Beane found high school pitchers to be over-valued.
What is this supposed to mean? The season gives you a 162-game sample. The playoffs are a coin-flip, by comparison. It's just too small of a sample to draw any conclusions, which is why both old- and new-school baseball guys have an endless array of cliches about how anybody who makes it in to the playoffs has a chance to win.