Why the 2010 Giants' World Series was no fluke

I don’t have anything new up today, but I thought you might want to head over to the Hardball Times for my recent article: Pitching (almost) always wins championships.
 
Here’s a portion that would be of interest to Giants fans:
 

I think this really hammers home the point that pitching really does win championships; that you need at least an adequate stable of arms to have a prayer. Trying to win the Fall Classic without league-average pitching has proven to be about as fruitful as attempting to drive a car without gas. You’re not going to get very far. So, if you had to choose which is more important between offense and pitching, the answer is obvious: run prevention…
 
I also took the liberty of averaging each teams OPS+ and ERA+ to determine how much better than average they were overall. I then averaged all of those numbers, whereby I discovered the average World Series champion has graded out at 108.7, or about eight percent better than league average.
 
If you take the most recent champion, the San Francisco Giants, and add their OPS+ (95) and ERA+ (121) from 2010 together, you get a grade of 108. This goes to show their World Series title in 2010 shouldn’t be considered lucky or a fluke, rather, they were a perfectly average champion. What’s more, their excellent ERA+ fulfilled the pertinent requirement of at least adequate pitching. Looking at the data this way would make a lot of pundits feel silly on their pre-postseason picks, routinely expecting them to lose.

 
Please head over to the Hardball Times for the rest.

Best. Link. Ever.

Giants fans, you're going to want to see this.

Hint: it has to do with November 1, 2010.

The Giants will be challenged to repeat in 2011

Dan Szymborski has an article -- San Francisco Giants' repeat problems -- for Insider’s on ESPN.com. Within it, he explains the difficulty the Giants now stand to face in their pursuit to repeat as World Champions. And he’s absolutely right. Let me explain.

Nowhere in his article does he say they won’t be good, quite the contrary.  Especially not when he says “[the] rotation is elite…” Or when he explains the Giants’ Brandon Belt is “… almost certainly one of the two best 1B prospects in baseball…” Nonetheless, it will be an uphill battle – and here’s why, using his four main reasons to prompt my thoughts.

The 11th Reason...

There were a number of baseball fans across the country whose passion for baseball was ratcheted up a notch thanks to the 2010 Giants. Their interest had dwindled over the years for various reasons: bad trades, enormous contracts and overpaid, spoiled, steroid using players. While the 1998 home run chase reinvigorated the sport and drove revenues to new heights, the BALCO investigation and Mitchell Report were the hangover after the party. For a lot of people, the 2010 Giants brought the word team back into sports and was refreshing to many*, even to hardened fans of struggling franchises, like the Mariners. My fiancés father, Gregg, a self-proclaimed “hardened Mariners fan,” pointed this 11th reason out to me.  
 
*I say “to many,” though not to as many as should have been possible. Jeff Passan at Yahoo! Sports just wrote an article laying out his reasons for being adamantly against an expanded playoff. I’m right there with him. It’s sad and extremely transparent, that Selig’s and Baseball’s primary motivation for expanding the playoffs is not to improve the game, but instead it’s for greed. As Jeff points out, expanded instant replay, which would provide an instantaneous improvement, is coming along as slow as a banana slug and is a perfect example of what’s overlooked when there are dollar signs in the eyes. He also suggests Selig could simply speak to ESPN and FOX and simply say, for the “long-term health [of the game], the networks need to focus less on the Yankees and Red Sox and more on growing the fan base among small and medium markets so a World Series like this year’s doesn’t find itself eminently skippable.”  But the money is in the Yankees and Sox rivalry, as tired and watered down as that storyline has become in the past 8 years, and not in the rest of baseball.  Until baseball becomes more interested in the sanctity and health of the game, and not just the loot that comes with it, fans will be missing out across the country, especially when a fun-to-watch team like the 2010 Giants comes along, and they simply haven’t heard much more than a peep about them for six solid months leading up to the Fall Classic.