Weird Postseason Accomplishments

Jayson Stark, the erstwhile Philadelphia Enquirer scribe, now writes a weekly column for ESPN about Useless Facts/Stats/Info which might better be titled "Accurate but Misleading Stats", for some fairly obvious reasons. This would be a great place to go into some of those, but...

A) It's a waste of my time, and
2) Stark's got the Elias Sports people to do it for him anyway.

But while I'm on the subject, in Stark's column about a week ago, he made the argument that the Twins had a good shot at the World Series championship, because they had home field advantage in both the ALCS and the WS, and because,

"So the Twins are now 12-2 all-time in postseason games in the Metrodome. They get to play four games there if this series goes seven. And remember, they've never lost a Game 7 in the Dome."

Gee, thanks, Jayson. Let's see what this really means:

Two different teams, who played eleven and fifteen years ago, respectively, none of whose players have any role on the current team, and most of whom aren't even in MLB anymore, went 11-1 at the Metrodome. This team went 1-1 in this postseason at the HHH Dome coming into this series. Whoopee. Sure, teams that played for the Twins franchise back in the Regan-Bush Era never lost a Game 7 at the Metrodome....but they only played two lousy freakin' games! Two. Nothing like making sure you've got a nice, representative sample from which to extract your data, eh Jayson?

Anyway, I did notice that Adam Kennedy was named the ALCS MVP, despite having gone 1-for-10 in the series before tonight's 3-homer, 5 RBI fluke performance that didn't even have much bearing on the 8-run victory. It seems to me that Francisco Rodriguez, with 2 holds, 2 wins (now 4-0 in the postseason), 4 baserunners and 7 K's in 4.2 IP, would have been a better choice. At least he contributed in every winning wame. Kennedy didn't do crap before tonight, and didn't even play in Game 3. For that matter, Kennedy had never had a 3-HR game before tonight. Heck, he'd only had three 3-HR months before tonight.

Looking at the NLCS, which is shaping up to be a much more interesting series, I notice some out-of -character performances there as well. JT Snow is hitting .314 currently, Benito Santiago has 11 RBI. Livan Hernandez has an ERA of 3.07, and hasn't lost yet. The Angels haven't choked (yet). Tino Martinez stole a base. Tim McCarver was quiet for like, a few seconds. Amazing stuff.