When I started doing sabermetrics in the mid-1970s, it was an easy decision to essentially ignore post-season play. We ignored post-season play for two reasons:
1) It was very small. I think that all of post-season history, at that time, was about 500 games, and only a handful of players had played in as many as 25 of them. If you had five homers in post-season play, you were among the all-time leaders.
2) There was a lack of equal access. To the extent that sabermetrics is about comparing players one to another, it is problematic to base the evalution on areas of performance that are only available to some of the players.
This has become, I think, more or less the standard practice—to evaluate player careers as if the post-season didn’t exist.
The world has changed, and we need got to seriously review this policy. The number of post-season games has changed so dramatically that the role of post-season games in the making of a great career is just not the same as it was in 1975. John Smoltz is who he is in substantial part because of his post-season success. So is Derek Jeter, and Mariano Rivera, and Curt Schilling.
There are players now who have played 100+ post-season games. It is a matter of time until the post-season totals of some players start to pass the markers that identify outstanding seasons. . ..100 RBI, 200 hits, 100 runs scored, 20 wins. In a few years, people are going to start hitting those numbers for post-season play. We’re now ignoring an entire season of a player’s career—and not just any season, but the most important games of his career.
I know that the equal-access problem is still with us, and I don’t really have a solution for that. But I don’t think we can go on discussing who should be in the Hall of Fame, or how the top 100 shortstops of all time rate, without reference or with minimal reference to post-season play.
While we’re sort-of on the subject. .why do the leagues exclude the division series and the league championship series from Cy Young and MVP voting? Does that really make sense?
I understand why the World Series is excluded, and I agree that it should be. But it seems to me that the logic of the honoring groups, in 1969, was simply “If the World Series doesn’t count, these games shouldn’t count, either.” Should that really be the controlling logic?
The League Championship Series is a part of the league. I agree that there might be a problem with some people over-valuing or over-weighting the post-season games, but I still don’t really get the logic of excluding the league’s most critical games from the consideration of who is the league’s Most Valuable Player or the league’s Best Pitcher.