Craig Calcaterra passes along a conspiracy theory from The Common Man:

To The Common Man, it suggests that perhaps TBS was asked not to make a big deal out of potentially missed calls. This would seem to jive with an earlier play in the San Francisco-Atlanta series, where Buster Posey was clearly out at 2B, but announcers refused to acknowledge it, in spite of the video evidence to the contrary (and Posey saying after the game “it’s a good thing we don’t have instant replay).

If this is the case, it seems likely that the commissioner’s office has made conscious decision not just to ignore the loud cries for expanded instant replay, but to tacitly suppress them by denying these voices additional evidence with which to make their case.

Calcaterra adds:

I thought the Posey thing was totally bizarre, and was made even more bizarre when Mat Winer, the studio host, said he thought Posey was safe and was basically laughed off the stage by David Wells, Cal Ripken and Dennis Eckersley.  Winer would be beholden to a TBS/MLB mandate in ways that Eck, Ripken and Boomer really wouldn’t be.

So is there a conspiracy at play here? Did Major League Baseball ask TBS announcers to downplay discussions of bad umpiring?

I’m going to go ahead and say no.

Now perhaps I’m biased, since I’m occasionally the subject of similar conspiracy theories myself. And you must allow the small possibility that, as a representative of a team-owned network, I am part of the machine and have been assigned by Bud Selig to quash these rumors before they gain too much steam.

But that’s not actually the case, and I’m guessing neither Selig nor anyone in his office told anyone at TBS anything about what to say in the broadcast. I’d go with Occam’s Razor, like Calcaterra suggests.

If anything, I’d guess their producer told them that harping too much on a few bad calls diminishes the drama inherent in the actual sport part of the sport, which the announcers have to play up — not so much to benefit the league office as to keep people watching the damn broadcast.

Plus, the game’s moving forward; TBS has to show the next pitch, the broadcasters have to focus on what’s happening in front of them and all the folks in the production truck have jobs to do that might preclude them from replaying the same bad call ad infinitum.

Also, really fleshing this conspiracy theory out, I’m not sure it even benefits Major League Baseball to protect its umpires this October. If there are really going to be discussions about how to better umpiring and incorporate instant replay this winter, why enact some nefarious scheme that only works to the advantage of the umpire’s union?

Certainly it protects the product on the field, but Major League Baseball must realize that it has a monopoly on professional baseball, and it’s going to take a hell of a lot of bad umpiring before people start tuning out.

So I’m sticking with no. But of course, they could be paying me to write that.

Or more to the point, the so-called home-field advantage in the postseason is just that — so-called. So far this postseason it’s been proven to be completely false. Three out of the four American League playoff teams, the Yankees, Rays and Rangers, are a combined 6-0 on the road while, in the National League, the Phillies clinched their series against the Reds with a sweep-completing victory in Cincinnati and the Giants closed out their series with the Braves by winning twice in Atlanta.

Which brings us back to that nagging question, which commissioner Bud Selig has been loathe to address until just recently: With home-field advantage clearly not that much of an advantage, doesn’t there need to be more of an incentive not to settle for the wild card? I’m not sure if Girardi and the Yankees’ seemingly cavalier attitude about trying to win the division — and then winning their two games in Minnesota — was what finally prompted the commissioner to admit he’s taking another look at the postseason format. I only know when Selig says he’s going to consider adding two more wild cards to the process, to create a playoff between them to advance in the postseason, you can pretty much go to the bank on it happening. Soon. As in next year.

– Bill Madden, NY Daily News.

Ugh. First off, it would take hundreds of games to prove that home-field advantage doesn’t exist in the playoffs and not, like, ten. Look at the league splits this year: Home teams boasted a .559 winning percentage. Last year? .549. 2008? .556. 2007? .542. And so on.

Second, while adding a second Wild Card team in each league would have made this year’s boring AL pennant stretch a bit more exciting — adding an all-Sox battle to the mix and providing the Yanks with incentive to take the division — it also would have severely cheapened the end-of-season drama on the other coast in the Senior Circuit, allowing the Giants, Braves and Padres into the postseason instead of forcing the three teams to compete for two open spots.

And creating a system wherein Wild Card teams had to square off in either sudden death or best-of-three series to advance to the division series would only make the entire process significantly less fair.

In the case of this season, it would mean the Yankees — who compiled the second-best record in the American League while playing an unbalanced schedule in the toughest division in baseball — might see their world-championship hopes vanquished at the hands of an inferior team because of the whims of a short series or, even more ridiculous, a single game.

And then, from that point, it really wouldn’t be any safe bet that said inferior team didn’t go on to itself win the World Series, as — like Madden mentions — Wild Card teams sometimes do.

That’s what Madden is missing here. A five- or seven-game series among two good baseball teams is not nearly long enough to distinguish the clearly better club, and so the playoffs often come down to the whims of randomness — which team gets hot, who gets a few good breaks, what week Jeff Weaver decides to pitch like Cy Young.

That’s fine. It’s exciting, and it’s part of why we watch October baseball. But the 162-game schedule is a huge part of what makes the Major Leagues so awesome — it’s almost always long enough to firmly establish which teams deserve to continue playing into the postseason. Extending the playoffs to more teams would cheapen the first six months of baseball and only increase the likelihood that a less-deserving champion emerges at season’s end.

Something about this post at The Book Blog didn’t sit right with me, but because I never studied economics and don’t know anything about game theory I figured I’d run it by TedQuarters resident maverick economist and former roommate extraordinaire Ted Burke.

He also struggled to grasp what MGL was trying to get at when he writes:

If batters and pitchers adjust their approaches according to what the other has done in the past during a game, then one or the other is NOT performing (in terms of their approach/strategy) optimally!  Game theory tells us that.

Baseball is a game of adjustments only in terms of learning – a player improving upon his skills and strategy and learning new things about his opponent.  It should NOT be about the kind of adjustments during a game that you hear from commentators all the time.

My gripe was that, though certainly it makes sense that a player should rely on the largest sample he has  to determine an opponent’s tendencies, there are myriad minor in-game factors that might impact those tendencies (most obviously the pitches a pitcher has the best feel for on any given day) and so it seems reasonable that an opponent should be adjusting to the in-game sample.

Ted Burke’s issues ran a bit deeper, and were perhaps more semantic. Our conversation went like this (apologies in advance for the cheapshot at Jersey drivers):

Burke: He’s assuming that a Nash Equilibrium exists for this situation, which pretty clearly isn’t the case.

Berg: You’re assuming that I have any idea what a Nash Equilibrium is.

Burke: It’s a nerd name for a concept you fully understand as a sports fan and human in society. In a situation where multiple parties each have to make a choice or series of choices, its Nash Equilibrium is the outcome where each party made the right choice for them given the choices of the other parties.

Say the two of us are driving on two different roads and we’re approaching the intersection of the two. Your road has the green light, and my road has a red light. We each have a choice to make: stop at the intersection or continue through it. We’re both licensed drivers, so we have certain expectations about how other licensed drivers will behave in this situation. You figure that if you keep going through that intersection, there’s a slim chance that I will plow into you, but there’s a much greater chance that you’ll pass through the intersection safely.

If you stop at the green light, you eliminate the chance of getting smashed by me, but you realize that doing so will almost certainly result in you being rear-ended by the truck behind you. So you choose the safer expected outcome and drive through the intersection. Similarly, I know that stopping at the red light carries a very small possibility that I will be rear-ended, but there’s a much greater chance that I’ll smash into another car if I attempt to drive through the intersection. So I choose to stop on red. Our paths cross safely, like two handsome ships passing in the night.

So every time we get in that situation, I stop and you keep driving. That’s the Nash Equilibrium.

Berg: And you’re saying that doesn’t exist in baseball (or in some parts of Jersey).

Burke: There are plenty of situations in baseball that have a Nash Equilibrium, but this isn’t one of them. Actually, if there were a Nash Equilibrium in this situation, the game of baseball wouldn’t be nearly as interesting as it is. One primary reason for throwing different pitches at different speeds in different locations is to prevent the batter from knowing if, when, and where to swing. In that sense, game theory would fit perfectly with the adjustment process the announcers described.

If the Yankees are swinging aggressively at first pitches, Pavano would want to start at-bats with a breaking ball or something out of the zone, which would in-turn lead to the Yankees choosing to be more patient, which leads to Pavano throwing fastballs over the plate on first pitches. And the cycle repeats itself.

Berg: It seems like his point is based on the fact that the Yankees should know going into the game that Pavano is going to throw fastballs over the plate and should base their expectations on those tendencies.

Burke: But if Pavano went through the whole game throwing first-pitch strikes and the Yankees spent the whole game swinging at them, the Twins would have to be idiots.

Game theory tracks the decisions people make over time to maximize their own utility. It would never suggest that the Twins continue making a decision that’s getting them pounded when a simple “adjustment” would at least give them a chance of not getting pounded.

Berg: Yeah, which is a big part of why it made no sense to me.

Burke: What the announcers were describing is basically the essence of game theory.