For all of those lamenting how poor the Brewers offense is,...I remember the mantra of "pitching wins in the playoffs" for like 25 years... and it's probably more like a 45 yr old mantra, but I'm only 41 years old...
Since you asked me not to, I won't name any more. But there are more than a "few exceptions," to the point where it isn't exceptional at all.
Get in and get hot.
I like Rock, but have never found him that funny...but his "you can't teach people to care, Jeff...he cares" line after the diving not-quite-a-stop effort by the ball boy made me laugh.
Your second point is extremely important...Regression to the mean always happens with enough trials when the true value is known...i.e. rolling a fair dice or flipping a fair coin.
In most real world applications (including baseball), the true value is not known...and variables are constantly changing that affect that true value.
mmmm....I'm not sure about that. Hader blew MULTIPLE games/saves for the Padres in the first few weeks after we traded him. Had he done that with the Brewers our season would have been sunk even earlier than it was.
The guy was nails in the playoffs though. And this year, of course. It would be fun to still have the 2 best relievers in baseball...
Freitag's recruitment sure seemed kinda strange in that nobody else really stepped up to aggressively pursue him (MSU/ILL/Kansas/Gonzaga/etc.). I guess he made comments about how UW was the first to offer and have offered nobody else at his position. Perhaps his first question to schools who contact him is something like "who else are you looking at signing? Am I your top priority?" And got a lot of hemming and hawing in response while UW was all-in.
Also, for some reason his ranking seems to have slipped a bit in in the last year. All of that is fine with me. From what I've seen of him he is a gem.
I do not disagree. Just because it's fun to make lists though I'll put out the Flyin' Illini teams in the late eighties and the '05 Illini.
The 38-and-done '15 UK team had the highest efficiency margin in the KenPom era (since 2002 I think). And of course they lost to a UW team that had the highest offensive efficiency in the KenPom era (by a significant margin).