In the “Moneyball” heyday of his A’s teams, then-Oakland GM Billy Beane entered the sports-adage column by suggesting you spend the first two months of the baseball season evaluating what you have, the next two making changes as circumstances dictate, and the final two letting it all play out, in preparation either for October or for the next year or two.
The Rangers and Mavericks are both in Minnesota tonight. The Mavs will look to extend a 1-0 series lead over the Timberwolves in the Conference Finals, on a quest to land their first championship since 2011 and the first locally since the Rangers won theirs seven months ago. Meanwhile, in defense of that title, the Rangers will wrap up the first third of their schedule with three against the Twins, two blocks away.
We don’t know for sure how Chris Young and his group, or Bruce Bochy and his staff, are evaluating what they have, but with the standard caveats, we can at least try reading into Bochy’s comments after Wednesday night’s particularly messy loss in Philadelphia, the club’s ninth loss in 11 games and one that was marred by unopportunistic offense, error-filled defense, and a bullpen that let the game get out of hand.
“When you have a game like this, man, you really gotta flush it because it was ugly,” Bochy said. “There's no getting around it. We didn't handle the ball well and it came back to hurt us. . . . We’re better than this.”
“We don’t want this to define us,” the manager added. “This isn’t who we are. This kind of stretch is going to happen. What’s important is how you handle it, how you bounce back.”
And on his pregame radio segment on Thursday: “We’ve just gotta power through this stuff.”
The game that followed didn’t go much better. An 10th loss in 12 games, and a fourth straight series loss, this one ending in a sweep.
It’s easy to run half-baked theories out there, and you are forewarned that that’s what’s about to follow.
Do we just point to league parity to explain why no team has won consecutive World Series since Roger Clemens, David Cone, and Paul O’Neill were still playing and their 87-win Yankees took care of Bobby Valentine’s Mets in 2000? It’s certainly an available argument.
But in the case of a relatively playoff-inexperienced team like Texas, maybe there are some other things going on.