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West Notes: Beane, Padres, Mattingly
Athletics GM Billy Beane is in favor of recognizing teams with the best regular-season records, NBC Sports' Joe Posnanski reports. Beane, who was quoted in Moneyball as saying his "s*** doesn't work in the playoffs," calls the postseason a "gauntlet of randomness."
"[W]e allow small sample sizes and random events to determine the champion. That’s how it is in baseball," says Beane. Each team plays 162 games in baseball, an enormous number, and both Beane and Posnanski feel that stellar performances in the regular season shouldn't be completely washed away by a bad performance in a short playoff series.
Posnanski suggests a system in which the playoffs and World Series still exist ("The playoffs are a great thing for our sport – I want to make that clear," Beane says), but Major League Baseball presents separate, and meaningful, awards for the teams with the best records in each league. It's an interesting idea, even if, as Alex Remington at FanGraphs points out, there's no chance it will happen. Here are more notes from the West Coast.
- New Padres owner Ron Fowler told the media that the team planned to offer Chase Headley a contract extension, but Fowler never mentioned that to Headley, Jon Heyman of CBS Sports writes. That led to a surprised reaction from Headley, who said, "To be honest, this is not something we've discussed."
- The Dodgers have not yet extended the contract of manager Don Mattingly, who has only a team option in place next season, and Mark Saxon of ESPN Los Angeles wonders why. But team president Stan Kasten says it's a non-issue. "The team has its option some time next fall. What’s wrong with just leaving it at that?" says Kasten. "The answer is nothing and it’s stupid to suggest otherwise. If he had a 10-year contract, but we weren’t happy with his performance, he wouldn’t be here next year, because they’re unrelated." The Dodgers are off to a 13-14 start this year.
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