It's been a week or so since the Phillies clinched their fifth straight NL East championship. Expectations for this team—both among fans and within the team itself—are almost impossibly high: anything short of a World Series victory will be counted as a disappointment. I'm as excited as anyone, but I'm keenly aware that there is a fair chance that the Phils will not win it all. Not because they aren't capable (carrying baseball's best record for most of the season despite a number of injuries to key starters shows that they are more than capable); not because they have a major weakness for opponents to exploit (the Hunter Pence acquisition seems to have plugged their only offensive hole, and despite some recent hiccups, I feel safer handing the ball over to this bullpen than I have in a long time); not because they've celebrated their title with a six-game losing streak. It simply comes down to this: playoffs, especially in baseball, are a crapshoot.

There are a lot of clichés in baseball (the one that got me thinking about this was yet another invocation of the adage ‘pitching wins championships’), but perhaps the truest is that it is a game of inches. An inch—or less—can be the difference between a routine fly-out and a game-winning homer, an RBI single and an inning-ending double play, a critical strikeout or the walk that paves the way for a big inning. These minute differences aren't exactly random—great players are the ones who (thanks to some combination of superior mechanics, decision-making, and sheer physical prowess) are able to consistently be on the favorable side of that inch—but games often seem to turn on a handful of plays that could literally have gone either way. Over the long haul of a major league baseball season, the impact of these ‘lucky’ breaks is minimized, or evens out. In any case, by the end of a 162-game season, it seems reasonable to see teams' records as expressions of their respective talent, rather than the vagaries of chance.

Playoffs in any sport present the classic ‘small sample size’ problem: the more we restrict our focus—to a single series, or game, or period—the more a single anomalous event skews the overall result. And baseball offers arguably the smallest ‘sample’ of opportunities for its contenders to compete in of all the major American sports. To win the World Series, a baseball team must win 11 out of a potential 19 games (best-of-five Divisional Series and best-of-seven League Championship and World Series). That is, the baseball postseason is, at most, a bit under one eighth the length of its regular season (between 6.8% to 11.7% to be exact). By contrast, the NBA and NHL both play a season that is roughly half as many games (82) followed by four best-of-seven playoff rounds, for a postseason that can run up to a third as long as the whole regular season (no wonder these sports' playoffs seem to last forever). In the NFL, the champion must win four direct-elimination games (three if they get a first-round bye), which is a quarter (18% for the bye teams) of their 16-game regular season.

To put it another way, you could say that each regular-season football game is "worth" as much as 10 baseball games. If that's the case, a best-of-seven series could be likened to to playing a 40-minute football game, with the option of ending it at various points past half-time if one team gets sufficiently ahead. (The divisional series are, by that logic, like playing only half a football game that could end any time after the first quarter.) How much different would football history look if you simply dropped the fourth quarter from every Superbowl?

Obviously, given the differences in game mechanics among the sports, none of the above is an apples-to-apples comparison, and I am by no means saying that any of these systems are better or worse than the others (well, hockey playoffs are too damn long, but that's an issue for another time). But I do think it highlights the fact that baseball's regular season is very much a marathon and its playoffs are, if not exactly a sprint, certainly a different kind of race. The things that make a team good over the regular season (scoring runs and preventing runs) should still give that team an edge in the playoffs, but the impact of each individual play is magnified, and there is much less time for aberrations to be averaged out. Other sports have their share of upsets and Cinderella champions, I guess, but baseball has produced some truly memorable ones (the barely-.500 '87 Twins beating the Cardinals in the prime of their ‘Whiteyball’ days; the Dodgers knocking off the seemingly unbeatable Bash Brothers A's the following year; my own beloved Phillies ousting the Maddux-Glavine-Smoltz Braves in the '93 NLCS).

The unexpected and the improbable make for great drama, and I wouldn't necessarily have it any other way. But there is a danger in assigning too much importance to these critical moments. It's literally impossible for for one play out of hundreds to decide the outcome of a multi-game playoff series, and yet we frequently use these moments to measure not just the skill or talent of a player, but even his moral fiber. Be on the right side of the one of those inches and you're an instant hero; be on the wrong side and you're a bum (a phenomenon that is at least as old as the New York Giants' Heinie Zimmerman being declared the newly-crowned Monarch of all the Goats that are for his role in a botched rundown play in the 1917 World Series). That has never seemed fair to me. As crushing as Joe Carter's home run off Mitch Williams in the '93 Series was, and as glorious as Brad Lidge's final strikeout in 2008 was, those are just two pitches among hundreds of thousands that were thrown in major league baseball those seasons, each of which contributed its own small piece to the the whole.

In any case, come playoff time, I will root for my Phillies, and yes, I'll be disappointed if they don't go all the way. But win or lose, I'll know that a myriad of other outcomes were only a few inches away.

Addendum: A day after I started writing this, Jason Snell mused about much the same issue on American McCarver.