Performance Under Pressure – Why All the Quant Models Agree that AROD’s Playoff Metrics are Abysmal

For those of you who frequent the sports television radio stations in hopes of witnessing highlights relative to your teams-of-interest, there is no doubt you were exposed to all of the analysis and comments surrounding the most recent round of MLB playoffs – the ones where Alex Rodriguez (AROD) seemingly individually competed against some other team of no apparent significance.

Now, I am by no means a Yankees fan, however, I feel as though I have recently become the expert on AROD’s playoff capabilities as a result of the exhaustive commentary regarding how poorly he performed. Accordingly to literally all of the analysts – especially you, Stephen A. Smith - AROD is incapable of even crawling out of bed correctly when the playoffs roll around. Since I haven’t followed AROD with any legitimate consistency since his days of glory when he was paired with Griffey Jr., I can’t say whether or not I agree with all of the analysts who think his contract is sunk and he should be traded for any ol’ bench player off the street. As I know analysts have a tendency to sensationalize player performance on popular teams (see: 2010 when Michael Vick was touted as the best QB of all time), I’ve decided to put the quantitative gears to work to see if AROD really does suffer from “playoff collapse syndrome”.

In order to determine if AROD is simply unable to perform in the players, let’s first look at his nominal statistics – or “descriptive statistics” as titled to the left. These are some key batter metrics over his entire career (controlling for playoffs in his early career where he only batted once), and the difference in performance between the playoffs and regular season. After some cursory investigation, it is apparent AROD does, indeed, perform worse in the playoffs. In fact, he performs 20-30% worse in almost all significant batting categories. While this is certainly cause for some concern (and maybe even assertions that he performs poorly in the playoffs), looking at simple statistics like these can elicit false perceptions because of outliers and anomalous events.

In order to ensure statistical significance of AROD’s playoff performance, I performed a brief OLS regression, where the dependent variable is the batting category in question and the independent variable is a dummy to represent whether the statistic is assigned to the regular season or the playoffs. The results of these are reported to the right, but for the cliff notes version: effectively, AROD statistically significantly performs worse in all batting categories – with the exception of OBP.  In fact, all of these are significant at the 5% level, which is evidence that there is a nearly certain relationship between performance and the playoffs. Even more, you’ll notice the estimators are all negative, which means the inclusion of the playoff dummy variable resulted in negative performance.

“But, wait!”, you AROD fans say. “Just because he doesn’t perform well in the playoffs doesn’t mean he’s not valuable to the team.” This is correct, my friends. Although many of the analysts and commentators have asserted AROD’s salary is egregious given his inability to perform in the playoffs,  it is possible that his salary is actually justified by the fact that he continually contributes to his team’s regular season success and subsequent birth in the playoffs. After all, most teams make the playoffs very infrequently, and just making the playoffs is considered a success by most fans (believe me, I’m a White Sox fan just happy to get into October in any year).

In order for me to test if AROD contributes to his team’s success throughout the year such that they make the playoffs because of his existence, I ran another model – this time a logistic regression. The model measures a metric called “Wins Against Replacement” (WAR) against a playoff birth or not. This will determine if AROD’s contributions over a standard minor league replacement resulted in playoff births at a statistically significant level. Indeed, it did not. In fact, there is almost no relationship between ARODs WAR and his team making the playoffs in that year. Given that, one can conclude AROD hasn’t added value such that a minor league replacement (ostensibly making about $22million a year less than AROD) wouldn’t have lessened the chances of his team making the playoffs.

In total, here we’ve learned that AROD does, indeed, perform worse in the playoffs than he does during the regular season – which was proved statistically. We also learned that his contributions to the team above an average minor league replacement weren’t significant such that the team’s playoff contention would have been altered in his absence. But still, teams continue to pay the man obscene salaries for his presence in the line-up. Why is this? Most likely because he helps to fill the seats and couches of spectators, and ultimately, that’s what it’s all about.