When the Los Angeles Dodgers hired Andrew Friedman to run their baseball operations last fall, his grasp of analytics was part of the attraction. It was only logical, then, that Friedman would cite percentages in explaining whether a front office can actually engineer a roster for October success.
“It’s difficult,” Friedman said last month, before a game at Dodger Stadium. “In the regular season, the best team wins roughly 60 percent of the time and the worst team wins roughly 40 percent of the time. That’s only a 20 percent spread between the best and the worst.