I was reading the following article in the Washington Post today: 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/nationals/mlb-instant-replay-improves-accuracy-adds-strategy/2014/03/07/bbdbec20-a625-11e3-8466-d34c451760b9_story.html

In it, the columnist is talking about the advanced stats in baseball, and how they can tell us that a teams chances of winning a game can change drastically on certain plays, while other plays affect those chances hardly at all. The paragraph in question: 

"But other plays are cataclysmic by comparison. Daniel Descalso’s single off the Washington Nationals’ Drew Storen in Game 5 of the 2012 National League Division Series increased the St. Louis Cardinals’ chances of winning from 13 percent to 50 percent.

In the legendary Game 6 of the 2011 World Series, four key plays from the ninth through the 11th innings changed the probability of a victory by 54, 47, 43 and 37 percent. “Winning” one such play matters enormously while the outcome of a dozen other plays combined may hardly matter at all."

But this doesn't seem right to me. This seems like someone complaining about losing on the river in a pot that was all-in pre flop. Sure, you were 95% on the river the way the first four cards were dealt, but if the money went in pre, it never matters what order the cards come in, you were always flipping to begin with. You can never really say you were a 95% favorite. To me, in a baseball game, the money goes in on the first pitch. The resulting sequence doesn't really 'change the odds' of your winning - your odds stay the same as they were when you started playing. Obviously it's not as purely mathematical as that given that human beings are involved, but isn't the concept of the odds of winning 'changing' like that pretty much game theory nonsense?