from Amazon
Wednesday, July 07, 2010
A perfect use of WPA
From Jack Moore, in looking for relievers with a worse than -1.00 WPA in a single-game. That was since 2002.
Sean Forman will give it to us for the Retrosheet era. There were 26 of them… TWICE by Rollie Fingers.... in the same year.
http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/OAK/OAK197409060.shtml
http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/CLE/CLE197407200.shtml
That’s what happens when you give up the go-ahead run in one inning, the tie-ing run in the 9th inning, and the eventual winning run in extra innings. He didn’t necessarily pitch terribly. It simply tells the story of a pitcher who ended up giving up a run at the wrong time, every time, late in the game.
It’s a story stat. And WPA makes it very easy, by quantifying the story, to find these games.
To those who think WPA is useless: just because you haven’t found a use for it, doesn’t mean that it has no use.
