THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

I posted the following in the FAngraphs blog:

REW: note that this does include “clutch” with respect to men on base. To exagerrate for illustration, say you have someone who hits .000 with bases empty and .500 with men on base.  His REW will be much higher than someone who hit .500 with bases empty and .000 with men on base.

Therefore, the “clutch” portion only distinguishes between the timing in terms of inning and score, and does not also include the men on base clutch portion. 

You could start with Linear Weights Wins (LWW I guess), and then have REW, and the difference would be his clutchiness based only on the base/out.  Then the gap between REW and WPA is his clutchness base on the inning/score.  WPA minus LWW is his overall clutch.

Jeter’s Clutch score dropped alot (used to be +2.5 wins and now he’s below 1.0 wins).  My guess is that he performed great with men on base, and performed a bit better with the game on the line.

If you look at his performance with men on base and bases empty:
http://www.baseball-reference.com/pi/bsplit.cgi?n1=jeterde01&year=2006

You will see it bears that out.

(There is an extra technicality with using the LI as well, but not important right now.)

Tom - When you click into game logs, and click into one game, does it show each and every LI and WPA for a batter and pitcher in that particular game?

It’s compiled at the game level, not the PA level.

Unless David changes his layout, your only hope would be for b-r.com or mlb.com to eventually use my files.  Retrosheet will not.

Is it really necessary to propagate lame nicknames for Alex Rodriguez? Really, it just comes across as petty.

It comes across as petty, or however other negative word, to you and others.  Not to me.  He’s as insincere, polished, and phony as they come.  To me, anyway.  Gretzky, Orr, and Howe he’s not.

Further to post#3: in a recent blog entry, Fangraphs will carry play-by-play data, seemingly with WPA and LI!

I’ve made several comments in the Fangraphs blog itself:

http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/index.php/win-probability-changes/

Feel free to discuss in either blog, as I’m monitoring both.

David generated LWTS values for 2006 for an extremely long list of events:
http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/index.php/win-probability-changes/#comment-8927

Until he published the number of occurrences, some of the strange ones (like the infield fly) may be aberrations.  Or they can contain additional information (like they occur more often with men on base).