from Amazon
Monday, March 29, 2010
The story as only WPA can find
I love how studes describes WPA as a “story stat”. Case in point:
Perhaps the weird entry of all on this list is Adam Eaton’s. He came to bat in the bottom of the 14th inning after having given up 3 runs in the top of the inning. The Rockies came to bat in the bottom of the 14th with just a 5% chance to win by the Win Expectancy measure. With 2 singles and a walk sandwiching an out, the Rockies loaded the bases but increased their chances to just 21%. Eaton batted and walked, driving in a run and pushing the odds to 34%. The Ryan Spilborghs hit a walk-off grand slam, adding in the extra 66% and giving the win to the Rockies. That means that despite pitching only one inning, Eaton had a -31% contribution to the win but at the plate he had a +13%.
Once you quantify everything, it makes life so much easier in terms of canvassing baseball history. Win Probability Added tells you WHAT happened, without taking a position of WHY it happened. It tracks that Eaton was involved (as a batter, and as a pitcher), it tracks how much the game swung in terms of real-time odds (i.e., how your heart felt at the time… yup, WPA measures HEART Mr. Garciaparra… not the player’s heart, but the fans’ heart), and you can also accumulate all this tracking by player (like your stocks, even if your stock-picking skill is non-existant, you still get the cash if the stock prices go up).
And, as we see at the career level, the career WPA figures of players mirrors that of their basic context-neutral numbers, telling us that at some point, the noise in the stat washes away enough that we can focus on WPA.
So, WPA is great at a game-level, it is great at a career-level. And somewhere in-between, it loses its lustre to other stats, but gains it back.
Recent comments
Older comments
Page 1 of 344 pages 1 2 3 > Last »Complete Archive – By Category
Complete Archive – By Date