Blue Jays/Red Sox
April 20, 2005
David Tybor has posted another WPA graph—this one of last night’s Blue Jays/Red Sox game, which was won in the late innings by the Blue Jays.
David’s approach to graphing the game is confusing to me, and we both thought it might be worth discussing here on the site. Here are some points:
- Essentially, the scale of the chart flips every time one team rises above/below 50%. This is confusing to me.
- Remember that some segment of the population is colorblind, meaning they won’t be able to make any sense from this graph.
- David’s response is that there is a lot of white space on the graphs I produce (good point!), and he was trying a new approach.
Any responses? My reply would be that essentially flipping the Y axis when one team rises above 50% makes it very hard to follow the flow of the game graphically, and it isn’t worth the tradeoff of less white space. One way to address the white space problem is to add more info to the graph (as long as it’s relevant), such as the “P” of each situation.
For those interested, I point you to this summary of Edward Tufte’s work. Tufte is the Godfather of Good Graphs.
I think there is a subtle difference between the OPPORTUNITIES in which a manager places a player and the OUTCOMES that a manger sometimes forces upon a player.
WPA is nice becasue it considers the importance of the situations players face. For example, we can learn that Marte was a stud reliever for a few years because we can tease out his stats from the fact that he pitched in very important situations. (And, he happened pitched well in those situations.)
But we’ve all seen games where the manager make a call to the bullpen and then orders the new relief pitcher to issue an intentional walk to the first batter he faces. Is the resulting change in win expectation the pitcher’s fault? Should it be debited against him? Did he have any choice BUT to follow his manager’s orders? After all, it was arbitrary that he was given the task to throw four wide, rather than the pitcher he replaced.
So if that sort of debit should obviously not go against the pitcher, then perhaps an ordered sacrifice bunt shouldn’t either. Of course, there is a grey area - who are we to judge whether Konerko is bunting on his own, or bunting at Guillen’s hest.
Posted by Tybor on 04/22 at 01:59 PM
Good point about the IBB. We should probably have a rule that that doesn’t go against the pitcher’s record—give it to None.
You may well be right that the same thinking should apply to sac bunts. As you say, there is a gray area. What if the bunter is really sort of bunting for a hit, a la Matsui with the Mets?
Posted by
studes on 04/22 at 04:36 PM
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