I only wish the Mets / Phils game had been closer, so we could all see the effect of Victor Diaz forgetting the number of outs and getting doubled off second on a routine fly ball.
Posted by Tybor on 04/20 at 09:15 AM
WPA Updates
April 19, 2005
I posted a Game in Review at the Hardball Times, covering the pitching duel between Rich Harden and Jarrod Washburn last Saturday. Also, David Tybor has discovered the spreadsheet, and he posted a graph of last night’s Mets/Phillies game (scroll down to see it).
I love this graph, by the way. The final score was 5-4, Phillies, which would lead you to believe it was a close game. But the Phils led 5-0 going into the ninth, and even Cliff Floyd’s home run didn’t have a significant effect on the Phillies’ chances of winning.
In other news, I’ve stopped tracking the Reds’ WPA on a daily basis. It was just too much time, because I was trying to capture fielding WPA as well, which meant I had to watch every game in its entirety. But as a result, I do have some beginning thoughts on how to allocate WPA debits and credits between pitchers and fielders, using only play-by-play logs.
- Credit the following events 100% to the pitcher: Strikeouts, walks, HBP’s and home runs, for obvious reasons.
- Also, credit pop flies to the infield 100% to the pitcher, because they are converted into outs virtually 100% of the time.
- Line drives are trickier. My observation is that line drives caught by infielders are mostly a matter of chance, though you could also call it positioning. So I don’t tend to give infielders much credit for catching line drives, just as I don’t give them much of a debit for not catching line drives. Maybe 5% at the most?
- Line drives to the outfield do provide more of a chance for fielders to make an impact. Maybe 10%?
- Groundballs and flyballs provide fielders with the greatest chance to make an impact, and I would credit and debit 10% to 20% of the outcome to them in those cases.
Now, these are just guidelines for discussion purposes. Only use them if you want to. And, if you do want to allocate WPA between pitchers and fielders, you’ll find pretty quickly that you should really watch the entire game.
One last thing. I’ve been using the play-by-play logs in mlb.com’s “Gameday” application, because they offer the most detail, including the type of batted ball and who caught each ball. If other folks have their own preferred play-by-play logs, please let me know.
I think in general you might be giving too much credit to the pitcher. Player A hits a screaming liner to the SS, who is standing right there. OK, its a matter of luck that it is not a hit. But why give all the reward to the pitcher? The one thing you do know is that the pitcher did not do a good job on that batter, unlike the pop fly to the IF or a lazy fly to the OF, where you could say that the pitcher fooled the batter.
Posted by ccas007@earthlink.net on 04/22 at 11:55 AM
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