World Series Win Probability Added Leaderboards, Day 8 (Final Division Series Update)

It took me a while to get this posted because there's a couple of days here without baseball. For these purposes these don't count as "days," they count as non-days, so this post is on time from a baseball-topological sense or something. Anyway, with the Division Series being over I'm going to add a new section to this post, one we'll see two other times: a post-mortem on the teams that have been eliminated and are going home.

Tomorrow the League Championship Series start up, bringing with them higher leverage! And also fewer players playing each day. Technically tomorrow is just the ALCS, so Saturday's update will just include that one game, and then Sunday there should be two games to incorporate.



Top 10 players by WSWPA:

Eric Hosmer, Kansas City Royals, +12.20%
Matt Carpenter, St. Louis Cardinals, +8.37%
Yusmeiro Petit, San Francisco Giants, +6.98%
Jordan Zimmermann, Washington Nationals, +5.24%
Jerry Blevins, Washington Nationals, +4.99%
Matt Adams, St. Louis Cardinals, +4.88%
Santiago Casilla, San Francisco Giants, +4.74%
Delmon Young, Baltimore Orioles, +4.46%
Brandon Finnegan, Kansas City Royals, +4.46%
Brandon Moss, Oakland Athletics, +4.29%


Three players move on and three players move off. In a way all three of the departures were by attritition: Zack Greinke sat, while Hanley Ramirez and Brandon Belt both had lousy games, but they didn't leave because they moved backwards on the leaderboard, they left because they didn't move forward. Brandon Moss, whose team played one game and lost it, managed to survive the entire Division Series round without falling off the leaderboard. Matt Carpenter also had a lousy day but he'd already been so awesome that he stayed in second place. Matt Adams, who was slightly in positive territory entering the day, had the big blow (which we'll get to more later), putting up more than 4% of WSWPA in one night and vaulting onto the leaderboard out of nowhere. Santiago Casilla, meanwhile, the Dodgers' closer, recorded his second save; he pitched one scoreless inning apiece in each of Games 1, 2, and 4, and the one that wasn't a save was in the long extra-inning game. Jerry Blevins, meanwhile, also finished the NLDS without allowing a run over 3.1 innings. Last night he came on in relief of Tanner Roark with the bases loaded and no outs, got Brandon Belt to strike out (thus accounting for Belt's lousy night) and then pitched a scoreless inning of his own. It all adds up to a lefty specialist reliever on a losing team having been the 5th-most-valuable player of the first round and a half of the playoffs.


I do not expect this leaderboard to hold up very well over the course of the next round.


Bottom 10 players by WSWPA:


Clayton Kershaw, Los Angeles Dodgers, -8.92%
Joakim Soria, Detroit Tigers, -5.91%
Denard Span, Washington Nationals, -5.50%
Jason Hammel, Oakland Athletics, -5.46%
Josh Hamilton, Los Angeles Angels, -4.88%
Jayson Werth, Washington Nationals, -4.42%
Wilson Ramos, Washington Nationals, -4.11%
Ian Desmond, Washington Nationals, -3.99
J.P. Howell, Los Angeles Dodgers, -3.98%
Omar Infante, Kansas City Royals, -3.92%

Scott Elbert, Wei-Yin Chen, and Dan Otero all moved off of this list by pure attrition, none of them seeing game action yesterday. Gregor Blanco, meanwhile, had a decent game, and needed to 'cause he entered the day narrowly behind Infante. Those guys were replaced by a quartet of Washington Nationals: Span, Werth, Ramos, and Desmond. All four played in all four of the Nationals' post-season games; of those 16 individial player-games, three had positive WPAs. Two of those were Desmond and Span in game 3, when they put up a combined +0.34% WSWPA. The other was Ramos in Game 3, which was entirely because of what was supposed to be a 0% WPA sacrifice bunt. Basically these dudes didn't do a damned good thing all series long. They were a combined 8-for-71 in the series. They were also the Nationals' 1, 3, 5, and 7 hitters. I think it's a problem if you have offensive black holes at every other spot in your lineup; it meant that whenever Rendon or Harper did something good, there was no one to back it up with something else good. Adam LaRoche was also awful, going 1-for-18 with no extra base hits or walks or RBIs or runs scored or whatever, but he must have been awful in lower-leverage spots and he also somehow seems to have had a positive-WPA day in Game 1. Basically it wasn't a good series for the Nationals' hitters.

There's only one other player on this list who played yesterday. It's the guy at the top. It's also probably the NL Most Valuable Player. Clayton Kershaw's team entered the post-season with a 12.5% World Series Win Expectancy. Clayton Kershaw coughed up 70% of that chance. But it's worse than that, because if we just look at his first six innings from each of his starts he was up something like 2.64% of WSWPA. In just those seventh innings, Kershaw coughed up more like 13.8% WSWPA. That's more than his team's entire starting stake. Clayton Kershaw basically lost his team the entire series over the span of 11 batters faced and 0.2 innings pitched. This makes sense, of course, because of Clayton Kershaw had just been Clayton Kershaw and pitched a couple more scoreless innings, the Dodgers would've won the series on Tuesday instead of losing it. The other Dodgers were more or less good enough to win this series, if they had had the Clayton Kershaw they had almost every single day during the regular season. Instead they got a Clayton Kershaw who did more damage to his team's post-season chances than anyone else in the Division Series round. Baseball, man.

I have no idea how this leaderboard will hold up over the next couple of rounds. Three of the four remaining teams will lose 25% of WSWE over the next couple of weeks. On the other hand, those teams are neatly selected to be the teams whose players currently have positive WSWPA figures. In the end, losing teams total -12.5% WSWPA, or just -6.25% if they were a Wild Card team. My intuition, then, is that at least Kershaw is a pretty good bet to end up on the final leaderboard, since his figure is over 70% of the total hit taken by any losing team. But I honestly don't know how many of the others will stick around. Obviously Omar Infante is in a great position to do so because he's the only guy on this leaderboard from a team that's still playing baseball: he'll get lots more chances to suck and already has a head start. There are, of course, plenty of other people pretty deep in negative territory but not quite in the bottom 10 who are still playing. So we'll see.

Top 5 plays by WSWPA:

NLDS Game 4, bottom of the 7th, 2 on, no outs, LAD 2, STL 0: Matt Adams homers to right field off of Clayton Kershaw, Matt Holliday scores, Jhonny Peralta scores. +5.45% WSWPA for St. Louis.
AL WC Game, bottom of the 12th, 2 outs, runner on 2nd, OAK 8, KCR 8: Salvador Perez singles to left field off of Jason Hammel, Christian Colon scores. +4.975% WSWPA for Kansas City.
NLDS Game 1, top of the 7th, 2 outs, bases loaded, LAD 6, STL 4: Matt Carpenter doubles to right-center field off of Clayton Kershaw, Yadier Molina scores, Matt Adams scores, Jon Jay scores. +4.753% WSWPA for St. Louis.
ALDS Game 2, bottom of the 8th, 1 out, bases loaded, DET 6, BAL 4: Delmon Young doubles to left field off of Joakim Soria, Nelson Cruz scores, Steave Pearce scores, J.J. Hardy scores. +4.967% WSWPA for Baltimore.
ALDS Game 2, top of the 11th, 1 out, runner on 1st, KCR 1, LAA 1: Eric Hosmer homers to right field off of Kevin Jepsen, Lorenzo Cain scores. + 3.928% WSWPA for Kansas City.

!!!
We have action! We have a new biggest-deal event! Sal Perez's game-winning single in the AL Wild Card game has been on top of this list literally since this list began. The game- and series-winning blow from the Dodgers/Cardinals game has finally supplanted it. In doing so it knocked Brandon Moss's bigger home run from that same game off the list, so this is the first time there haven't been multiple events from that game on the list.

The Matt Adams home run was weird. It was hit by Matt Adams, a lefty who struggles against left-handed pitching, off of Clayton Kershaw, a lefty who devours left-handed hitters. It was hit off of a curveball that had literally never been taken deep by a left-handed hitter, by a hitter who had only once before taken a lefty's curveball deep. It should not have happened. It did, though, and it changed the post-season landscape more than any other single event that has yet happened. It took the Dodgers from looking at a Game 5 Greinke vs. Wainwright matchup to, well, looking at travel plans for the winter. And it took the Cardinals to the National League Championship Series, against the San Francisco Giants. Those two teams between them have won the National League pennant four years running. I guess now it'll be five.


I said I was gonna do a post-mortem on each of the teams that got eliminated, but that turns out to have been a lie. I think it makes more sense to do that in a separate post or perhaps series of posts, depending on how long they each turn out to be. That'll be forthcoming at some point, but not necessarily all that soon 'cause I have a fair amount of work to do tonight.