World Series Win Probability Leaderboards, League Championship Series Update

So, yeah. My plan of giving daily updates, as you may have noticed, fell completely through during the League Championship Series round. This, therefore, is the all-in-one-go update: it includes data from all nine LCS games. The leaderboards you are about to see, therefore, bear very little relationship to those we saw at the end of the Division Series round. I will try to do daily updates for the World Series, which shouldn't be too hard as there will only be one game each day.



Top 10 players by WSWPA:

Eric Hosmer, Kansas City Royals, +14.04%
Wade Davis, Kansas City Royals, +10.11%
Matt Adams, St. Louis Cardinals, +8.97%
Yusmeiro Petit, San Francisco Giants, +8.87%
Jeremy Affeldt, San Francisco Giants, +8.47%
Alex Gordon, Kansas City Royals, +8.40%
Santiago Casilla, San Francisco Giants, +8.15%
Andrew Miller, Baltimore Orioles, +8.15%
Travis Ishikawa, San Francisco Giants, +7.64%
Greg Holland, Kansas City Royals, +7.37%

A grand total of four of these players were on the leaderboard after the Division Series. That's Hosmer, who is still on top; Matt Adams, who was in the #6 spot; Petit, who was in the #3 spot; and Casilla, who retained the #7 spot. Hosmer kept his ranking by hitting .400 in the ALCS; he had no extra-base hits, but did a good enough job of failing to make outs that he moved forward overall. He could've sat all series and kept the top spot, though he did make contributions with a couple of two-run first-inning events in Games 2 and 4, the first an honest single scoring runners from second and third and the latter a fielder's choice at first base gone badly wrong. Matt Adams, on the other hand, hit a paltry .222 in the NLCS, but two of his four hits were solo home runs, one of which broke a 3-3 tie in the bottom of the 8th inning of Game 2 and the other of which tied up Game 5 at 2 runs apiece to lead off the bottom of the fourth. Yusmeiro Petit added to his heroics from Game 2 of the Division Series against Washington with three scoreless innings in relief of Ryan Vogelsong in Game 4, keeping the Giants in the game after Vogelsong had coughed up four quick runs and getting a well-deserved win. Santiago Casilla, meanwhile, appeared in each of the games that the Giants won, allowing no runs and notching two saves. (He did admittedly bequeath loaded bases to Jeremy Affeldt with two outs in the ninth inning of Game 5, which didn't exactly help, and unlike ERA, WPA doesn't credit him for the fact that Affeldt stranded them, but he did enough in Games 1, 3, and 4 that his Game 5 struggles only moved him down a couple of spots on the rankings and not out of the top 10.)

Three names moved off the leaderboard by attrition: Jordan Zimmerman and Jerry Blevins of the eliminated Washington Nationals and Brandon Moss of the long-eliminated Oakland Athletics. Moss having been #10 on the list after the Division Series, I'd bet he didn't last another day in the top 10, but that's just a guess. He's currently #19 on the full list. Three other names, however, moved off the list by playing and playing poorly, or at least not well enough. After introducing himself so brilliantly to a national audience just a few months after being drafted in the ALDS, Brandon Finnegan entered Game 1 of the ALCS in the bottom of the 6th inning and his team leading 5 to 4. He allowed a walk, a single, a double steal, and a bloop single to blow the lead, burning through 32% of gmWPA in a three-batter span. Oops. Delmon Young, meanwhile, was only mediocre in the ALCS; he drove in a run in the bottom of the 9th with two outs in Game 1, but to no avail as his team trailed by three runs at the time and Nick Markakis made the final out to strand Young, the tying run, immediately thereafter, and he then went 0-4 on the conclusive Game 4. He only cost himself about 1% of WSWPA in the Series, but as he would've needed to gain nearly 3% to keep pace, well, he is now in 24th position overall.

And then there's Matt Carpenter, hero of the NLDS against the Dodgers and Clayton Kershaw's bane. Along with Hosmer he's the only player who could've sat out the LCS round and stayed on this leaderboard. Instead he played in every game, and lost his team 1.70% WSWPA in the process. He did hit another home run, a solo shot which scored the first run of the one game the Cardinals would go on to win. But he did little enough else, hitting .200 on the series with just 4 hits and no runs batted in beyond that solo homer. No particularly high-leverage disasters, just failure to really produce for his team the way he had a week earlier. For his troubles Carpenter is currently in 12th place.

Six men, then, moved onto the leaderboard. One of those is from a team that lost: Andrew Miller, who added four more scoreless innings over three appearances to his 3.1 scoreless frames from the ALDS. They were truly dominant innings at that, with 5 strikeouts and just the one baserunner, but his bullpen-mates were not as dominant and so Miller's post-season ends there. Another is Travis Ishikawa, who for some reason hit .385/.429/.769 against the Cardinals, putting up positive WPA figures in all except Game 4, hitting a bases-clearing double in the first inning of Game 3, and hitting the walk-off three-run home run to finish Game 5 and send his team back to the World Series for the third time in five seasons. Alex Gordon, meanwhile, has been generally mediocre this post-season, hitting just .222. In fact, over seven of the eight games he's played he's had negative WSWPA. But in Game 1 of the ALCS, he went 3-4 with a bases-clearing double in the 3rd inning to take a 4-0 lead and, more importantly, a solo home run to lead off the top of the 10th inning after his team had blown that lead. That performance was worth +60.3% gmWPA and +9.42% WSWPA, easily biggest single-game performance yet this October by any one player.

Finally we have Greg Holland and Wade Davis. And, you know what, Kelvin Herrera deserves mention here as well, as he is in the 11th spot and therefore just barely missed inclusion. Each of the three dominant Royals relievers pitched in each game of the ALCS; indeed, through eight games and eight wins from the Royals, these three men have a total of 23 games pitched, with only one game taken off, and that by Herrera in the Division Series. In this round they pitched 14.2 innings, the equivalent of two really extraordinary starting efforts, and combined to allow one run. That was by Holland, in a game the Royals already led by three, so it didn't much matter in the end. Between the three of them, then, they had not a single game with negative WPA all series, and totaled over 20% WSWPA, particularly striking given that the entire team earned a grand total of 25% WSWPA with their series victory. They are, in other words, by far the biggest reason the Royals won the American League pennant. We'll see if they can keep it up against the Giants in the World Series.

Note, by the way, the remarkable absence of Lorenzo Cain from this list. He was, after all, just named ALCS MVP. But he only put up 4.62% of WSWPA in the series, and just 3.20% in the post-season as a whole. All three of the dominant relievers were more valuable than he was in the ALCS. At least, if we're only considering offense, which WPA does. This is one of its flaws: the Win Probability Added from Cain's spectacular defense was undoubtedly substantial, and is credited entirely to the pitchers he bailed out. This is a failing of the methodology, and I therefore do not mean to suggest that Cain was not in fact the Royals' MVP. (Although the 7.5% WSWPA Wade Davis put up and the 8% put up by Kelvin Herrera do sort of speak for themselves.) It's just interesting.

Bottom 10 players by WSWPA:

Clayton Kershaw, Los Angeles Dodgers, -8.92%
Randy Choate, St. Louis Cardinals, -7.20%
Salvador Perez, Kansas City Royals, -7.08%
Steve Pearce, Baltimore Orioles, -6.41%
Zach Britton, Baltimore Orioles, -6.23%
Joakim Soria, Detroit Tigers, -5.91%
Denard Span, Washington Nationals, -5.50%
Jason Hammel, Oakland Athletics, -5.46%
Jhonny Peralta, St. Louis Cardinals, -5.36%
Josh Hamilton, Los Angeles Angels, -4.88%

This list is actually not very different from the last one I wrote. A remarkable five of the players on it did not make it to the League Championship Series round at all, compared to zero players on the top 10 list. Kershaw, Soria, Span, Hammel, and Hamilton's efforts for teams already eliminated have stood up; indeed, Kershaw is still on the very bottom. Hammel's continuing presence is particularly ignominious given that his team only played one game in October. Five other names moved off by attrition, four from eliminated teams (Jayson Werth, Wilson Ramos, and Ian Desmond of the Nationals, and J.P. Howell of the Dodgers) and one, Omar Infante, by having a mediocre ALCS with the Royals but not quite mediocre enough to pass Hamilton. He's in 11th place, though he'll have further opportunities to move "up" this list going forward. The two teams that were eliminated in the LCS round each contribute two new players, one reliever and one position player apiece. Steve Pearce went a whopping 1-for-17 for the Orioles against Kansas City, and Jhonny Peralta was not much better for the Cardinals with just 2 hits in the same number of at-bats. In the manner of position players, their failures were rather spread out. The worst single moment by either of them by far was a weak F7 Pearce hit with the bases loaded and one out in the bottom of the 7th in Game 2, not deep enough to score Nick Markakis against the strong arm of Alex Gordon, a moment worth -12% gmWPA.

The entirety of Choate's damage came in his appearance in Game 3 of the NLCS in the bottom of the tenth. He entered a tie game at the beginning of an inning. He allowed a walk and a single and then, when Gregor Blanco tried to bunt the runners over, he threw the ball away and allowed the winning run to score. Oops. Zach Britton, meanwhile, after having been solid in the ALDS, was bad in both Games 1 and 2 of the ALCS. His troubles in Game 1 were of no eventual consequence; he entered the 9th inning of a tie ballgame and proceeded to promptly walk the bases loaded. He then got a force-out at home before being removed in favor of Darren O'Day, who prompted a double play ball from Billy Butler. (After putting up 35% gmWPA with that escape, O'Day would promptly surrender the game-winning home run to Alex Gordon in the 10th, ending up with a deeply bizarre +0.1% gmWPA that really didn't tell the story.) In Game 2, however, Britton was the one who took the loss. He relieved O'Day after the latter had allowed a leadoff single to Omar Infante to lead off the top of the 9th, again in a tie ballgame. Mike Moustakas then hit a sacrifice bunt before Britton allowed a double to Alcides Escobar (yep), a probably-speed-induced reached-on-E5 to Jarrod Dyson, and a run-scoring single to Lorenzo Cain. Not what you want from a dominant closer.

Finally we have Salvador Perez. Yes, Salvador Perez, the hero of the Wild Card game. Well, I say hero. More like the goat-cum-hero. The problem for Salvador Perez is that, after being terrible for the first 11 innings or so of that game and then hitting the walk-off, he's been lousy ever since. Specifically, he has yet to post a positive single-game WPA score since then. It hasn't really mattered that much because the Royals just keep on winning, but Salvador Perez is 4 for 34 this post-season, with one walk and zero extra bases. That's a .118/.142/.118 batting line, which is fairly mediocre for a pitcher. If it weren't for that walk-off back on the first day of the post-season, Perez would pretty handily be in last place by now. He'll have by far the best chance of supplanting Kershaw, and he will do so unless he starts to hit better in the World Series, because the leverage is doubled compared to that of the LCS round.

Top 5 plays by WSWPA:

NLCS Game 2, bottom of the 9th, no on, no outs, SFG 4, STL 4: Kolten Wong homers to right field off of Sergio Romo. +5.869% WSWPA for St. Louis.
NLCS Game 2, top of the 9th, runners on 1st and 2nd, 2 outs, STL 4, SFG 3: Joe Panik walks off of Trevor Rosenthal, wild pitch, Matt Duffy scores, Juan Perez to third. +5.797% WSWPA for San Francisco.
ALCS Game 1, top of the 10th, no on, no outs, KCR 5, BAL 5: Alex Gordon homers to right field off of Darren O'Day. +5.547% WSWPA for Kansas City.
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.
ALCS Game 1, top of the 9th, bases loaded, 1 out, KCR 5, BAL 5: Billy Butler grounds into a double play, shortstop J.J. Hardy to second baseman Jonathan Schoop to first baseman Steve Pearce, Eric Hosmer out at second. +5.359% WSWPA for Baltimore.

I was right! The crazy AL Wild Card game has been knocked out of this list in its entirety. In fact, all but one of the new top-5 plays are from the LCS round. Only Matt Adams' crazy homer off of Kershaw remains from the first round-and-a-half. Joining it we have one big blow from each of the four teams that played this past round. Two of them, remarkably, were consecutive plays against Darren O'Day, first the double play ball off the bat of Billy Butler that turned a truly dire situation into a tie ballgame headed to the bottom of the 9th and second the home run by Alex Gordon that made O'Day's fine work in the 9th be for naught. The other two were from the same inning of the same game: first, in the top of the 9th, Trevor Rosenthal uncorked a very wild pitch indeed on a 3-2 pitch to Joe Panik. There were two outs so I presume the runners were in motion (though to be honest I was not watching the game), and therefore the runner from second was able to come all the way around to score the game-tying run. That's a hell of a way to blow a save. Rosenthal, however, worked out of the inning without allowing further trouble, and immediately thereafter Kolten Wong bailed him out with a walk-off home run on the second pitch he saw off of Romo.

That was, uhhhh, the only good thing that happened for the Cardinals in this series.

To be honest, most of the other games were pretty boring, without many events with gmWPA figures in excess of 20%. But two of the games ended in genuine whip-saw fashion, with one team improving its chances of winning it all by over 5% in a single play only to cough up all that gain and then some shortly thereafter. That's gotta suck.

Since the Leverage Indices are precisely doubled in the World Series, I expect that these plays won't stick around for very long. Game 1 will have 31.25% WSWE on the line, meaning that it will only take just over 17% of gmWPA to make this list. That's just not a high bar to clear. Of course, if there were to be a Game 7, with the full 100% of WSWE up for grabs, just about every routine groundout or single would beat these plays. From this perspective there is truly nothing like a Game 7. Here's hoping the Royals don't need one.