World Series Win Probability Leaderboards, Update #13

Things may change 'round about the thirteenth! Because, finally, at long last, we have volatility! This is World Series baseball. This is what it's all about. People made double digit impacts on their team's chances of winning it all last night. That's new! The leaderboards you are about to see bear scant resemblance to the ones you're accustomed to seeing. Well, except that Eric Hosmer is still leading. Dude is on fire. But things got awfully shaken up, let's just say.



Top 10 players by WSWPA:

Eric Hosmer, Kansas City Royals, +21.98%
Wade Davis, Kansas City Royals, +15.21%
Yusmeiro Petit, San Francisco Giants, +14.87%
Greg Holland, Kansas City Royals, +14.01%
Hunter Pence, San Francisco Giants, +12.16%
Jeremy Affeldt, San Francisco Giants, +11.67%
Madison Bumgarner, San Francisco Giants, +11.48%
Kelvin Herrera, Kansas City Royals, +11.34%
Gregor Blanco, San Francisco Giants, +11.07%
Matt Adams, St. Louis Cardinals, +8.97%

Matt Adams is still the only guy on this list who isn't still playing. And now he's in the last spot. Doesn't look like he's gonna make it. Davis, Holland, Herrera, and Bumgarner didn't play last night. Hunter Pence did, but somehow barely made an impact despite going 3 for 5 with 3 runs driven in. His gmWPA was just +1.5%, because one of his RBIs came on a fielder's choice ground-out and he had the misfortune of bounding into a fielder's choice out at the plate with the bases loaded and one out in a tie game in the 6th inning. That ended up not mattering much, but still, it undid pretty much all the good from his various hits. Jeremy Affeldt also played with modest effect, pitching a scoreless top of the 7th after the Giants had taken a 3-run lead in the 6th, enough to move past Herrera and Bumgarner.

Gregor Blanco is the only new face on this leaderboard, bumping teammate Santiago Casilla, who didn't play, off it. Blanco was 2-for-5 with a walk, a stolen base, and a whopping three runs scored; it all added up to about +12% gmWPA and +4.54% WSWPA, enough to move him from just outside the top 10 to just inside it.

Eric Hosmer, well, what can one say at this point? He's just having a dominant month of October. He was 3-for-5 last night with a double, a run scored, and a run driven in. His wacky swinging-bunt infield single that somehow found the Bermuda triangle between the pitcher, the first baseman, and the second baseman in the third inning scored the Royals' first run of the night and tied the game. Since neither of his outs were remotely high-leverage, that plus his leadoff double in the 5th, with his team up 4-2 at the time, were enough to give him nearly another +6% of WSWPA last night.

But Yusmeiro Petit stole the spotlight. He wasn't actually the star of the game, but he was the star of the game among people already having good post-seasons. He entered the game in the top of the 4th with his team down 4 to 2. The starter had been knocked out after 2.2 innings pitched, and the Giants were already trailing the series 2 games to 1. If Petit let the game get away from them, the series would get away from them. Instead he did that thing that he does, throwing three scoreless innings and giving his team the chance to get back in it. They did, and Petit got the win, his third of the playoffs. He's pitched in three games. Putting last night's performance together with his similar performance in Game 4 of the NLCS, also bailing Vogelsong out that night, and his marathon starting-in-relief appearance in the 18-inning game, the man who set a new record for consecutive outs recorded working mostly in mop-up duty earlier this year is one of the really great stories of this post-season.

Bottom 10 players by WSWPA:

Ryan Vogelsong, San Francisco Giants, -16.16%
James Shields, Kansas City Royals, -10.96%
Brandon Finnegan, Kansas City Royals, -9.79%
Hunter Strickland, San Francisco Giants, -9.63%
Norichika Aoki, Kansas City Royals, -9.29%
Clayton Kershaw, Los Angeles Dodgers, -8.92%
Brandon Crawford, San Francisco Giants, -8.22%
Randy Choate, St. Louis Cardinals, -7.20%
Salvador Perez, Kansas City Royals, -6.90%
Jean Machi, San Francisco Giants, -6.78%

Okay, this is where more of the changes took place. Four new names, four gone names. Two of those were by attrition: Steve Pearce and Zach Britton. Another could have been by attrition; had Buster Posey sat the game out, he'd've moved off the list. Instead he had a positive night, with +8% gmWPA pretty much entirely on the strength of his RBI single in the bottom of the 3rd that got the Giants within two. I'll get to the other missing name in a bit.

Sal Perez has been yo-yoing up and down this list for a while, but can't quite get himself off it. Last night was another good game, as he went 3-for-4 including an RBI single in the 3rd inning that capped the Royals' scoring for the night and gave them what was at the time a 4-1 lead. Jean Machi also got a modicum of credit for getting out of Vogelsong's jam in the 3rd inning, though he did walk the first batter he faced before doing so. (The ends of innings are convenient like that for pitchers; if you end up not letting runs score, it doesn't matter how high you had let the other team's run expectancy get in the middle.)

Brandon Crawford started his post-season with a bang, hitting the game-winning grand slam in the Wild Card game. That put him on the top-10 list for a while. He's been unremittingly lousy since then, though, and is hitting just .231/.305/.327 on the post-season, with only one run driven in after the slam. Though he's actually hitting .286 in the World Series, he's also been a negative in every game so far, and last night's 1-for-5 with a strikeout (looking) to leave two men on in the bottom of the 5th, after the game had just been tied, was enough to move him onto this list. (The hit game with his team already up by three, so it barely mattered.)

Nori Aoki entered the World Series very slightly in positive territory, at +0.76% WSWPA. He's hitting, well, he's hitting nil in the Series. No hits, no walks, no nothin'. Now, last night he only had a single plate appearance, but in it he bounced into a ground-ball double play with Jarrod Dyson on first base and no outs in the top of the sixth. In a tie game. If he had even so much as managed to advance Dyson to second while getting himself out, say by bunting, Dyson could've stolen third and scored on an out to give the Royals the lead. Then maybe everything else goes very differently. If you're only gonna do one thing all night, that's about as bad a thing as you can do.

But Nori Aoki did not have the worst night of anyone last night. No, no he did not. Because two different people had worse nights than anyone else has yet had in this post-season. One of them was Brandon Finnegan, who impressed so much in the Wild Card game and who, mostly on the strength of a fine performance in Game 3 of the World Series, was meaningfully in positive territory before last night. Then he entered a tie game in the bottom of the 6th inning. At the time his team had a 43% chance to win. He gave up three runs in that inning and bequeathed two runners in the next one without recording a further out; when he left, his team had a 3% chance of winning. Also both of his bequeathed runners scored, after which his team had a 0% chance of winning. Not a good night.

Only slightly less terrible was the guy whose bad night Finnegan erased. Ryan Vogelsong had a pretty good start in the NLDS, which gave him +3% WSWPA, but then he's had back-to-back starts of failing to record outs in the fourth inning and giving up four runs. The one in Game 4 of the NLCS cost him 6% of WSWPA; this one cost him 13.35%. At the start of the third inning, with the Giants up 1-0, his team had a 63% chance to win. When he left the game a few batters later, that figure was down to 18%. Yikes.

But Finnegan and Vogelsong did not have the only double-digit WSWPA swings from last night. The other guy who did was the hero of the game and the fourth man to move out of the bottom 10: Pablo Sandoval. Last night he had moved in to the bottom 10 for the first time, despite seeming like he was having a good October. Now he's in positive territory. And he did it with only two base hits and two RBIs. But both hits were big ones: the first came just after Hunter Pence had driven in the Giants' third run of the night to draw them within a run, and gave the Giants runners at the corners with one out. After a walk to Brandon Belt they would later score Pence on a Juan Perez sacrifice fly; Sandoval's hit was the biggest event of the inning, though it did not score any runs. It was not, however, Sandoval's biggest blow of the night. After Pence had hit into a force-out at home, Sandoval stepped to the plate with the bases loaded and two outs in a tie game in the bottom of the 6th. He hit a crisp single up the middle that plated two, giving the Giants a lead they would never relinquish. Add it all up and Sandoval had almost exactly +30% gmWPA, and therefore +11.3% WSWPA. That's one way to get off the bottom-10 list.

Top 5 plays by WSWPA:

WS Game 4, bottom of the 6th, bases loaded, 2 outs, KCR 4, SFG 4: Pablo Sandoval singles to center field off of Brandon Finnegan, Gregor Blanco scores, Buster Posey scores, Hunter Pence to second. +9.675% WSWPA for San Francisco.
WS Game 4, top of the 3rd, bases loaded, 2 outs, KCR 1, SFG 1: Omar Infante singles to center field off of Ryan Vogelsong, Lorenzo Cain scores, Eric Hosmer scores, Mike Moustakas to second. +7.575% WSWPA for Kansas City.
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.


Hooray! We finally have some World Series action gracing this leaderboard. Though none of the first three games could muster a single play that cracked the top 5, Game 4 had not one but two plays bigger than anything from any previous round. (That's not too surprising, since the top 5 was incredibly bunched entering the World Series.) And funnily enough, the two plays in question were virtually identical: two-out, two-run singles up the middle with the bases loaded to break open a tie game. Also, in both innings one further run would score. The only difference is that Sandoval's hit came later than Infante's, and therefore was more highly leveraged.

The series is currently tied at two games apiece. That means that each team has, obviously, a 50% chance of winning. But whichever team wins tonight will have a 75% WSWE, because they will only need to win one out of the remaining two coin flips in Kansas City while the losing team will need to win them both. That means that there's a whopping 50% of WSWE up for grabs, making tonight's game by far the highest-leveraged we've seen yet. And Game 6 will inevitably have that same 50% leverage. (Obviously a Game 7 has fully 100% leverage; inevitably, unless the game is just supremely boring, any Game 7 would tend to overwhelm this list.) This means that it will only take 11.1% of gmWPA tonight to make it into the top 5. I can't imagine that we won't see multiple plays of that magnitude. It should be exciting.