World Series Win Probability Leaderboards, Final

Madison Bumgarner, ladies and gentlemen. Madison Bumgarner. I have nothing more to say.



Top 10 players by WSWPA:

Madison Bumgarner, San Francisco Giants, +90.28%
Alex Gordon, Kansas City Royals, +31.67%
Jeremy Affeldt, San Francisco Giants, +28.07%
Wade Davis, Kansas City Royals, +24.21%
Kelvin Herrera, Kansas City Royals, +22.34%
Greg Holland, Kansas City Royals, +17.71%
Pablo Sandoval, San Francisco Giants, +15.03%
Hunter Pence, San Francisco Giants, +14.91%
Mike Morse, San Francisco Giants, +10.48%
Matt Adams, St. Louis Cardinals, +8.97%

Entering last night I figured the race for the top of this leaderboard was quite close. Hosmer was about 3% behind, so if he had another good game or maybe Bumgarner got hit a little in relief, he could take back the crown. Yeah, no. No. As it turns out, all your World Series Win Probability Added are belong to Madison Bumgarner. As in, the entire San Francisco Giants team had a WSWPA of 93.75%, since they went from a 1-in-16 chance to start the Wild Card game to winning it all. That means that members of the world champion San Francisco Giants not named Madison Bumgarner had an aggregate WSWPA of... 3.53%. Also known as functionally nil. Madison Bumgarner just won a World Series all by himself. Oh, and guess what: 85.5% of that WSWPA came in the World Series itself. Giants other than Bumgarner had WSWPA of -35.5% during the World Series. The other 24 guys played well enough to lose, easily. Madison Bumgarner pitched well enough that the rest of his team couldn't manage to lose. I have to think that this was one of the best individual post-seasons ever, by this metric.

Matt Adams is the only guy on this list who didn't play last night. He didn't play at all in the World Series. He's the last man standing from the teams that didn't make it, and remarkably he is left standing. No one came that close to bumping him out, though he's only here because Lorenzo Cain and Eric Hosmer cratered on the last day.

Mike Morse had a very good game. He hit a sacrifice fly with the bases loaded and no outs in the 2nd inning to put the Giants on the board, and then he had an RBI single to break a 2-2 tie in the 4th. That's driving in the go-ahead run twice, of the two times that go-ahead runs were driven in last night. Good night.

Hunter Pence had yet another low-magnitude positive game. Subsequent to Game 1, Pence only once had a single-game WSWPA magnitude over 1%, putting up +2% in Game 6. This, mind you, was in the highest-leveraged games of the entire season. He was 2-for-4, singling after Sandoval's leadoff hits in the 2nd and 4th innings. A ground ball double play in the 6th and making the last out of the 8th, however, took back almost all of that value.

After Game 3, Pablo Sandoval was on the worst-10 list. He finishes on the best-10 list. That's because he was 3-3 with a hit-by-pitch last night, scoring both of those go-ahead runs that Morse drove in and also reaching base to lead off the 6th inning (before being erased in Pence's GDP) and hitting a two-out double in the 8th. It was his last game under his current contract, and by god he made it a good one.

Then we come to the Royals' big three relievers. They collectively entered with one out and runners on the corners in the 4th inning, when Kelvin Herrera came in three batters too late to bail out Jeremy Guthrie. Seriously, he comes in three batters earlier and nothing else changes and we're still playing baseball. Herrera let one of the runs score on Morse's broken-bat soft liner to right field on an up-and-in fastball, scarcely a blameworthy pitch at 99 mph, but then got out of the inning without further damage and threw scoreless frames in the 5th and 6th. Wade Davis pitched the 7th and 8th flawlessly, and Greg Holland threw a clean 9th. The sum total of the damage against these three guys over 4.2 innings pitched was letting an inherited runner on third with one out score, which you're pretty much expected to do anyway. It wasn't these guys' fault that the Royals lost. They were collectively worth over 64% WSWPA on the month. That's not quite Bumgarner, but if, say, Holland had been in position to collect a save last night instead of Bumgarner, it would've been, at least.

What Herrera, Davis, and Holland did for the Royals last night, Jeremy Affeldt did for the Giants. Tim Hudson had a not-so-good night, and Affeldt came in with two out and two on in the 2nd inning to face Nori Aoki. The game had just been tied up and was in danger of getting away altogether with the Royals getting ready to go to their big three relievers. Instead Affeldt got Aoki to ground out to end the threat, and then threw scoreless innings in the 3rd and 4th innings with help from a couple of double plays (one of them routine, one of them insane). That got the ball to Bumgarner, and capped off his pretty much perfect post-season of relief work. Well, not "pretty much perfect": he allowed zero runs over 11 appearances and 11.2 innings pitched. The Giants won because of their ace pitching in relief, but their relief ace as such helped too.

Until last night we thought the Royals' middle-of-the-order left-handed hitter gracing the upper reaches of this list would be Eric Hosmer. Yeah. That didn't happen. Hosmer went 0-4 last night, striking out to strand a runner in the 1st, grounding into the insane Joe Panik double play in the 3rd, popping out to deep short to start the 6th, and fanning to start the 9th. After being practically in the lead the entire post-season, he finishes just under +3% WSWPA, because last night was terrible on the night that was twice as important as any other night. Lorenzo Cain also fell off the list with a bad night, going 1-for-4 with a single to open the 3rd that didn't last long offset by a fielder's choice groundout in the 1st, a strikeout that stranded a runner who had been bunted over to 2nd in the 5th, and a pop-up to end the 8th. Ugh.

Instead we have Alex Gordon, who was the Royals' best player during the regular season and at the last minute managed to be their best player in the post-season as well. Despite hitting .204 in said post-season. And despite being just under +4% WSWPA entering last night. But unlike some of his teammates, Gordon had the clever idea of getting big timely hits. Two of them, specifically: he went 2-for-3 with a hit-by-pitch. The only out he made was a lineout to deep center to end the 6th, and he smoked that ball. He also reached base to start the 4th inning before being erased on a Sal Perez double play. Those were the not-important things Alex Gordon did. One of the important things Alex Gordon did was hitting a double to the right-center-field gap in the 2nd inning that miraculously managed to score Billy Butler all the way from first and set Gordon himself up to score the tying run without a further hit, which he did.

The other was hitting a sinking, slicing line drive to left-center field on an 0-1 count with two outs in the ninth inning down by a run. Had Gregor Blanco played the ball better, it might only have been a single. Had Gordon been running a little bit better, it might've been an inside-the-park "home run," modulo the errors charged on the play, to tie the game at the eleventh hour. Which would've been one of the most amazing moments in baseball history. Or he might've been out, ending the season on a failed attempt at an inside-the-park round tripper, which also would have been one of the most amazing moments in baseball history. Instead he held up at third, and the Royals chose to have Sal Perez try to get him in with a hit off of Bumgarner. They didn't, say, do something clever like pinch-running with Terrance Gore and sending Jarrod Dyson up to put on the highest-leverage squeeze play in history. Which also could've been one of the most amazing moments in baseball history. But the fact that they didn't do that wasn't really Alex Gordon's fault. He hit a ball that created the coolest moment of the entire playoffs, even though it didn't then take that extra leap to become one of the coolest moments in baseball history. He had a great game when it mattered the most, his teammates just couldn't match his effort.

Because of Madison Bumgarner. All because of Madison Bumgarner. Who got the save. The five-inning, one-run save. That was after we were already talking about how he had one of the best pitching post-seasons of all time, up there with Curt Schilling's 2001. In the end he threw 52.2 innings and allowed 7 runs, 6 of them earned (though the unearned one was on his own error). That's an ERA of 1.03. He struck out 45 and walked six. Three of the runs scored on home runs, I believe all of the solo variety. And none of them scored during the five innings he pitched that were the last five innings of the season when if he let one run score it would be a tie game at the other guys' park. He entered last night with the best WSWPA of anyone, at almost +30%. He tripled his figure last night. He put up 60.3% WSWPA last night. That was also, of course, his gmWPA, because last night was in essence the entire World Series. It must be one of the more amazing feats in baseball history, pitching or otherwise.

Also, the Royals helped him out a ton. When he came on in the 5th inning, he had no control. Infante singled to lead off the inning and then it was 2 balls and no strikes to Alcides Escobar. None of Bumgarner's pitches had been anywhere near his intended target. Escobar should've continued taking pitches, forcing Escobar to throw strikes. If he drew a walk, then bunt with Nori Aoki to set up second and third and one out and Lorenzo Cain with an opportunity to drive in the tying run without a hit. Instead, they bunted, on 2-0, and then Aoki hit what looked like a game-tying slicing line drive into the left-field corner except that the Giants knew it was coming and Juan Perez caught it pretty easily. And then Cain went up hacking at pitches at his eyes, and therefore struck out swinging despite barely seeing a single pitch in the strike zone. And Bumgarner was off to the races. Had the Royals just been more willing to take advantage of Bumgarner's wildness in that inning, the whole thing might not have happened. They weren't, and it did.

Bottom 10 players by WSWPA:

Salvador Perez, Kansas City Royals, -30.75%
Tim Hudson, San Francisco Giants, -19.49%
Norichika Aoki, Kansas City Royals, -18.09%
Ryan Vogelsong, San Francisco Giants, -16.16%
James Shields, Kansas City Royals, -15.36%
Jake Peavy, San Francisco Giants, -12.20%
Buster Posey, San Francisco Giants, -11.30%
Jeremy Guthrie, Kansas City Royals, -10.70%
Brandon Crawford, San Francisco Giants, -10.57%
Joe Panik, San Francisco Giants, -9.88%

The top 10 list doesn't look that different than it did the night before. The bottom 10 list, however, looks very different. Brandon Finnegan, Hunter Strickland, Clayton Kershaw, Randy Choate, Jean Machi, and Steve Pearce are all gone by attrition. Zero of the players on teams that left the stage early are still on this list, contrary to my initial suspicion. The only guys on this list who didn't play and play badly last night are Shields, Vogelsong, and Peavy. This is basically a who's who of who screwed up in the last game of the season.

Well, almost. Because Joe Panik did not screw up last night. Sure, he went 0-4 with three strikeouts, making four rather low-leverage (within the game) outs. But he also turned what could, or even should, have been a ground ball up the middle for a base hit to set up runners on the corners with no outs into a glove-flip double play in the 3rd inning. The change in Win Expectancy between the two scenarios was around 18%. If we credit him for that play, he's close to knocking off Matt Adams and making it into the top 10 list rather than occupying the #10 spot in the bottom 10 list.

Brandon Crawford, on the other hand, made three outs last night without doing anything much good. He did technically hit a sacrifice fly in the 2nd inning to make it 2-0 Royals, but sacrifice flies don't actually have very high WPA figures usually. Certainly not early in the game. And other than that, he fanned against Herrera in the 4th with runners on the corners and one out, he fanned off of Wade Davis to start the 7th, and he fanned off of Greg Holland to close the top of the 9th. Bad hitting nights on the team that won are easy to ignore, especially when you did technically drive in a run, but Crawford wasn't helping last night. Neither was Buster Posey, who went 0-4, though admittedly none of his four outs were all that important.

Jeremy Guthrie, oy. Jeremy Guthrie lost the game for the Royals, or rather, Ned Yost lost it for them by letting Jeremy Guthrie throw pitches in the 4th inning. Jeremy Guthrie had the honor both of giving up a couple of runs in the 2nd inning, breaking what had been a scoreless tie, and of creating a situation in the 4th inning that meant that even though the first thing his replacement Kelvin Herrera did was give up an RBI single to Mike Morse, Herrera still ended up with a positive WPA on the inning when he got out of it without any further damage allowed. Jeremy Guthrie, like fellow veteran starters Jake Peavy, James Shields, and Ryan Vogelsong, was not helping. Oh, and like fellow veteran starter Tim Hudson, who after all squandered the first lead that Guthrie had allowed the Giants in the bottom of the 2nd and left Affeldt a bit of a further mess to clean up. Bad series for veteran starters.

It feels a little rough to give Nori Aoki the full measure of the blame for the things he did last night, because with slightly worse positioning or Travis Ishikawa in left field, he would've had the game-tying hit in the 5th inning. But, well, we're judging people on the basis of what happened here, not of what should have happened, and in fact he lined out there, making an unproductive out at a key moment in the game. He also made two other outs, one of which ended the threat in the 2nd and the other of which was the team's fifth-last out of the season. His walk in the first inning was nice, but didn't end up mattering. Given that he had already had a terrible World Series, he grades out as having had the third-worst post-season despite having had a pretty good first two-plus rounds.

But the guy with the worst post-season was, well, the guy who started out by being the biggest hero of it. Sal Perez got things started with a walk-off hit in the AL Wild Card game (after he had already had a couple of terrible strikeouts that killed rallies earlier in the game), just like Madison Bumgarner started things off with a complete-game shutout in the NL Wild Card game. The playoffs came full circle, then, with Bumgarner getting Perez to pop out to Sandoval in foul territory to end it all. That, obviously, sent the Royals down to a 0% WSWE, down from the 16% chance that they had after Gordon's Little League triple. But that wasn't all that Sal Perez did wrong last night. He did get hit on the leg in the 2nd inning, a modest part of the Royals' rally in that inning. But after that, well, he grounded into a double play in the 4th inning, erasing Gordon, and also flied out to start the 7th. If the Royals had brought in Eric Kratz to replace Perez after he got drilled, well, it could scarcely have gone any worse. Between the double play and making the last out, he was worth a little over -27% gm- and WSWPA last night. Put that together with his struggles all month long and he was about as bad as his teammate Gordon was good. He had been alternating goat and hero all month long; last night he finally made his choice. Salvador Perez was the goat of the post-season.

Top 5 plays by WSWPA:

WS Game 7, bottom of the 9th, runner on 3rd, 2 outs, SFG 3, KCR 2: Salvador Perez pops out to third baseman Pablo Sandoval in foul territory off of Madison Bumgarner. +15.2% WSWPA for San Francisco.
WS Game 7, bottom of the 2nd, one on, no outs, SFG 2, KCR 0: Alex Gordon doubles to right-center field off of Tim Hudson, Billy Butler scores. +13.9% WSWPA for Kansas City.
WS Game 7, top of the 4th, runners on the corners, 1 out, SFG 2, KCR 2: Michael Morse singles to right field off of Kelvin Herrera, Pablo Sandoval scores, Hunter Pence to third. +11.9% WSWPA for San Francisco.
WS Game 7, bottom of the 9th, no on, 2 outs, SFG 3, KCR 2: Alex Gordon singles to left-center field off of Madison Bumgarner, Alex Gordon advances to third on error by center fielder Gregor Blanco. +11.0% WSWPA for Kansas City.
WS Game 7, bottom of the 4th, one on, no outs, SFG 3, KCR 2: Salvador Perez grounds into a double play off of Jeremy Affeldt, second base to shortstop to first base, Alex Gordon out at second. +10.0% WSWPA for San Francisco.

Here's more full-circle: we started the post-season with a game with a whole bunch of awesome events all of which stayed on this list for a mighty long time. We end with every single play on the top-5 list coming from the same game. Now, none of these plays had gmWPA figures remotely as high as those from the AL Wild Card game's best moments. But, well, it's Game 7. It's also a win-or-go-home game, except you also go home if you do win, except you go home with a trophy and a whole bunch of rings. Remarkably, two of these five plays were bad for the batting team. Usually those don't make such a big difference. Man Sal Perez had a bad night. Note also that two of them happened back-to-back in the 9th inning, and that Alex Gordon was involved one way or another in all four of the plays that happened while the Royals were batting. Basically Sal Perez just undid everything Alex Gordon did last night, except for the BBBI double (Billy Butler Batted In) in the 2nd inning. Grrrr. It's also amusing that the pitcher who allowed the Giants' biggest offensive event had a positive WPA on the night.

It's also worth noting that the biggest play from the pre-World Series rounds was at +5.87% WSWPA, and the two World Series plays that had made the top 5 previously were worth +7.575% and +9.675%. There weren't any more plays from last night that beat out that biggest play, but there were three more that beat out the second-biggest previous play, namely Belt's single to load the bases with no outs in the 2nd inning, the Panik double play off the bat of Eric Hosmer in the 3rd, and Hosmer's strikeout to open the 9th. (Yeah, that's about as high-leverage as an out with no one on base can ever be.) Hunter Pence's double play in the 6th inning was at around the same level as Infante's hit from Game 4. Pence, however, had two of the four additional plays from last night that were bigger deals than anything from before the World Series, namely his singles as the second batter of the 2nd and 4th innings after Sandoval had already reached base. The other two were Alcides Escobar's strikeout to open the 8th inning (the second-biggest deal that an out with no one on base can possibly be?) and Brandon Crawford's strikeout with runners at the corners and one out in the 4th.

So in the end, the World Series contributed fifteen plays that were bigger deals than anything that happened before the World Series, as should have happened (at least). Thirteen of them were from Game 7. Full leverage is a wonderful thing.



By way of overall conclusions, I don't have that much to say. Madison Bumgarner is amazing, obviously. I'm shocked that no one from the teams who burnt up all their WSWE prior to the World Series made it onto the bottom 10 list while someone from one of those teams did make it onto the top 10 list. When Kershaw had his second melt-down I did not think that his name would disappear from the top 10 list when all was said and done. It's good to be forgotten because lots of other people screwed up even worse. The Royals had an amazing relief corps, but maybe it would've been nice to have one good starting pitcher as well. There are some problems with this metric, not because it's contextual (that's the whole point, the post-season is intrinsically contextual) but because it doesn't give credit for defense and it can penalize players for things other players do during a play (like getting TOOTBLAN'd ahead of someone's hit, as Posey kept doing to Sandoval). But overall it's been a lot of fun tracking the post-season this way.

I think that, as I have time, I will try to do post-mortems on the eight teams that made it to the Division Series round, looking at who their best and worst players were, how much they got out of the various parts of their roster, etc. But I make no promises about when that's gonna happen. I have all the data, the issue is just finding times when it makes sense to have that be the thing I'm doing.