World Series Win Probability Leaderboards, Final

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

World Series Win Probability Leaderboards, Update #15

So, yeah, I meant to get this written before it was actually the middle of Game 7 already. I failed. Fortunately it's still early in Game 7 so there's not too much to say about how I already know this will change tomorrow. But it will change, probably a lot. Because tonight we get a game with a Leverage Index of 100%. But first, the penultimate update of the post-season. Hopefully this will be slightly more terse than my other updates.

World Series Win Probability Leaderboards, Update #14

Remember when I was all excited about the double-digit WSWPA swings caused by Ryan Vogelsong, Brandon Finnegan, and Pablo Sandoval in Game 4? Yeah, well... They don't seem so impressive anymore. There was surprisingly little movement last night, because one dude sucked up basically all the WPA. People not named Madison Bumgarner didn't really do that much.

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.

World Series Win Probability Leaderboards, Update #12

Finally we had a nice close baseball game last night. You'd think that would mean we finally got our big moment, right? You'd think. Anyway, the Royals are going pretty well. The San Francisco Giants, meanwhile, have frittered away about a third of the WSWPA that they entered the series with. Also they're losing again tonight. Which would be bad for them. They'd have to win out. Mostly on the road. Go Royals.

World Series Win Probability Added Leaderboards, Update #11

Game 2 of the World Series was soooo much better than Game 1. Eric Hosmer agrees.

World Series Win Probability Added Leaderboard Update #10

Looks like I am going to at least do the first single-game update for the World Series. Certainly it's a big update: lots and lots of movement on the leaderboards. That's because there was 31.25% of World Series Win Expectancy up for grabs last night. The previous high for Leverage Index was the 18.8% mark from Games 3 and 4 of the NLCS between the Dodgers and the Cardinals. So yesterday's game was two-thirds more important than the previous most important games in determining who will win the World Series. This is not surprising, of course, it's just striking nonetheless.

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.

World Series Win Probability Added Leaderboards Meta-Update

So, there have been a bunch of League Championship Series games and I haven't given any further updates. This past weekend was a long weekend and I was on a mini-vacation over it, when disrupted my posting schedule. Since I'm already this far behind and since the LCS's are so close to being over, I think I'm just going to wait until they are completely over and then do a big update incorporating the entire round in one fell swoop. I honestly have no idea whether I'll do an update after each World Series game or just after the whole Series; I'll probably try to do one after each game if I can.

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.

World Series Win Probability Added Leaderboards, Day 7

Today saw the third games of both National League Division Series. Down 2 games to none, the Washington Nationals beat the San Francisco Giants to keep their season alive and force a Game 4. The St. Louis Cardinals, meanwhile, beat the Los Angeles Dodgers in a series tied at one game apiece. It may seem counterintuitive given that the former was an elimination game, but the latter actually had twice as many points of World Series Win Expectancy on the line; in fact, it was the highest-"leverage" game, by that standard, since the Wild Card games.

World Series Win Probability Added Leaderboards, Day 6

Two ALDS Game 3's yesterday, each with the perceived underdog team holding a 2-0 lead. Two sweeps. Yeah. The Detroit Tigers and Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim have officially recorded aggregate WSWPA figures of -12.5% for the post-season, dropping from, well, a 12.5% chance to win it all to a 0% chance. The games were pretty low-leverage, though (in the sense of total WSWE points up for grabs, if not exactly from the perspective of the losing team), so they didn't make a huge difference to the existing leaderboards.

World Series Win Probability Leaderboards, Day 5

This post is being written a bit later than usual 'cause I spent the morning dealing with a dead car battery. It includes updates from yesterday's two NLDS games, in which the Giants took a 2-0 lead over the Nationals and the Dodgers tied up their series with the Cardinals at 1-1.

World Series Win Probability Added Leaderboards, Day 4

Yesterday was quite the day of baseball. Four whole games! Baseball from noon to the wee hours of the morning. And some of the games were quite something. Below the fold you will see some deeply, deeply bizarre figures.

World Series Win Probability Added Leaderboards, Day 3 (for real!)

This is a little mini-update, since the last update only included one of the two games played on the relevant date. In a few more minute there will be another, bigger update, featuring all four of the games from yesterday (a.k.a. Friday), but I just wanted to make sure there was a post featuring precisely all of the games through October 2nd.

World Series Win Probability Added Leaderboards, Day 3*

Yesterday (okay, technically it was two calendar days ago, on the East Coast at least) there were two baseball games played. The Orioles gave the Tigers as 12-3 drubbing, and the Royals beat the Angels 3-2. Unfortunately, Baseball-Reference has only posted a box score for the first one. This is a problem because B-R gives me player WPA numbers to one further decimal than FanGraphs does. So the player leaderboards below don't include anyone from that second game, though the list of top plays would conceptually if there were any that made the cut and I'll note if anyone from the Royals/Angels game is in the top 10, even though I won't list them.

World Series Win Probability Added Leaderboards, Day 2

It's Day 2 of the post-season! Or, really, it's day 3, but that means I have access to leaderboards from day 2. So here's the first update of the leaderboards I debuted yesterday, of the best players, worst players, and biggest plays from this year's playoffs, measured by WSWPA.

The Wild Card Games and World Series Win Probability Added

A year ago (wow, I did not remember it had been that long) I introduced the concept of World Series Win Expectancy and Win Probability Added. The idea is simple: you assume that every post-season game is a coin flip and use that assumption to determine the probability of winning the world series from any position in the playoffs, and then within each game you treat the Win Expectancy scale from 0 to 1 as corresponding to the interval from your WSWE if you win to your WSWE if you lose. Individual events that cause a change in your game Win Expectancy, and which therefore accrue Win Probability Added (positive or negative), generate World Series Win Probability Added, and we can therefore be pretty precise about which players and events have had the most impact.

This October, just for fun (and because I have lots of stuff to be procrastinating from) I'll keep a leaderboard of World Series Win Probability Added. I'll keep track of which players have done the most so far in the post-season to help their teams win the World Series, and of which players have done the most to help them fail to win it. I'll also keep track of the most momentous handful of plays. Right now this isn't a super exciting leaderboard. I'm only keeping track of one game, namely the (insane!) Royals/Athletics Wild Card game from last night, because Baseball-Reference (which, unlike FanGraphs, gives me WPA numbers to the tenth of a percent) doesn't put up its box scores until the next day. So right now this is just the WPA numbers from that amazing ballgame divided by eight (because if you win you have a 1/8 chance of winning, whereas if you lose you have, well, a 0/8 chance of winning, so there's one-eighth of WSWE on the line). Tomorrow's update will include the WPA numbers from both Wild Card games, divided by the same constant! But then after that we'll start having players with multiple games played and games of different leverages, so things will start getting interesting. Anyway, leaderboard is below the fold.