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 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.

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.