Congratulations to Bernie Sanders on his First Good State Result!

Woohoo! He finally beat the 538 benchmarks in a state! And it'll almost certainly be two of them by night's end. His shocking 10-point victory in Oklahoma was six points ahead of his +4% benchmark, and he looks on pace to win Colorado by about six surplus points as well, with a 17-point win.

That is officially the end of the good news for Bernie Sanders tonight. Well, okay, a 73-point win in Vermont ain't bad, even if it falls short of the +83% benchmark. But his ~15-point win in Minnesota will fall short of a +21% benchmark. Meanwhile he's failing to win two states he should've won: Massachusetts, which he should've won by about 11% and will instead lose by 2% (which I think is brutal for his campaign), and Tennessee. Oh, Tennessee. 538 thinks it should've been a very competitive state. It had other ideas, joining its Southern neighbors in giving Hillary a landslide win at +37%. Taken all by itself that would imply a 39-point national lead for Hillary. Obviously that's ridiculous, but these benchmarks are just approximations and the real results would vary a little. Which is to say, the massive surplus in Tennessee for Clinton makes up for Bernie's good results in Colorado and Oklahoma.

And then we get to the rest of the South, where he was projected to lose big but actually lost bigger. In the current approximations of the final results, he's 16 points behind his benchmark in Georgia, 20 points behind in Texas, 24 points behind in Arkansas, and 28 points behind in Alabama.

Add it all together and Hillary's running about 15 points ahead of the benchmarks in the states that voted tonight. Add in the four early states and it's... still 15%. We're getting a fairly consistent view of the race, not so much state to state but when you add it all up. Sanders has run a great campaign, and his five state wins so far really are amazing given where he came from. But he's not there yet, and at this point, with the battle-lines hardening ever more, it really doesn't look like he can get there.

And even if he does, he'll need to make up for the big wins Hillary's already banked. Which looks basically impossible given the proportional delegate allocation.

Within a few weeks it's gonna start looking like Bernie shouldn't really be in the race anymore.

There's Not a Single State Where Polling (or Voting) Suggests Sanders is Leading

FiveThirtyEight just rolled out a new version of the projections I discussed in this piece. It incorporates several new demographic factors, including an urban/rural split. One interesting thing about it is that, if the race is tied, Hillary will be winning about fifteen states, out of fifty: this implies that her support is more strongly concentrated into a few big states where she has major advantages, where Sanders has more modest advantages across a larger number of smaller states. Or to put it another way, in order to win, Sanders really needs to feel like he's winning.

And... boy does this ever not look like a race where Sanders is winning. The first three states now look way better for Hillary: instead of implying national leads of 6, 7, and 2 points respectively, Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada now imply leads of 19, 10, and 5. Meanwhile, they also put the current 538 polling averages into their latest chart, and... whaddaya know, Sanders is currently beating his benchmarks in a whopping zero states. You've got some states, like South Carolina, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, Texas, and North Carolina, that don't look all that different from a tied race; Hillary's beating those benchmarks by single digits. But then you've got, jeez. Sanders ought to be winning Tennessee, narrowly; he's losing it by 25 points. Similarly in Michigan, where he's 20 points behind his benchmark. And then looking a little further down the calendar, you've got more states Sanders ought to be winning, or maybe even winning big, like Utah and Wisconsin. You've got big states he's got to win, like Pennsylvania and California. Hillary's leading them all: by eight, two, twenty-two, and thirteen, respectively. There just isn't a single real bright spot for Sanders in the state polling we have right now. Overall, taking a rough average of all these future states, it looks like a Clinton +13 race right now. That's very similar to the numbers implied by the first three states that have voted, which were maybe consistent with a +11 race overall.

And this, by the way, makes me skeptical of the polls we're seeing showing more like a +5 Clinton race nationally, or the one that had Sanders leading for what is I believe the first time ever. If that's so, there has to be somewhere in this nation where he's doing better than you might expect given a tied race. But those national polls that are more optimistic for Sanders, that's basically where the single most optimistic individual state data-points for him are at. And that makes it tough to view them as anything other than outliers, or perhaps pollsters whose weighting algorithms are off.

But, we shall see.

Where We're At in the Democratic Primary

A few days ago, FiveThirtyEight published a very useful piece that essentially laid out the landscape for the 2016 Democratic primary. They used some polling data, fundraising, demographics, and Facebook popularity to figure out how we can expect each state to vote if Hillary is leading by twelve points, and alternately how we would expect them to vote if she's fallen into a tie with Bernie--i.e., the first projection shifted over by twelve points, plus or minus rounding errors. And what this lets us do is convert individual state results into an estimate of how the race stands nationally, both with actual results and with polls.

So, for example, they show Nevada as a pro-Hillary state, one that should go to her by about 3 points even if the race is tied. If in fact Nevada ends up as basically a tie tomorrow (and we have very little idea what will happen there; there have only been three polls, all low-quality ones, in recent weeks), that's a fantastic result for Bernie. Even if it comes out as Hillary +6%, the most pro-Hillary of the three recent polls, that's a very good result for him. Conversely, Hillary's got something like a 25-point lead in the South Carolina polling average, which would be even better than the +23% win they project for her with a national 12-point lead. It's to be expected that different states will give different signals, because these projections are by no means perfect. (It's like extrapolating election night results on the assumption of uniform swing: it's a good approximation but never quite holds.) Indeed it kind of looks like a decent guess for Nevada is the national-tie scenario, while a decent guess for South Carolina is the Clinton lead scenario.

One interesting thing, though, is that the two states that have voted so far both say the same thing about the race. Iowa was a tie, falling almost precisely between the two projections (+7% for Hillary if she's up big, +6% for Bernie if it's a tie). Meanwhile, though Sanders won big in New Hampshire, by 22%, he didn't win as big as he should have if the race is a tie, which would've been 29%. Both states, therefore, imply a Clinton lead of roughly 6 or 7 points nationwide. Which confirms my feeling that those results were decent for Clinton, even though they looked pretty lousy. To be sure it's remarkably that Sanders is within 6 or 7 points nationally, but that's still a pace that has Hillary winning. If that pace holds, we should see Hillary winning by nearly 10 points in Nevada and by 16 or 17 in South Carolina; more likely we'll see a similar average result between those two states but highly disparate individual signals.

In any case, it's just something to keep an eye on, as a guide to interpreting each state's results.

In Defense of Cautious Football Coaches.

FiveThirtyEight is on a crusade. Well, I guess they're just one of many people on this particular crusade, but since I'm not a football fan they're most of where I encounter it. Specifically it's the crusade to get football coaches to be less conservative in their decision-making about things like punting or going for it on 4th down. Or about two-point conversations. They've got another piece today, arguing that a couple of NFL coaches who made ill-fated decisions in this weekend's playoff games had committed "crimes against middle-school math." This is basically because, in certain situations, you can show using simple math that going for two-point conversations after touchdowns is the correct call by win expectancy, even when failing to convert would mean falling one point short. Roughly speaking that's because you often lose in overtime; to a first approximation it's a 50/50 shot, and if you're on the road it's a lot worse than that. So if you're a road team with something approaching a 50% chance of making your two-point conversion when it would win you the game outright, it's better to go for it.

But I feel like this is missing something: maybe the goal isn't always to maximize win expectancy. This is perhaps the most radical idea in all of sports. Maybe it's even more radical than the whole "maybe we shouldn't really be playing football at all, guys" thing. It's close, anyway. Well, there's a category of things called "sportsmanship," I guess, where it's routine not to maximize win expectancy. But I'm talking more broadly than that. Maybe we care about things other than just the end-of-the-day result. My hypothesized other value in this context is that losing now and losing later are different things. The 538 calculations implicitly treat them as the same, and indeed, one week later they have awfully similar consequences. But it's possible, isn't it, that they're not really the same. And if losing later is better than losing now, then you get something out of the cautious, "wrong" decisions the 538 people inveigh against in exchange for those points of Win Expectancy. You get to keep playing. You get hope, at least a few more minutes of it. Maybe, sometimes, that's worth it.

Now, I don't know anything about football, really, but I do know baseball, and I know that I always breathe an immense sigh of relief whenever the Mets tie up a game. The difference between one run down and a tie is, to me, the most emotionally significant one there is late in games, because it means you're not losing. It means something has to go wrong in order for the game to end with a bad result. Of course, something might go wrong, and if you're not leading then you need something to go right before something goes wrong. (Against the Royals in the World Series, for instance, that felt juts about impossible.) But, phew, not losing is a wonderful feeling. It's the feeling of, okay, we were down 8-1, maybe, but we've just put up a six-run inning--but that seventh run, that's what makes it mean something. That's a multitude of sins washed away; that's a fresh start to the ballgame. The go-ahead run can seem almost unimportant in comparison, even though it's not, really.

Now, baseball isn't football. There's rarely a situation that calls for a genuine strategic choice here, although for what it's worth, in the late innings, if I'm down a run and have a chance to sacrifice-bunt a runner over to third base with one out, I'm gonna do that more often than not, even though it's at best a neutral move from a win probability standpoint, because I'd rather attain that wonderful status of not losing now and worry about the actual winning part later than go for broke now and fail. But maybe similar concerns aren't really felt by football fans. And maybe the immense awesomeness of winning now by going for that two-point conversion with seconds left in the fourth quarter would outweigh them, if ever anyone would try to do it. But the point, really, is just that it's a little too simple to do the win probability analysis and call it a day. There might be things besides just who wins and who loses at the end of the day that matters.

The Mets lost the World Series. They lost it despite having led in the late innings of four of five games; they could almost as easily have won the series in five games. And in Game 5, Matt Harvey was pitching the game of his life. For eight innings. Eight glorious, shut-out, five-hit innings. With nine strikeouts. But then came the ninth inning. The team was up 2-0, Harvey had thrown 102 pitches, and the Mets had Jeurys Familia, ace closer, waiting in the bullpen. Terry Collins brought Harvey back out to start the ninth. He walked Lorenzo Cain, I believe after a few close calls that he maybe should've had. Then Cain stole second and Eric Hosmer doubled. Familia came in and got three ground-ball outs, and indeed, had Lucas Duda made a routine throw home on the second of them, the game would've ended. But he missed, and Hosmer scored, and the Royals went on to beat up Addison Reed and Bartolo Colon in the 12th to claim the Series.

It's easy to criticize Terry Collins there for making the wrong move. And maybe, in a pure win-maximization sense, he did. But Mike Francesa did a segment about it the next day, plus or minus a weekend or two, and said, look. Collins chose to trust his player. He put his faith in Matt Harvey, who had pitched lights-out with all his heart that day. And it backfired. But isn't that what sports is all about? We're here to see great players do incredible things, are we not? Matt Harvey completing that game would have been legendary. (To my mind, the first eight innings still deserve to be legendary; they sure were amazing to watch.) Isn't it a better world where managers will put their faith in their greatest players and give them the chance to do incredible things, even when that doesn't make the most sense, then where they meticulously hew to what some probability chart tells them about optimal strategy?

I found that segment incredibly moving, and it helped me find a real sense of peace about the fact that the Mets lost the Series. Now, I still don't think I agree with Collins' managing: I would absolutely have brought Harvey back out for the ninth, but the leash would have been precisely one baserunner. After that first walk I would absolutely have brought Familia in, no questions asked. That, to me, would have struck the right balance between putting your faith in your player and still also doing what's necessary to win. But Francesa helped me remember that it isn't, it shouldn't be, all about winning. That way lies becoming the Yankees. Sports, ultimately, is entertainment, and we should play the game in a way that's fun, even if that sometimes means losing when we could have won. There are worse fates.

I don't know if this is what's going on in these football contexts, but I wish the public discourse on the issue would at least consider the possibility.

On Yoenis Cespedes and the MVP

So. .312/.357/.675. 36 runs driven, and 33 scored, in over 36 games. 14 homers, three triples, and nine doubles over that time. Four stolen bases, never caught stealing (for what that's worth). Mostly while playing center field, and providing dynamic defense in center or in left. That's what Yoenis Cespedes has done since coming to the New York Mets. Oh, and since they acquired him (including one game after the trade but before Cespedes got to the team) the Mets are 26 and 11. They've surged from two game behind the Washington Nationals to seven games up on them, including going 6-0 against the Nationals themselves. Before they got Cespedes, Baseball Prospectus gave the Mets just a 26.8% chance of seeing the Division series; now (not even including tonight's win) that's up to 94.6%. And Cespedes has been everywhere. He had a home run and also a run-scoring double in Monday's game, hit a big two-out, bases-clearing double in last night's game to get the Mets all the way back from a 7-1 deficit to trailing by just a single run (and would later score the tying run), and tonight he absolutely crushed a hanging slider off Drew Storen for a two-run shot to give the Mets a lead they would not relinquish in the 8th.

It's got people, at least Mets people, talking about Yoenis Cespedes for National League Most Valuable Player. Which, y'know. He wasn't in the National League on July 30th. Gary Cohen was saying after tonight's game that he had been thinking over the Cespedes-for-MVP chatter prior to the game and was skeptical, but then Cespedes was the hero yet again, and at some point you just have to wonder. Especially since the guy who's having the absolutely bonkers season, hitting .336/.467/.657 including a heroic if futile 10-total-bases effort tonight against the Mets, is Bryce Harper, who plays for the Washington Nationals, who have just suffered a miserable collapse. Harper is unambigously the best player in baseball this year (his full-season line is better than Cespedes's line with just with the Mets), but sometimes best players in baseball don't win the MVP if their team disappoints. So that makes you start to wonder whether there's a window for a non-traditional candidacy from Yoenis. And for what it's worth, his whole-season stats are MVP-worthy, if divided between two leagues. Including his numbers with the Tigers Cespedes is hitting .298/.333/.554 with 32 homers, 37 doubles, 5 triples (for 74 total extra-base hits), 95 runs scored, and 97 runs driven in. FanGraphs credits Cespedes with 2.6 Wins Above Replacement with the Mets so far, and 6.6 WAR on the season. That's a very MVP pace; indeed, his Mets pace is at peak Ruth/Bonds levels.

Now, this is not necessarily the only kind of argument one could make, and there's certainly plenty of reason to think that past years' MVP voting practices were quite flawed, but it's interesting, I think, to look at other players who've done something like what Cespedes is up to. Here are three examples from the last decade-plus:

Tiger 2000 >>> Jordan 2015

One of the announcers on the early coverage of the last round of the PGA Championship suggested that if Jordan Spieth were to win, for his third major championship of the year, he would have had the best year ever. Ahem. This is ridiculous. Here's what Spieth has done so far this year. He's won four tournaments, two of them majors, the others both relatively minor tournaments (the Valspar Championship and the John Deere Classic). He's finished second three times, third once, and in the top 10 thirteen times overall out of 20 tournaments. He's missed two cuts, one of them at the Players Championship, and has finished outside the top 25 four times in all. Now, that's a really, really great season.

But in 2000, Tiger Woods won, including three consecutive majors, nine total tournaments. He won his three majors by a combined 23 shots, compared to the 5 by which Spieth won his first two (and he doesn't look to add more than another couple today, if he does win). Overall Tiger won those nine tournaments by a combined margin of 46 shots, including three wins by at least 8 shots; both of Spieth's non-major wins were in playoffs, so he's got a combined margin of victory of just 5. Also, Tiger missed zero cuts; in fact, he didn't once finish outside the top 25! Only three times did he miss the top 10, compared to Spieth's seven (and counting). He led the Tour in GIR%, holes per eagle, birdies per round, scoring average (adjusted or otherwise), total driving, ball-striking, all-around ranking, par-3 scoring average, par-4 scoring average, par-5 scoring average, birdie percentage on par 4s and on par 5s, bounce-back, birdie conversion percentage, par breaker percentage, scoring average in rounds 1, 2, and 3, front and back nine scoring average, total eagles, lowest round, and, of course, the official money list. He was also World #1, by an enormous margin. Like, practically a 3-1 margin. Also he finished second in driving distance, putts per GIR, and final round scoring average, and was third in scrambling. His all-around ranking (the sum of his ranks in eight key statistics) was 40% lower than the second-place finisher, David Duval.

Spieth, meanwhile, leads the Tour in the following statistics, of those that existed in 2000: birdie average, scoring average (actual and adjusted), putts per GIR, one-putt percentage, putts per round, putts per round in round 2, lowest round, par breaker percentage, round 2 scoring average, back 9 scoring average, scoring average and birdie percentage on par 4s, lowest average, and, of course, the money list. That's a lot! But it's not as much as Tiger; in fact, Tiger led every single one of those stats except for the putting stats (and he was second in putts per GIR, the best putting stat that existed back in 2000). Meanwhile, Spieth is 55th in GIR%, 42nd in total driving (including 76th in distance and 85th in accuracy), 25th in par-3 scoring, 20th in par-5 scoring. Oh, and he's third in all-around ranking, with a figure about 30% above Will Wilcox's leading figure. (What?!)

The point is that, obviously, Jordan Spieth is a great player, and is having a great year, but he isn't coming close to dominating the Tour, either in terms of performance or in terms of statistics, the way Tiger did. If we're talking best years ever, and we're excluding Bobby Jones's 1930 for some reason and don't consider Hogan's 1953, or any of the years when he or Byron Nelson or whoever won double digits of tournaments, then there just isn't any question. Tiger's 2000 was the best year anyone has ever had, and I daresay it will continue to be for a long, long time.

Update on the Bartolo Colon Saberhagenometer

It's, uh, not going well. In our last update, which was also the first update, Bartolo Colon had five wins on the season against just one walk. Since then, though, he's got a 5-10 record and has walked 13 batters, dropping him to 10 wins and 14 walks on the season. His Saberhagen score is, thus, -4. Now, he's closed that gap a little bit recently, with no walks in his last four starts, one of which he won. And if he were to pitch really really well the rest of the way it wouldn't be crazy to see him climb back toward positive territory here. But it's really not very likely. If you want a Saberhagen, you really can't afford three-walk games, or back-to-back multi-walk games, or five starts in a row with a walk. Bartolo's had all three (and none of them overlapped). So, it's not looking good.

However! Five of his walks have been of the intentional variety, and in a sense it's not really fair to penalize him for them. In a sense it is, as it was his pitching that created the need to issue the walk, but they also don't represent his inability to throw strikes or anything like that. So if we define the Modified Saberhagen, defined as Wins minus (Walks minus Intentional Walks), then Colon is still at +1, and has a much more reasonable shot at it. Interestingly, Saberhagen had no intentional walks in 1994, so his Modified Saberhagen score was identical to his normal Saberhagen score at +1. Of course, the Modified Saberhagen isn't really as impressive as the proper Saberhagen, but it's still got some validity.

It's a bit trickier to get a sense of who else has pulled off the Modified Saberhagen, since the "unintentional walks" stat often isn't kept as its own thing. I was able to make a rough stab at it using some custom FanGraphs leaderboards, though, which reveal two other completed seasons that just barely pulled it off: 2005 Carlos Silva (9 W, 9 BB, 2 IBB) and 2014 Phil Hughes (16 W, 16 BB, 1 IBB). Then there's 1997 Greg Maddux, who won 19 games and walked 20 batters, but six of those were intentional, giving him a Modified Saberhagen of +5! As much as all the other Saberhageners put together, counting 2015 Bartolo Colon. Maddux finished second in the Cy Young Award voting that year, to Pedro Martinez's last season with the Expos, and deservedly so, but only because peak Pedro was insane.

Now, this list only includes players who qualified for the ERA title and who played at a time when they keep track of intentional walks. So there may be others who have pulled off the Modified Saberhagen who don't show up here. (I could check for those with fewer innings, but that would just be more work so I'm not going to.) I think it's pretty clear that the Modified Saberhagen is orders of magnitude less impressive than the proper one, even if Saberhagen himself didn't care about the difference. Still, at least Colon's season isn't entirely lost.

Introducing the Bartolo Colon Saberhagenometer

In 1994, Bret Saberhagen, of the New York Metropolitan Baseball Club, did something rather impressive, something no one had done since 1919: he had more wins than walks. In 24 starts, he went 14-4 (the season was, you recall, strike-shortened), and allowed a meager 13 walks. No one who's thrown enough innings to qualify for the ERA title has done that since the deadball era. Two of the three people who did it between 1901 and 1919 were Christy Mathewson. A few relievers have done it in the interim, and plenty of people who didn't pitch a full season or anything like it, but no one with at least 65 innings pitched. Of course, Saberhagen's feat is slightly tainted by the strike, since he didn't get to keep it up over a full season, but that wasn't his fault.

Anyway, the point is, Bartolo Colon. He just won his fifth game of the season, out of six starts (the other being a rather tough loss because the Mets' offense got atrocious for a while there). In his first start, on Opening Day, he walked a dude. He hasn't made that mistake again. So, yeah, that's 1 walk, 5 wins. So I am hereby introducing the Saberhagenometer, a statistic defined as Wins Minus Walks. Bartolo Colon 2015 is the all-time leader in the statistic, at +4. (Well, okay, Christy Mathewson put up a +4 season in 1913, with 25 wins against just 21 walks, Dick Hall was +4 in 61.1 innings over 32 relief appearances at 10 and 6, and Deacon Phillippe was actually +5 in 1910 in 121.2 innings over 8 starts and 23 relief appearances, but he's bloody well close enough.) And like, I dunno, it seems like he could keep it up. He really gives off the impression of simply having decided that walking people is a bad idea, so he's not gonna do it. So this will be something to keep an eye on over the course of the season. And if he does get it done, the fact that the only two to do it in the modern era will both have been New York Mets is just pretty damn cool.

Oh, also, Matt Harvey is currently at +1 on the Saberhagenometer at 5 W, 4 BB, as is Michael Pineda of that other New York team at 3/2. That doesn't seem like nearly enough of a cushion, although since Matt Harvey is going to go 33-0 this year I guess he's got a chance.

For the Record

Mike Piazza made his MLB debut in 1992, and played in 1912 games until his retirement after the 2007 season. Over his 7745 plate appearances, he had 2127 hits, including 344 doubles and 427 home runs, and drew 759 walks against 1113 strikeouts, good for a batting line of .308/.377/.545. That gives him a wRC+ of 140. He drove in 1335 runs and scored 1048. Piazza was a catcher for at least part of 1630 of those games, 1602 of which as the starting catcher (the rest of his time split between first base and the designated hitter role), and while his 23% caught stealing mark was well below the league average of 31% and he wasn't the world's best pitch-blocker either, he is thought to have been one of the best catchers at history in framing pitches to produce extra called strikes, and his pitchers loved throwing to him. Add it all up and Piazza was worth 59.4 bWAR and 63.5 fWAR, the sixth- and fifth-highest marks all-time for a catcher, respectively (in both cases virtually tied with Yogi Berra). Versus a more stringent baseline, Piazza put up 35.7 bWAA and 38.4 fWAA*, and during the productive portion of his career, from 1993 through 2003, he accumulated 38 bWAA and 41.2 fWAA. Piazza also hit .242/.301/.458 over 133 post-season plate appearances, hitting six home runs and eight doubles and racking up 15 RBIs and 14 runs scored, and leading the New York Mets to the 2000 World Series with a monstrous .412/.545/.941 batting line in the NLCS and put up a .636 slugging percentage against the Yankees. Earlier today, in his third year on the ballot, Piazza received votes from 69.9% of Hall of Fame voters, just shy of the 75% necessary for enshrinement.

Craig Biggio made his MLB debut in 1988, and played in 2850 games until his retirement after the 2007 season. Over his 12504 plate appearances, he had 3060 hits, including 668 doubles and 291 home runs, and drew 1160 walks against 1753 strikeouts, good for a batting line of .281/.363/.433. That give shim a wRC+ of 115. He drove in 1175 runs and scored 1844. He also stole 414 bases, and was caught stealing 124 times. Like Piazza he came up as a catcher and caught in 428 games, but moved off the position. Biggio spent 363 games in the outfield but the vast bulk of his time at second base, appearing there in 1989 games. Though he won four Gold Gloves at second base from 1994 through 1997, available defensive metrics view him as having been mediocre at every position he played. Add it all up and Biggio was worth 65.1 WAR (per both sources), the twelfth- and tenth-highest totals for a second baseman ever, respectively. He accrued 28.7 bWAA and 24.3 fWAA, and during the productive portion of his career, from 1989 through 2001, he accumulated 35.6 bWAA and 30.0 fWAA. He also hit .234/.295/.323 over 185 post-season plate appearances, hitting two home runs and nine doubles with 11 RBIs and 23 runs scored, and was part of the 2005 Houston Astros team that made it to the World Series. (Biggio hit .295/.343/.377 in that post-season.) Earlier today, in his third year on the ballot, Biggio received the votes of 82.7% of the voters, and will therefore be inducted into the Hall of Fame later this year.

Mike Piazza was a better baseball player than Craig Biggio. This is, I think, incontrovertible. Piazza was the undisputed best-hitting catcher of all time. Biggio was a decent hitter and a decent baserunner, and maybe a decent fielder if we believe the people voting on Gold Gloves (though not if we believe the admittedly fairly primitive defensive metrics--in fact, both FanGraphs and Baseball-Reference have Biggio with more negative defensive value at his positions, and at less valuable positions), but nothing special in any regard. But Biggio wasn't a catcher (or at least, unlike Piazza, he had to stop being one early in his career), and so he played a lot more games than Piazza and stuck around long enough after he was still good to get 3000 hits. Also, because he wasn't renowned for his power, he manages to escape the pall of the Steroid Era, which Piazza apparently doesn't despite the abject lack of anything remotely resembling evidence that he cheated. There is a cogent argument that Craig Biggio should not be a Hall of Famer. There is no cogent argument that Mike Piazza should not be a Hall of Famer. For at least a year, Biggio but not Piazza will be in the Hall. That's absurd, and the writers had better not make the travesty last any further years.

Piazza 2016!



*FanGraphs does not actually give a Wins Above Average statistic, but it gives Runs Above Average statistics for the four major components of WAR (hitting, baserunning, fielding, and position), and I calculated the listed figures from those.

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.