The Reds wrested victory from the jaws of defeat this afternoon by coming back in the bottom of the 10th inning for three runs against Eric Gagne and Salmon Torres. In doing so, they absolved Edwin Encarnacion and Jared Burton of rather sloppy performances in the top of the 10th that led to two Brewers runs. Yay!
Here's the win probability graph,
courtesy of Fangraphs:
Eddie's
throwing error cost the Reds 0.133 WPA. His offense (including his two homers) netted a total of 0.215 WPA. So a net positive day for Eddie, but not by a whole lot.
Paul Bako continues to have a fairytale-like April with the Reds, today leading position players with +0.420 win probability added with the stick. Someday, one has to think he'll return to Earth. But it's fun while it lasts!
Eddie's 
Technically, it wasn't a throwing error this time.
ReplyDeleteRight, whoops. I think I just have a Pavlovian sort of response at this point--I see E5, my brain registers throwing error. :)
ReplyDelete-j
Where do you stand on clutch hitting? Do you believe in it or not? Why would a home run in the first inning be worth more than a game-winning home run in the 10th? I understand all about leveraged situations, but still in all,
ReplyDeleteWPA smacks of clutch to me. Just interested in your view on this.
I view WPA as primarily a historical statistic. So, if you want to know the most important plays in a game, WPA directly quantifies that by reporting how much each player influenced a team's chances of winning. That's why I tend to focus on it when talking about games.
ReplyDeleteI do "believe" in clutch, based on the study in The Book, among others. However, indications are that it's a very minor skill, accounting for no more than a few "points" of OBP or wOBA difference among players in clutch situations. Therefore, I don't view WPA as particularly predictive of future performance, which I think is what you're getting at.
It's very hard to predict clutch performance based on past history--that's what the Great Clutch Project is all about. And thus far the "unclutch" best hitters are beating the pants off of the clutch group--especially in terms of influence on games: 1.87 WPA vs. -0.53 WPA.
A less context-dependent statistic is WPA/LI, which is also reported at fangraphs on their player pages and leader boards. It should be much more predictive than WPA in terms of future performance (and I think it is, though I can't remember the particular study).
-j