Wasting time between trades...
Here are a few links I stole from an article at The Hardball Times, to help pass the time while we all wait to see what this big bombshell is that Theo is working on:
Clutchiness: A sweet site that updates daily, what it basically does is subtract the number of wins a player has been worth so far this season (based on OBP, SLG, and plate appearances) from their leveraged WPA score, giving you the number of "clutch" wins that the player has really been worth. Sadly, there's no way to rank pitchers yet. A-Rod's total is priceless.
Baseball Race: Watch any pennant race ever in the form of an actual race to the finish line. Strangely hypnotic. Check out the 2003 AL Central to follow the historically bad Tigers and the eventual demise of the surprising Royals.
2 comments:
Has WPA taken off, or what? I still think it's a little overdone, because you can get a huge percentage of your total for a season by happening to come up big in just a couple of key at bats. Those at bats are clutch, but WPA really only tells you that they player was clutch in those few at bats - not that they've shown a pattern of coming up big in important situations all season.
It's a nice descriptive stat of what happened, but I've yet to see any evidence that "clutchiness" is a repeatable skill. But it's still fun.
I think of it as a good tie-breaker stat. Like if two players have pretty similar numbers and you want to see who was "more clutch," it's a good way to settle the score. It's a good way to compare similar players, but not to compare, for example, a closer to a leadoff hitter. But mostly, yeah, it's fun.
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