Clutch: A measurement of how much better or worse a player does in high leverage situations than he would have done in a context neutral environment.

How it’s calculated: WPA / pLI – WPA/LI

Why you should care: Unlike tradition clutch statistics (close & late), Clutch is a much more comprehensive statistic taking into account all situations that may or may not have been high leverage. Additionally, instead of comparing a player to the rest of the field, it compares a player to himself. A player who hits .300 in high leverage situations when he’s an overall .300 hitter is not considered Clutch.

Links and Resources:

All About Clutch
Baseball Fever Forum: SABR Matt

The Japan series is over and no longer do I have to wake up at 6am to catch my daily dose of baseball. I like the idea of having a few games in Japan, but I don’t like having the season opener completely disjointed from the “other” season opener that will take place this Sunday night. It’s kind of a tease. Which leads me to Rich Harden.

Oh Rich Harden, I took a chance on you in all my fantasy drafts last year, but completely forgot about you this year! Needless to say, it looks like this could have been a huge mistake on my part. You struck out 9 in 6 innings of work while only allowing 3 hits and 1 run. The last time you struck out 9 was all the way back in 2005. I pleaded with you last year to stay healthy and it didn’t work so I’ll try again: Please stay healthy this year so you can dazzle us with your pitching ability.

Keith Foulke who retired in 2007 due to health reasons, pitched an inning in both games and struck out 2 while allowing not a single run. He entered both games as the setup man and was used in a fairly high leverage situation (LI of 2.17) in the first game. So far so good for the 35 year old.

Emil Brown made a big base-running error in the first game costing the A’s .25 wins (only -.064 wins overall). He tried to remedy his error in the second game by leading all batters with a WPA of .12 wins, courtesy of his 3 run homer in the 3rd inning.

And finally, Manny Ramirez now leads everyone in WPA and has already eclipsed his 2007 WPA total of .31. Looks like he’s already started to rebound from his worst season ever.

And don’t forget to check out Studes’ latest “Ten Things” column over at The Hardball Times where he delves into the merits of WPA/LI among other things.

The site is now up to date with 2008 stats and will of course be updated nightly. The new pitch data usually runs a day or two behind and that’s why all the pitchers in yesterday’s game have undefined pitch type and velocity data.

Couple quick reminders:

– We’ll have live win probability data all season long including the all-star game and playoffs.

– The live play-by-play data is different from the data that becomes “official” in the nightly loads, which often causes WPA values to change slightly from those found in the live data.

Tangotiger is running his Clutch Project to see if you know which players on your favorite team are clutch. All you need to do is vote for which player you’d want to have at-bat when the game is on the line.

Once the votes are in, we’ll be compiling the results on a daily basis during the season. In the mean time, go vote!

Just as the title says, there are now play logs and box scores for live data. Unlike the graphs they do not update automatically, so you’ll have to refresh the page if you want the latest data. I might change that if enough people would prefer to have it update automatically every 30 seconds to a minute.

WPA/LI (context neutral wins / game state linear weights): How many wins a player contributes to his team with the Leverage Index aspect removed, invented by Tom Tango.

Calculating WPA/LI: WPA is divided by LI for each individual play attributed to a specific player and then the WPA/LI for the individual plays is then added up to create WPA/LI for an entire season. This is considerably different then taking a player’s WPA and dividing it by pLI.

Why you should care: Unlike standard linear weights, WPA/LI does take into account the situation. So at times when a walk would be just as valuable as a home run, WPA/LI accurately weights the walk and the home run, where linear weights would still give .13 wins to the home run and the walk .03 wins.

Links and Resources:

Unleveraging Win Probability
The Book Wiki: Linear Weights

The following spring training games should be available with live Win Probability and of course we’ll have all regular season, all-star, and playoff games with live Win Probability as well.

3/18/2008 4:05PM OAK TEX
3/18/2008 4:05PM KC CHC

3/19/2008 12:05PM TOR BOS
3/19/2008 4:05PM COL CWS

3/20/2008 1:05PM TB CLE
3/20/2008 1:05PM FLA STL

3/21/2008 1:05PM TOR DET
3/21/2008 1:10PM WAS NYM

3/24/2008 1:05PM STL MIN
3/24/2008 4:05PM SD LAA

LI (leverage index): A measure of how important a particular situation is in a baseball game depending on the inning, score, outs, and number of players on base, created by Tom Tango.

Baselines: The average LI is 1 and is considered a neutral situation. 10% of all real game situations have a LI greater than 2, while 60% have a LI less than 1.

Why you should care: Because LI puts a single number on the importance of a situation, it creates a much simpler and specific way of determining which situations in games are important. It can also be applied to players. See below for various LI player stats:

pLI: A player’s average LI for all game events.
phLI: A batter’s average LI in only pinch hit events.
gmLI: A pitcher’s average LI when he enters the game.
inLI: A pitcher’s average LI at the start of each inning.
exLI: A pitcher’s average LI when exiting the game.

See Critical Situations: Part 3 for more details

Additional Links and Resources:

Critical Situations Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
Leverage Index Tables

The leaderboards are up for Pitch Type & Velocity! There are a couple standard leaderboard functions that do not work with the Pitch Type tab.

-Starters and Relievers cannot be broken down yet.
-You cannot filter by league.
-You can select the minimum IPs.
-You can select only qualified players.

If there’s a % sign in the column, it’s the percentage of pitches thrown and if there’s a “v” after the pitch type, it’s the average velocity of the pitch.

Quick refresher on what means what: FB – Fastball, SL – Slider, CT – Cutter, CB -Curveball, CH- Changeup, SF – Split-fingered Fastball, KN – Knuckleball, XX – Unidentified, PO – Pickoff Attempt

RC (runs created): An estimator of how many runs a batter produces for his team, created by Bill James.

“Basic”: ((H + BB) * (1B + (2*2B) + (3*3B) + (4*HR))) / (AB + BB)

“Technical”: ((H + BB – CS + HBP – GDP) * ((1B + (2*2B) + (3*3B) + (4*HR) + (.26 * (BB – IBB + HBP)) + (.52 * (SH + SF + SB)))))/ (AB + BB + HBP + SF + SH)

Which formula and when: FanGraphs employs both formulas depending on what stats are available for individual seasons. Seasons prior to 1955 use the “Basic” formula and any season after and including 1955 uses the “Technical” formula.

Why you should care: Runs Created is a good estimator of how many runs a team should have scored in a given season. When applied to players, it is somewhat less accurate though still a useful estimator of a player’s actual production.

Variations: There are other run estimators that do a better job then Runs Created, yet one of the main advantage of Runs Created is that it’s extremely easy to calculate. Other run estimators include: Batting Runs, Base Runs, Extrapolated Runs, Estimated Runs Produced, Equivalent Runs.

Links and Resources:

Wikipedia: Runs Created
A Brief History of Run Estimation: Runs Created
How Runs are Really Created Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
The Book Wiki: Runs Created
The Book Wiki: Run Estimators