FanGraphs Weekly Awards: 4/14/08

Week two of baseball is officially in the books as of two days ago. Lots of surprises this year including David Ortiz trailing baseball in WPA, WPA/LI, and BRAA. He’s dead last, by a lot. Maybe he’ll land himself a not so coveted Worst of the Week award.

Batter of the Week:

Travis Buck takes top honors this week with .806 wins. His biggest hit of the week was on April 10th where he hit a 2 run double in the top of the 9th worth .391 wins. He hit 6 doubles and 1 triple the entire week and while he may not have hit any home runs or had the best OPS, his consistent hitting was definitely the most timely.

Pitcher of the Week:

Matt Capps narrowly beat out Wandy Rodriguez with .84 wins to become the pitcher with the highest WPA of the week. Capps threw five scoreless innings including two that were very high leverage extra innings.

Worst of the Week:

Joe Borowski’s -0.897 wins was by far the worst of any player. David Ortiz as the worst batter gave him a run for his money with -.565 wins, but Borowski giving up a walk-off grand slam to Torii Hunter was really something special. The way things are going, Borowski could win this award next week too!

The Biggest Hit:

.712 wins – Travis Hafner hit the biggest home run of the season off of Justin Speier with 2 outs, in the top of the 9th, and a man on first to put his team up 4-3. Jake Westbrook closed out the game for the win and his first complete game of the year.

The Biggest Out:

-.347 wins – With the A’s up by 1 and a man on 1st and 2nd in the bottom of the 13th inning, Keith Foulke induced a game ending double play ball hit by Aaron Hill. The Leverage Index in that situation was an extremely high 7.16 and it was the biggest out of the season thus far.





David Appelman is the creator of FanGraphs.

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