Individual Play Logs
You may have noticed there’s a new tab in the player pages called “Play Log”. This will give you every single play for the selected player in any given year. It’s currently sorted by WPA so you can easily tell which plays were the most/least important.
It’s a little slow for my tastes and I’ll see what I can do to speed it up. Sorting is currently disabled because it was extremely slow. If you desperately want to do sorting, you can add “&sort=wpa” query string to the end of the url. The options for the querystring are “li”, “braa”, “wpa”, and “day”. Update: Sorting is now enabled, but you can no longer click on the play to find out the pitch sequence. I’ll get that fixed soon enough.
This is still pretty bare-bones right now, but I’m sure as the season goes on there will be substantial improvements.
David Appelman is the creator of FanGraphs.
David, this is incredible. I wish I had the time to hole myself up for forty eight hours and pore over these.
I agree, fantastic.
***
Looking at Ortiz’s play log, he gets an enormous credit for a wild pitch in this game, 5th inning:
http://www.fangraphs.com/plays.aspx?date=2007-04-27&team=Yankees
I have three comments:
1. Your second column, “Player”, is really either the batter or runner. Another column, indicating that this is a PA or non-PA event would be more helpful.
2. It seems Ortiz is getting the whole +.112 WPA here, rather than it being split. Or perhaps, it is being split, but the way you have it presented (single player) in the game log, and the player’s play log, doesn’t represent that. Perhaps making use of the new column I’m suggesting above, you can denote that it’s a 2-runner or 3-runner split.
3. The inning, base, and out columns represent the before-event, while the score represents the after-event. While not confusing in the game log, it now seems a bit off in the player log. I think the score column should either show the before-event, like the other game-state columns, or it should be moved to the WPA/BRAA set, as those denote the impact of the play.
Or perhaps add another column, “R”, that shows the number of runs on the play. The added benefit here is that you can then sort on this column, and all the run-scoring plays will bubble to the top.
In any case, everything is fantastic.
Thanks!
1. This is not such an easy fix right now on the web side of things. I have the data, but it’s arranged in a way where the loading will be unbearably slow. Until I have the opportunity to put together some more optimized tables, this is a no-go. (Same goes for splitting up base-running and batting WPA).
2. Oritz is getting all the credit here. This is one of those situations where the play is not completely broken up and all the credit goes to the lead runner. I’m keeping of list of things to look at in the play-by-play files and this is on that. This is probably work for the off-season.
3. Ah hah! This I can do immediately. I like the idea of having the runs before and an additional R column. I’ll add a a sorting option for that in the querystring as well. I’m not sure when real sorting will finally be turned on.
David,
I showed this to one of my friends who either doesn’t completely understand WPA or doesn’t think it’s legitimate. He asked why it doesn’t account the importance of the game (such as a game in april vs. a game in september). I told him that the contect of the game doesn’t matter becuase every game counts the same, but couldn’t think of an argument in favor of WPA taking things into account outside of just the context of the individual game.
P.S. I just thought of this while writing… why not give the home team the 54% chance it has of winning when calculating WPA?
I know someone talked about doing a sort of playoff probability added. But I don’t actually remember where. It was probably on Hardball Times if you want to poke around.
As for the 54%, there is a very long thread in the forum that goes into pretty much every minute detail of that same thought. The short version is: It doesn’t make much of a difference. <----- That's actually a link.
Dan,
Game win probability has merit, as done Playoff win probability. One is not better than the other. They each answer its own question.
As for how to describe this to your friend, that’s easy. Tell him to place bets after every single PA, as to who will win. The win probability chart will give you that.
Tom
Would it be possible to have another column reporting the “play” in the most sintetic form? (i.e.: BB, K, 1B, HR…).