Shutdowns & Meltdowns

by
May 6, 2010

This week there’s been a lot of discussion on The Book Blog about creating a save style metric based on WPA. The end result of the discussion was to create two stats: Shutdowns and Meltdowns.

A Shutdown is when a reliever accumulates greater than or equal to 0.06 WPA in any individual game.

A Meltdown is when a reliever’s WPA is less than or equal to -0.06 in any individual game.

The entire discussion of Shutdowns and Meltdowns was started off by Jeff Zimmerman’s “saves rant” over at Beyond the Box Score and then the creation of the new metric was hashed out on The Book Blog here and here.

The number of Shutdowns are scaled to Saves + Holds, which is where the .06 thresholds originated.

Both these metrics: Shutdowns (SD) and Meltdowns (MD) are available in the Win Probability leaderboards and teams sections and will eventually make it into the player pages. Remember you will either need to click on “All Players” or “Relievers” since starting pitchers are not eligible for Shutdowns or Meltdowns.

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David Appelman is the creator of FanGraphs.

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Bob Dylan
15 years ago

I just orgasm-ed.

3