Major League Baseball will announce the winner of the 2011 American League Most Valuable Player this afternoon. While sabermetric tools such as Wins Above Replacement are very helpful, and perhaps even necessary for sorting out which players have been the most valuable, they are not necessarily sufficient by themselves for deciding such issues. As I discussed in an earlier (no-longer-so-“official”) post on using WAR to help determine the MVP, WAR and its cousins should start conversations about the MVP, not end them. However, this post is less about the general framework and more about why I think, despite the presence of other viable candidates just as Jacoby Ellsbury and maybe Justin Verlander, Jose Bautista is my choice for the American League’s Most Valuable Player of 2011.

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With a classic World Series — the most exciting in a long time, if not the best-played or best-managed — now over, it is time to hand out individual awards for the 2011 regular season. Sure, some people are anticipating the Cy Young, MVP, and Rookie of the Year announcements, but I bet true baseball fans really pumped for stuff like today’s award, which attempts to measure how much a hitter has contributed to his team’s wins beyond what traditional linear weights indicates. Who is 2011’s King of Little Things?

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I have done a number of posts since end of the 2010 season ranking players and plays based on stats not normally given prominence. But I haven’t yet done one of my “classics”: the season’s “King of Little Things.” As the name implies, it is an attempt to quantify a player’s contribution with regard to the game state beyond average run expectancy. Who were the best and worst in 2010?

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When the “rebuilding” San Diego Padres started 2010 well, most thought they wouldn’t stick. However, with with less than fifty games to go, the Padres are still in first place in the National League West. Predictably, various explanations have been given for this, and talk of how they are “staying within themselves” and being “consistent” is cropping up, as in this recent entry by Buster Olney (Insider) quoting a scout to the effect that the Padres don’t have a very good offense outside of Adrian Gonzalez, but are winning more due to their willingness to move guys over and play their “roles” in an intelligent way to maximize their plate appearances.

It is probably true that the Padres are outplaying their “true talent” to an extent, but teams and individuals overperform and underperform their true talent all the time. What is more interesting is the implication that the Padres are getting “more bang for their buck” offensively by doing the “little things” that just help a team win. My interest is not in taking Olney or the scout he quoted to task. Rather, I want to see if the numbers bear out the idea that the Padres are getting more wins out of their offense than they “should” because of their execution, because of the “little things.”

The “little things” are often brought up in reference to teams who outperform their run differential, e.g., some recent Angels teams. The first thing to note about the Padres, however, is that they are not outplaying their Pythagorean expectation: they are actually two wins under what their run differential suggests. So one could argue on that basis alone that the Padres are being “inefficent” in their wins.

But that does not specifically address whether their offense has generated more wins than they “should.” This implies that the Padres have a poor offense. At first glance, one would say “yes,” as the Padres’ team wOBA of .311 (43 linear weights runs [a.k.a. wRAA] below average) is the among the worst in baseball. However, that needs to be understood in context. The Padres have one of the most hitter-unfriendly home parks in the major leagues. In addition, runs above/below average is baselined against all of the MLB, and includes pitchers hitting. To get a better picture, let’s use the park-adjusted linear weights runs from the team value pages and compare to the rest of the NL. In this light, we see that the Padres’ offense is actually four runs above average, and the only team in the NL West above average. So the Padres’ offense has been one of the better in the NL, and the picture of a team miraculously scraping out runs with inferior hitters is already a bit distorting.

Still, even if the Padres offense has been good, is it doing things to deliver more wins than than traditional linear weights measures?

One way of trying to quantify this is to measure their traditional “context-free” linear weights (wRAA, Batting Runs, etc.) against the difference in run expectancy based on base-out state, as I discuss for individuals here. In short, we can subtract a team’s traditional linear weights (“Batting”) from their RE24 to see how much run value is added by hitting “to the context.” Doing this for the Padres (35.84 RE24 – 4.2 Batting) gives a “situational” added value of about 36 runs, which is obviously good.

However, if we’re going to emphasize “context” when discussing a situational hitting, shouldn’t we go all the way, and include not just base/out state, but inning and overall game situation? This is what WPA/LI does. For more detailed explanation of the following, click here, but a brief example can illuminate the difference. Take the following situation: tie game, bottom of the ninth inning, bases loaded, two outs. In this situation, wRAA and RE24 consider a walk and a home run to have very different linear weights values, whereas for WPA/LI it has the same, since it adjusts linear weights to game-state contexts. So if we subtract traditional linear weights (converted to a wins scale) from that, we see how many contextual wins they’ve added beyond the average value of events. And when we do this for the 2010 Padres, we get -0.79 wins. In other words, their offense has actually helped their team win fewer games than one would expect by just looking at the events out of context.

The 2010 Padres are a good team. Their pitching (particularly in relief) has been very good, although that praise should be tempered for the same reasons that we should realize that their offense has actually been better than one might think: the park. They also have been excellent in the field. Those are the reasons that should be given for their success this season. I don’t know whether or not the “little things” stat used above represents a repeatable skill, but whatever the case may be, it is not true that the Padres are getting more wins for less offense.

In the course of a discussion at The Book Blog about the Angels’ (of late) recent outperformance of (some) projections, I was reminded of a related yet quite different issue I’d thought about looking into a while back (and then promptly forgot about). The Angels are one of the teams in baseball that are praised for “playing the right way” and “doing the little things.” Whatever people mean by that, one thing we can say is that recently, the Angels have consistently outperformed their Pythagorean Win Expectation. Looking (somewhat arbitrarily) at the last three seasons in which the Angels have won the American League West and comparing their actual record with what we’d expect given their run differential based on PythagenPat.

2007: Actual 94-68, Expected 90-72, difference +4
2008: Actual 100-62, Expected 88-74, difference +12
2009: Actual 97-65, Expected 93-69, difference +4

I should say right now that this post is not saying that I am not claiming either a) that the Angels “just got lucky” and weren’t as good as their record, or b) that they have some “intangible” ability (perhaps from their manager) that has enabled them to outperform their run differential the last three seasons. Both of those are copouts, at least at this point. For now, I’m only going to look at this issue with reference to their offense.

One might say that they’ve been “good in the clutch.” And that is, in fact, true. FanGraphs’ clutch score, which measures whether players outperform not only their peers, but themselves in high leverage situations, has the following win values for the Angels’ hitter from 2007-2009:

2007: 5.19
2008: 7.34
2009: 3.22

These numbers are impressive, but they sort of beg the question. Unlike relievers, hitters don’t “earn” their high leverage playing time — unless you think most of those scores were put up by Angels pinch-hitters picked for their “clutchness.” This seems to say what we already knew — the Angels won more game than their runs scored indicate that they “should have”. Undoubtedly, there are “clutch hits,” but this doesn’t tell us how they did it — just that they did.

One thing that “right way” teams are praised for is situational hitting. FanGraphs has a stat for that: RE24. While FanGraphs’ primary “runs created above average” stat, wRAA, uses the average change in run expectancy given an event irrespective of the base/out situation, RE24 does incorporate base/out state. For wRAA, a home run is a home run whether the bases are empty with none out or loaded with 2 out, while RE24 takes into account the different base/out run expectation. As I discuss here, if we subtract the average linear weight runs (wRAA) from the RE24, we can see how much better the Angels performed in terms of “situational hitting.”

2007: wRAA +7, RE24 30.5, situational +23.5
2008: wRAA -18, RE24 18.7, situational +36.7
2009: wRAA 88, RE24 92.8, situational +4.8

Impressive. However, it actually doesn’t tell us what we want to know. This tells us that we would expect the Angels to have scored more runs than traditional linear weights (wRAA) would suggest, but the Pythagorean expectation is already using their actual runs scored. We want to know why they outperformed their run differential (for now, from the offensive perspective) — not why they scored more than their linear weights suggest, but why they won more than their actual runs suggest.

Enter WPA/LI. While RE24 takes base/out context into account, WPA/LI goes one step further, by taking base/out/inning into account. You can follow the link to read up, but basically, it’s “unleveraged” Win Probability. It sounds like Clutch, but it’s actually WPA without the Clutch/Leverage element. To use an example to differentiate WPA/LI: with two outs in the bottom of the ninth with the bases loaded, for WPA/LI a walk and a home run have the same linear weight, whereas those events would be different for both wRAA and RE24, since they don’t take game state into account. So, if any stat could take into account a player or team adjusting their play to a situtation, this would be it. As I did in my earlier Little Things post for individuals, we can do for teams: convert wRAA to wins (I crudely divide by 10), then subtract that from WPA/LI to get the situational wins above average linear weights.

2007: wWAA +0.7, WPA/LI -1.32, -2.02 Little Things
2008: wWAA -1.8, WPA/LI -1.21, +0.59 Little Things
2009: wWAA +8.8, WPA/LI +6.37, -2.43 Little Things

Now that is just bizarre. With RE24, we saw that the Angels the last three seasons have been very good at maximizing their situational hitting in certain base/out states. But “Little Things” shows the exact opposite in 2007 and 2009. They’re about “even” in 2008, although far short of what RE24 shows, and they’re 2 wins below their traditional linear weights in 2007 and 2009. It’s not just that the Angels’ hittesr aren’t living up to their reputation (according to this measure) of “doing the little things,” it’s the contrast between RE24 and WPA/LI based “little things” that is striking. It’s as if the Angels do a great job of hitting with runners in scoring position when they’re playing in blowouts, but make terrible situational plays (relative to the average run expectancy) in close games. And then if you look at their hitter’s “Clutch” scores from those years… It’s really hard to know what the big picture is.

This post has no conclusion other than to note that the title is ironic. It would be foolhardy to dismiss this all as luck. The Angels have been a very good team no matter how you slice it. And just because we don’t understand “how they do it” at the moment doesn’t mean we can never know. But at the moment, I’m simply struck by the oddity.

We’re happy to announce the addition of the newest member of our team. Matt brings his particular style to the site beginning today.

I’m the new guy. Six or seven of you may have previously read my work elsewhere under a different name. I won’t tell you what it was, but it was something like… “devil_f.” No, that’s too obvious; let’s go with “d_fingers.”

We often hear that certain hitters “just do the little things” to help their team win. Can these things be quantified? Some would say no, but in last offseason’s epic Confused Says What? thread with Tom Tango, a user suggested that if one subtracted traditional linear weights (wRAA) from game-state linear weights (WPA/LI), one would get a measure of the “Little Things” the player contributed to his team(s) during the year. And so I checked it out.

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The Fireman of the Year Award is a rather meaningless award designed to promote some sponsor of major league baseball while simultaneously honoring the game’s best closer or relief pitcher. While the Academy Awards have the Razzies, this Fireman award does not have a reverse award designated to honor the league’s worst relievers. Yesterday, we took a look at the five worst starting pitchers of 2008, and today we will look to those in the bullpen. While WPA/LI was used to evaluate the starters, I decided to use both the leveraged and unleveraged WPA to check out the relievers. Here are the bottom five relievers via WPA/LI:

Brad Hennessey, -1.36: 13 g, 17.1 IP, 40 H, 8 BB, 12 K, 2.77 WHIP, 12.46 ERA
Jamie Walker, -1.36: 59 g, 12 HR in 38 IP, 1.68 WHIP, 6.87 ERA
Joel Peralta, -1.23: 40 g, 1.33 WHIP, 5.98 ERA, 15 HR in 52.2 IP, 14 BB, 38 K
Bob Howry, -1.23: 72 g, 1.46 WHIP, 5.35 ERA, 13 HR in 70.2 IP, 13 BB, 59 K
Gary Majewski, -1.19: 37 g, 1.90 WHIP, 6.53 ERA, 15 BB, 27 K in 40 IP

From these five, it is pretty remarkable that Hennessey accrued such negative impact in just 13 games, which portends that he might be able to dethrone Brandon Backe as the worst pitcher in baseball. Walker has given up plenty of home runs relative to his innings pitched, and Majewski does not really have anything positive working for him either. Peralta’s walk and strikeout numbers look solid, as he is right around the corner from a 3.00 K/BB, but he has given up a ton of home runs in just 52.2 innings. Howry’s K/BB is over 4.00, but he gives up a lot of hits and home runs. Next up, the bottom five by WPA:

Jason Isringhausen, -2.96: 42 g, 1.64 WHIP, 5.70 ERA
Luis Ayala, -2.85: 81 g, 1.45 WHIP, 5.71 ERA
Jamie Walker, -2.41: SEE ABOVE
Mark Lowe, -2.24: 57 g, 1.76 WHIP, 5.37 ERA
Masa Kobayashi, -2.19: 1.42 WHIP, 4.53 ERA, 2.50 K/BB

Two things should stand out from these five pitchers. First, Jamie Walker is the only reliever to bottom out in both WPA and WPA/LI, and secondly, Kobayashi does not look that bad. He has 14 walks and 35 strikeouts in his 57 appearances, but his hits allowed have raised the WHIP. He is actually the only reliever of the nine listed here with a sub 5.00 ERA. ERA might not be the best evaluator for relievers, but his controllable skills look better than most of the rest.

So, I will leave the votes in your hands for the Anti-Fireman of the Year Award. Does it go to Jamie Walker, who showed poor skills whether the plate appearances counted as one or more plate appearances? To Hennessey, who stunk it up so badly in just 13 games that he actually posted the worst WPA? Or maybe Majewski, who had literally nothing positive working for him or to fall back on?

This morning we took a look at some of the hitters who performed extremely well over the final month of the season, but went largely unnoticed for a variety of factors. Now, let’s take a similar look at the best under the radar pitchers. Again, we are using WPA/LI as our barometer. For starters, Roy Oswalt and Derek Lowe dominated the season’s final month, posting a 1.64 and 1.27 mark, respectively. In six starts, Oswalt pitched 44.1 innings, surrendering 24 hits, walking just six hitters, while striking out 30 of them. He allowed baserunners to the tune of a 0.68 WHIP, and allowed just 1.42 runs per nine innings. Lowe allowed even less hits and runs. In five starts and 30.1 innings, he managed a 0.59 ERA and a 0.76 WHIP. Other than these two, who performed well on the mound?

Jesse Litsch did, for sure. Formerly an intern for the Tampa Bay Rays (I honestly didn’t write Devil!) Litsch found himself a key component of baseball’s best rotation and he definitely had a September to remember. In six starts, he compiled a 1.13 WPA/LI thanks to a 2.18 ERA, 1.02 WHIP, and just 27 hits surrendered in 41.1 innings. For the season, Litsch recorded a 3.58 ERA, 4.29 FIP, and a 2.54 K/BB. He may be one of the least intimidating pitchers, based on mound presence and appearance, but he throws all of his pitches at least 10% of the time and looks to have great control over his controllable skills.

I never thought I would ever get the chance to write anything positive about Kyle Davies, a guy I used to wish would face the Phillies when on the Braves, but he… wasn’t… that… bad… this year. His overall season saw him make 21 starts with a 4.05 ERA and 4.22 FIP. His K/BB was the highest it has ever been at just 1.65, but hey, at least it is some type of an improvement. In September he was 1.10 wins above average, with a 2.27 ERA and a 0.92 WHIP, walking 7 and fanning 24 in 31.2 innings.

Mark Buehrle seems to do the same thing every year. He isn’t a Cy Young Award contender, and he is above average, but he is in that area between being slightly above average and being well above average. This year was a typical Buehrle line with a 3.79 ERA and a 3.94 FIP. In September, he produced a 0.94 WPA/LI, posting a 2.29 ERA and 1.25 WHIP, while striking out 30 and walking ten.

Lastly, another Royal found his way into this article. Zack Greinke had a great September, posting a 2.18 ERA and 1.00 WHIP, resulting in a 0.92 WPA/LI. He walked just 7 while fanning 32 in his 33 innings of work. On the whole, he produced a 3.47 ERA, 3.56 FIP, and 3.27 K/BB. Zack also experienced the highest frequency of groundballs in his entire, but short, career. With a .318 BABIP I would normally call for some type of regression, but Zack has posted BABIPs of .318, .316, and .318 over the last three seasons, so perhaps this should be expected.

The headlines were dominated by Sabathia, Lee, Halladay, Lincecum, and Santana, but Oswalt and Lowe staked claim as September’s best, and the five players mentioned above were decent surprises.

On occasion I like to peruse the leaderboards here by position and see which players rank atop or on the bottom of the WPA/LI spectrum. Yesterday, however, I discovered a disturbing pattern while doing this for the junior circuit. It seemed that the bottom of each position was populated by members of the Oakland Athletics. The A’s stayed in the playoff race for half of the season before shipping away parts like Rich Harden, signaling a throwing in of the towel, so to speak. Their poor performance from that point on was largely attributed to the trading away of Dan Haren in the off-season and Harden in-season. From what these numbers showed, though, their struggles have a whole heck of a lot to do with their offense.

Since WPA/LI is a counting stat, I did not use the qualified only field, but found that all but Frank Thomas and Jack Cust were above 0 in this category. In fact, some of the others are so below 0 that they rank within the bottom five or bottom ten at their respective positions, if not at the very bottom of the list. Here are some of the players and their context-neutral wins:

Kurt Suzuki, C, -0.89
Daric Barton, 1B, -1.81 (lowest)
Mark Ellis, 2B, -1.16 (3rd lowest)
Bobby Crosby, SS, -2.87 (lowest)
Jack Hannahan, 3B, -0.81 (5th lowest)

Additionally, five of their six outfielders rank in the bottom twenty, as Emil Brown is ninth from the bottom, Carlos Gonzalez is eleventh, and Eric Patterson, Rajai Davis, and Travis Buck rank eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth from the bottom. The WPA/LI of these players range from Buck’s -0.72 to Brown’s -1.37. The other outfielder, Ryan Sweeney, is at -0.01, making him essentially a league average hitter, keeping him away from the bottom twenty. That leaves the Athletics with Jack Cust, Frank Thomas, and Ryan Sweeney as average or above average hitters, with Cust being far and away the best.

The team has an MLB-worst .683 OPS on the season, from a .318 OBP/.365 SLG. To put that in perspective, it would be the equivalent to having Felipe Lopez occupying every spot in the lineup this year. Their pitching may still be relatively solid and may only improve in the years to come, but the offense of their personnel needs drastic improvement, regardless of how solid defensively some of these players may be.

Back at the end of April, Dave posted his First Month Heroes, a position by position look at the highest WPA/LIs through one month of play. In the comments section I had joked that it would be even more interesting to see the inverse, or the worst context-neutral performers in the same span. My wish became Dave’s command and the following players surfaced: Josh Bard, Adam LaRoche, Robinson Cano, Ryan Zimmerman, Troy Tulowitzki, Garret Anderson, Andruw Jones, Jose Guillen.

Two full months later I thought it again to be prudent to check on these low-level offensive performers. So, as of July 8, the worst WPA/LIs by position are:

C: Kurt Suzuki, OAK, -0.84
1B: Daric Barton, OAK, -1.33
2B: Freddy Sanchez, PIT, -2.56
3B: Melvin Mora, BAL, -1.15
SS: Jason Bartlett, TB, -1.71
LF: Emil Brown, OAK -1.20
CF: Michael Bourn, HOU, -1.67
RF: Jeff Francoeur, ATL, -1.31
SP: Bronson Arroyo, CIN, -1.94
RP: Brad Hennessey, SF, -1.26

Yes, Frenchy was demoted to the minors, and yes, it took me three attempts at spelling his name correctly, but he has been the least productive rightfielder on offense. After him it gets a little hazy since certain guys who may be classified as rightfielders played different positions (SEE: Gary Matthews, Jr, and Mark Teahen).

One interesting part of this group is that their WPAs, which could benefit from some game state bias, are not all the lowest at their position. In fact, the only players listed above with both the lowest WPA/LI and WPA are Suzuki, Barton, and Frenchy. Sanchez, Bartlett, and Brown have the 4th worst WPA at their respective positions; Bourn has the second worst; and Mora actually ranks at the halfway point in WPA terms.

The other aspect of this group that piqued my interest is that three Oakland Athletics position players are, as of this moment, the worst win-contributors at their respective positions. In terms of WPA, not WPA/LI, the most productive offensive total is the 0.80 of Eric Chavez. Overall, though, their offense has cost them six wins; thankfully their starting rotation and bullpen have combined to the tune of ten added wins. Perhaps this is why some As fans were calling for offense in return for Harden. Regardless, I’ll be very curious to revisit this closer to the end of the season not only to see how these players improve or digress, but whether or not any of them remain.