The Most Exciting Team in Baseball

As a baseball fan, winning feels great and losing feels awful. When teams win in dull fashion, fans are generally content to take the wins even if they aren’t all that thrilling. The Astros, Twins, and Dodgers are blowing teams out on a regular basis, but those wins aren’t causing too much consternation. But on the other end of the spectrum are teams that lose a lot of games and fail to provide much excitement during those contests. These are the bad teams that fall behind early and don’t give too much reason in terms of wins and losses to keep following the game. By combining a team’s winning or losing ways with how important at-bats tend to be, we can determine the most exciting team in baseball, as well as the most miserable club.

To determine how often teams have tension-inducing moments, we can take a look at Leverage Index (LI). Our glossary says “Leverage Index is essentially a measure of how critical a particular situation is. To calculate it, you are measuring the swing of the possible change in win expectancy.” A game’s LI starts at 1.0, and the more meaningful plate appearances gets, the higher the index rises; if plate appearances become less meaningful, the index goes lower. Leverage Index shows up on our Play Logs and is on the bottom of our Win Expectancy graphs. Here’s one for Game 3 of last year’s World Series:

The bars along the bottom identify the biggest moments of the game, even if something big doesn’t show up on the scoreboard. For teams, we are dealing with more than a thousand plays at this point in the season. If we take the average LI of every play, we can see if teams have a tendency to have a decent number of important moments during their games or if things are decided relatively early, with the players playing out games with little chance of changing the outcome.

If we separate out hitting and pitching, we can see where most of a team’s drama takes place. The graph below shows all teams so far this season:

We could stop here, and just call the Mets the most exciting team in baseball with the Twins and Mariners the most boring. That doesn’t feel completely right, though. While creating exciting situations is nice, there’s something to be said for actually delivering when the moments get big. Jumping out to an early lead and putting teams away like the Twins have done might lead to a lot of unimportant plate appearances, but the feel-good vibes of putting a team away in the third inning probably last a few innings longer. There has to be a level of fun to the excitement.

To factor in good results with the excitement, let’s add Win Probability Added to the mix. So that we can properly compare Leverage Index with Win Probability Added, I’m going to scale both to 100 and make 15 points one standard deviation away average. For WPA it looks like this:

This is a simple proxy for wins and losses, and provides the added context of how teams are winning and losing, either on offense or when they take the field. The Twins are pretty balanced, while the Dodgers have leaned heavily on the hitting side and the Rays have needed their pitching and defense. For Leverage Index, the same information looks like this:

Say what you will about the Mets, but they’ve certainly had opportunities to turn games around or stay ahead, even if their season hasn’t completely delivered. Take a look at the Tigers; they might not be winning a ton, but they are playing a lot of competitive games. In fact, if we were to subtract the WPA scores from the LI scores, we’d come up with a few teams delivering more excitement than their wins and losses might indicate. Of course, with that excitement has come disaster, resulting in what I am calling a Horror Score.

As for most exciting, we need to blend the winning with the tense moments. To that end, I’ve taken scores in four components: Pitching LI, Hitting LI, Pitching WPA, and Hitting WPA. With those scores, I found the geometric mean instead of the average to ensure that any one number wouldn’t weigh too heavily on the final number. This is what I found.

It turns out, the Yankees have been the most exciting team to watch in baseball this year, followed closely by the Rays. While the Diamondbacks might not have the best record in the game, they are providing their fans with a lot of good games and enough positive results to rank highly. As for the fans of the Royals, Mariners, and Orioles, my apologies. If you are a fan of the Mariners and you are saying to yourself, “It feels like the team should be even worse than that,” here’s every team’s Exhilaration Index for May.

Nothing above is going to tell us what teams will do going forward, but if you feel a bit dejected watching the home nine, or if their winning doesn’t make you feel as excited as you think it should, there might be a good reason why. For better or worse, being a fan can be a bit draining but these numbers might help put some of your feelings in perspective and provide a rational explanation for the mood of a team’s fans.