The Two Greatest Games of the First Half, Maybe

I’m of the belief that, if you look close enough, you can find at least one moment of beauty in every baseball game. But, as someone with a ton of firsthand experience watching Phillies games over the past five seasons, I can confirm that sometimes you have to look really hard to find that beauty. In reflecting on the first half of the season, I wanted to identify games in which baseball’s innate beauty and excitement had shown through most brightly. Using Win Probability Added (WPA) as an objective, if imperfect, means of identifying the amount of drama in a game, I isolated two contests which make a strong case for the title of Most Exciting Game of the First Half.

My methodology was simple. First, I looked at team WPA accrued by a team’s pitching staff in a game. I added the pitching WPA for both teams and found the game with the highest combined WPA. Next, I repeated the process with WPA recorded by both teams’ offenses. The result is the game in which pitchers did the most to impact their teams’ win expectancy and the game in which position players did the most to impact their teams’ win expectancy. Let’s take a look at both of them and see if either game stands out as the most exciting game in 2016.

The Most (?) Entertaining Pitching Duel of the First Half
Date: 7/1/16
Final Score: Cleveland 2, Toronto 1, 19 innings
Pitcher WPA: Cleveland 1.95, Toronto 1.45

Win probability added (WPA) is a cumulative stat. As a result, you can find the highest combined WPA games in extra-inning matches, much like you might expect to find the highest combined strikeout totals in extra-inning games. This is especially true when looking at WPA through the lens of pitching because a pitcher adds to his team’s win expectancy by preventing runs and extending games whereas hitters add value by creating runs and ending games. As a result, it should come as no great shock that the greatest game in the first half by win expectancy was also the longest game of the first half.

However, the length of a game is not enough on its own to generate a tremendous combined WPA total. None of the other four games this seasons of 15 innings or more can hold a candle to the Cleveland/Toronto marathon in terms of combined WPA.

In fact, this game featured the highest combined WPA total since the Rockies beat the Diamondbacks 2-1 on 8/15/06 in 18 innings. What was it about this game that made it so exceptional? For starters, check out the always illuminating win probability graph of the game.

Source: FanGraphs

Take a look at all of those massive peaks and valleys in the late innings of the game. What made this game atypically dramatic and exciting is that in those late extra innings, each team generated a huge number of base-runners, but pitchers ultimately racked up WPA by stranding said base-runners. From the bottom of the 13th through the bottom of the 18th, a runner reached base in 10 of 11 half-innings. But not only that, a runner reached third base in six different half innings. Need a quick way to generate high WPA? Allow a go-ahead run to get 90 feet away from home plate and then strand him.

The pinnacle of this high-wire act came in the bottom of the 16th. With Trevor Bauer on the mound for what would be the second of his four innings of work, the Blue Jays got runners on first and third with one out which quickly became second and third after Kevin Pillar stole second base. The Blue Jays’ win expectancy skyrocketed to 84.3% — the highest mark for either team all game – before Bauer got Darwin Barney to pop up to shortstop for out number two and struck out Ezequiel Carrera to retire the side and return the win expectancy to an even 50.0%.

This back-and-forth torture act continued until Carlos Santana finally broke through with a go-ahead home run in the top of the 19th. Bauer could have upped the WPA figures even further with a tense bottom of the 19th, but instead he shut out a dramatic game with a shockingly smooth (and somewhat anti-climactic) 1-2-3 inning.

If run-prevention gets your heart pumping, then this might have been the most exciting game so far this season. If not, read on.

The Most (?) Entertaining Slugfest of the First Half
Date: 7/8
Final Score: Houston 10, Oakland 9
Hitter WPA: Houston 1.36, Oakland 0.86

Coincidentally, our two highlighted games both occurred within the past two weeks. The game with the largest win-expectancy swings as a function of offense came last Friday night when the Astros defeated the Athletics on Luis Valbuena’s three-run walk-off home run. The blast came with the team trailing by two and provided the fourth-highest WPA of any single play this season. The reason that this game tops our cumulative WPA list and not the games containing the three plays which rank above Valbuena’s home run, however, is because of what happened in the top of the ninth.

Once again, let’s check the win-expectancy graph.

Source: FanGraphs

Oh yeah, that’s the good stuff. The first large swing comes in the fourth and fifth inning, when the Astros turned a 0-3 deficit into a 6-3 lead, but that’s a mere blip compared to what happened at the end of the game.

An RBI single by Danny Worth in the bottom of the eighth gave the Astros a 7-4 lead and a 97.5% win expectancy which fell to a mere 96.8% at the end of the inning. Then, in the top of ninth, the Athletics lit up Astros relievers Will Harris and Michael Feliz to the tune of five runs and completely upended the chart. At the end of the inning it was the Athletics with a 91.2% win expectancy.

The bottom of the ninth started off beautifully for Ryan Madson, the first batter grounding out. The Athletics’ win expectancy was now at 95.7%! Then Jose Altuve singled and Carlos Correa reached base on a dropped third strike — seriously — before Valbuena hit his walk-off to shoot the Astros all the way up to their final 100% win expectancy.

If you’re more into run-creation than run-prevention then maybe this was the best game of the season so far. Or maybe it’s neither of these two games. Perhaps the best game was a Kershaw masterpiece or maybe it was the game in which Chicago beat Cincinnati 11-8 on the strength of Kris Bryant’s 5-for-5 game. Objective methods aren’t going to answer our subjective questions, but they do give us a means to identify extraordinarily strong contenders for Most Exciting Game of the First Half.

Now the only question becomes, can these games be topped in the second half?

Thanks to Jeff Zimmerman for his research assistance.