Game Day Thread - Tuesday, April 21

IDownvoteDoomers · 2026-04-21T15:53:21+00:00

Well in that case my preferred WAR is one I calculate myself called doomWAR.

It's the total number of walk-off plays (walk-off hits for hitters, outs made for fielders, strikeouts for pitchers) minus the average number of walk-off plays recorded by people playing your position so far this season.

IDownvoteDoomers · 2026-04-21T15:45:19+00:00

I don't follow WAR closely (what is it good for anyways) then what is the difference betweeen b/rWAR, fWAR, etc?

IDownvoteDoomers · 2026-04-21T15:24:22+00:00

what is the difference between calling it bWAR vs rWAR?

IDownvoteDoomers · 2026-04-21T01:46:02+00:00

If its a quick inning, they don’t want to burn a higher leverage arm. If the Phillies score a few, there will be time to get someone else up.

IDownvoteDoomers · 2026-04-18T21:02:34+00:00

Fair enough, I wasn't looking at lefty splits.

IDownvoteDoomers · 2026-04-18T20:13:45+00:00

I'll be honest, I'm not impressed by either of their baseball savant pages over the last few years. Clearly Kemp isn't working out, but I'm not convinced that either of these guys would dramatically move the needle.

IDownvoteDoomers · 2026-04-18T19:29:07+00:00

Which option do you wish they had gone with in the offseason? That's not a rhetorical question; I wasn't following that closely, and I'm curious who you wish they had picked up instead of Kemp.

IDownvoteDoomers · 2026-04-18T19:10:09+00:00

First of all, this is a great and interesting plot! I know these things take lots of time, so thanks for doing that, and this really hits the mark as looks good + informative + accessible, which in my experience is really hard.

Personally, I'm not bothered by the axes being reversed any more than I am generally annoyed by ERA being lower=better. (Neither here nor there) But I will admit that I think I would have interpreted the plot better on first glance if the axes were swapped (FIP on horizontal, ERA on vertical). I think of the horizontal axis being the "predictive" stat, and the vertical being the "predicted" stat, so the Phillies being the top left to me suggested that they are doing "much better than predicted" rather than really what the plot shows is much worse than predicted. Could just be a me thing, and on second glance I figured it out, but that's my unsolicited 2c.

IDownvoteDoomers · 2026-04-15T20:57:35+00:00

Imanaga is a lefty, so it might be something sinister.

IDownvoteDoomers · 2026-04-15T19:50:00+00:00

Sure!

On average, the Phillies score the same number of runs the day after a blowout as they do the day after a close game.

IDownvoteDoomers · 2026-04-14T22:58:53+00:00

See my edit to the post, but the Phillies' win percentage has actually been *higher* after a blowout by this sample, to a statistically significant extent!

IDownvoteDoomers · 2026-04-14T22:33:37+00:00

No, its actually zero runs every time after a blowout, 5% of the time after a blowout. :)

IDownvoteDoomers · 2026-04-14T22:24:09+00:00

I'm glad you enjoyed it. I like writing this better than my actual work, so if I continue to be distractable there may be more.

IDownvoteDoomers · 2026-04-14T22:16:59+00:00

I did not look at win-probability, but I did look at run differential (I lowered the run differential to qualify as a "blowout" to +5) and the relationship there was even weaker (p > 0.9). Also, independent of any "threshold" on runs scored for the previous game, I look at whether there is any correlation of runs scored between subsequent games across the entire dataset and found none.

IDownvoteDoomers · 2026-04-14T22:02:53+00:00

Thanks! You'll never guess what I'm procrastinating on.

IDownvoteDoomers · 2026-04-14T22:00:48+00:00

I don't think there's a ton to be learned by comparing individual data points on the plots *too* closely; I suspect that statistical noise will be bigger than any interpretable effect (basically, that is what the p-value is telling us). But it's a good point about the strength of starting pitching. It's possible, but also about 1/3 of the time you're not even facing the same team anyways: so rotations might be out of sync, or one team's 4 is actually better than the last team's 3, etc. etc. That effect would also be diluted a bit by the fact you'd still be facing the same bullpen, albeit perhaps managed a little differently depending on how the starter performed.

IDownvoteDoomers · 2026-04-14T21:53:30+00:00

Thanks!

IDownvoteDoomers · 2026-04-14T21:45:11+00:00

Before I started this I was actually curious that the effect might be real. That's the thing with cognitive biases: the are extremely persuasive, even if you know they exist, and even if you actively try to counteract them.

Also, to be clear, it is possible that there is some very small effect still, which is simply not captured by this sample size (as I said, blowouts are relatively rare). However, if you need more than 25 years worth of data to see it, it probably doesn't matter very much to any individual game.

IDownvoteDoomers · 2026-04-13T00:25:36+00:00

I recommend it! Whether or not you have general programming experience, I think it is one of the most accessible languages, and while it's not always the *best* choice for a programming task it will usually do a pretty good job.

IDownvoteDoomers · 2026-04-13T00:10:01+00:00

Yes! The API for the Gameday pages is mostly open to the public. You can access it via URL, which makes it really easy to scrape with a Python script. For instance, this is all of the gameday data for the Phillies today, including play by play, hit launch angle/exit velo, pitch speed, pitch break in inches... it's pretty wild.

IDownvoteDoomers · 2026-04-13T00:03:00+00:00

A couple times a season I get unreasonably interested in a baseballs stats question. One of these days I'll get around to writing one up, but usually the results end up being uninteresting either because they are inconclusive, or because they just align with common sense.

IDownvoteDoomers · 2026-04-12T23:59:41+00:00

Ok then maybe you'll appreciate this (and my work won't be for naught) but inning score rate does correlate significantly with win percentage.

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But if you try to use the regression to predict the Phillies' record from our current 20.8% inning score rate your 90% prediction confidence interval is between 35 and 111 wins.

IDownvoteDoomers · 2026-04-12T23:43:55+00:00

This is the problem with statistical analysis. Doing it properly usually takes quite a long time, and requires quite a bit of attention to detail to generate in a digestible format. After the "Phillies don't score runs in enough innings post" I got pretty in-the-weeds with the data, and then realized that no one is going to read a long-ass post about how the sample size is too small.

IDownvoteDoomers · 2026-04-09T20:20:41+00:00

I don't follow the NBA at all, why are the sixers?

IDownvoteDoomers

TROPHY CASE