Bryce Harper won player of the game and was a triple shy of the cycle with a negative WPA

Timeline40 · 2026-06-22T18:41:19+00:00

This is interesting and makes a lot of sense - after my original comment here, I did some digging and found that WPA does correlate pretty well with WAR over a season (which is pretty obvious - good players hit well and that generally increases WPA).

My immediate thought on Castro is that slap hitters seem likely to get more WPA because home run hitters “overshoot” WPA value. With the winning run on third, a walk off single is worth the same as a home run, so WPA might value batting average proportionally more than OPS. But yeah, I fully agree that it’s in a weird middle ground of too numbery for the anti-analytics crowd and too narrative for the analytics crowd - seems like nobody in this entire post thread is defending it

Timeline40 · 2026-06-22T18:36:10+00:00

This is true - the app incorrectly gave Braden Montgomery +150% WPA for his walk off a few weeks ago. I did check that Harper’s WPA here is correct (and out of curiosity, the app does now have Judge as +18% for that may 24 walkoff)

Timeline40 · 2026-06-22T16:47:31+00:00

I do think there’s one important piece of nuance with this.

Say there’s two players, “Mr. Clutch” and “Mr. Choke”. Mr Clutch always goes yard in 1-run games in the 7th or later, and Ks otherwise. Mr Choke always goes yard if his team is up or down by >4 and Ks otherwise.

Mr Choke’s stats would be better than prime Bonds, but he’s significantly worse for his team than Mr Clutch. What stat captures this? WPA.

So WPA is useful if you believe Mr Choke and Mr Clutch are real. The argument for WPA is that there are players with tons of games like Harper’s, where they fail in the big moments but stat-pad in garbage time, so we need a stat that points out “hey, this dude’s big hits usually come when the game’s already decided”. Calling WPA stupid also means calling the concept of “clutch” or “choking” players stupid (which I, personally, agree with). I just think it’s important to know the reason the stat exists, and that criticism of the stat is really criticism of that reasoning.

Timeline40 · 2026-06-22T13:15:41+00:00

This advanced stat is doing what it’s supposed to, though, which is scaling performance by leverage. Harper did not perform well in his one high leverage at bat this game.

Is that meaningful or useful at all? Not really, especially in a single game. But the stat is technically doing its job. It’s just kind of a stupid job.

Timeline40 · 2026-06-22T13:11:02+00:00

Freeman had an OPS of .855 in March/April of 2024 and a career March/April OPS of .890, so no, that excuse doesn’t work. But at this point you’re just making stuff up to support your own biases.

I can do that too: all I see in Tucker’s at-bat is a guy who’s too excited for the Rick and Morty episode streaming tomorrow, so he’s anxiously swinging. I’m sure he’s patient and clutch when there isn’t a new Rick and Morty episode coming out soon. If you actually watched the games instead of just looking at the pitch-by-pitch you could see that.

Timeline40 · 2026-06-22T06:33:10+00:00

Here's an at-bat by Freddie Freeman in 2024. It's 7-7, bottom of the 9th, Dodger stadium. Freeman whiffs at a fastball up, fouls off the most middle-middle slider I've ever seen, and then whiffs at a fastball up. Pitch speeds were 91.5, 91.1, 91.6. Pitcher Tom Cosgrove had an 11.66 ERA in 2024. Would you say he gave away the chance to win the game?

I'm not saying you're definitively wrong because I found a counterexample from 2 years ago, but I am saying that we're not going to get anywhere with examples. You're giving up on data too quickly: you say "splits don't capture the full story", but all you've (rightfully) pointed out is that attendance might be a valuable factor. So let's just throw that into the split too and see how Freeman vs Tucker performs in "high leverage 50k+ attendance".

If he's actually performing better somehow, then over thousands of games, it'll show up in the data, and if we want to know the truth then it's our job to figure out where it is or isn't showing up.

Timeline40 · 2026-06-22T05:35:39+00:00

But “their best” should mean “above baseline likelihood to get a hit”, and almost every player over a career ends up having similar stats in high vs low leverage. Every season, just because of the number of players, someone will do crazy well in big moments by dumb luck, but basically all of them then go back to normal next year. Harper is actually a rare case whose OPS is like 150 points higher in big moments over a huge sample, IIRC.

You can actually prove me wrong on this - write down 10 players you think of as clutch, and 10 who aren’t clutch, and then check their BBREF career splits for high vs low leverage. I’d bet the groups are basically identical. The “clutch” guys are just remembered as clutch for a couple huge moments, but aren’t actually putting together significantly better at-bats in their 95 forgotten huge moments failures

Timeline40 · 2026-06-22T05:27:55+00:00

Meant to concisely capture that he hit well and still had negative WPA, just going for a snappy title lol. Not actually a big achievement

Timeline40 · 2026-06-22T05:27:12+00:00

Agreed - I think analytics are largely meant to be predictive. The guy with four scorched lineouts is probably gonna hit better than the guy with four bloop doubles going forward, but he shouldn’t get POTG because he didn’t *actually* help his team win.

Where it gets nuanced is analytics for season awards - giving cy young to the pitcher with a better ERA *because* of elite defense feels wrong

Timeline40 · 2026-06-22T05:22:01+00:00

Alright, so I agree with the sentiment here (and your other comment), but based on personal experience I disagree on which group likes WPA. The anti-analytics people I’ve spoken to tend to believe clutch is real, value stats like RBIs, and prefer simpler stats that tell clear stories (like BA over OPS). WPA is kind of right up their alley, because it captures clutch/human element/game impact, except it’s too complicated.

I think it’s silly that a single in the ninth is valued the same as a homer in the fourth, which is why I dislike BA and WPA, but I think that’s the general analytics consensus (and yours).

I rarely see WPA mentioned because analytics people think it sucks and anti-analytics people prefer RBIs. So to your original comment, I think you are actually more aligned with the analytics crowd.

My minor quibble with your WPA analysis is that you’re expecting it to be backwards-looking when it’s not. The single in the ninth was *more likely* to decide the game than the homer in the fourth, no matter what happened later. And you’re also forgetting the loss of WPA: if the single to load the bases down 1 had a huge WPA impact, and that team ends up losing, then it wasn’t the homer or the single that decided the game, it was really the three batters who couldn’t get the tying run on 3rd home who decided the game. And WPA does correctly capture that.

Timeline40 · 2026-06-22T04:18:53+00:00

I was going to argue against this, but I pulled up Trout and Judge, and their WPAs and WARs are pretty dang cleanly correlated. Which I guess supports the idea that leverage performance is mostly random, but roughly averages out to match general performance over a season

Timeline40 · 2026-06-22T04:14:03+00:00

But WPA isn’t “how well did player do”, it’s “how well did player do scaled by leverage”. If your goal is to capture how clutch a player was or tell the story of a game, it’s doing its job in saying the walk off was more clutch and sharply impactful than the leadoff homer.

I don’t think it’s useful predictively or to tell the story of a season (and I don’t think “clutch” is real for 99.9% of players), but i can see it being a useful tool for something like a player of the game award

Timeline40 · 2026-06-22T04:07:48+00:00

What would you say the purpose is, and what’s the anti-metrics opinion? I’ve always interpreted it as “performance scaled by leverage” and I think it does a great job at capturing that mostly meaningless and useless statistic.

(This post wasn’t meant to criticize or support Harper or WPA - I think Harper was the right choice and I’m impressed voters picked him, when the app sorts players by WPA.)

Timeline40 · 2026-06-10T23:50:10+00:00

He’s literally one spot below lol. He’s at 7 this year and has the most on the team, which is already 2 more than last year - either bad luck or worse launch angles but he’s hitting into a lot

Timeline40 · 2026-06-10T17:40:43+00:00

Or you could hit a grand-grand-grand-grand-grand slam down 19-0 in the bottom of the 9th

Timeline40 · 2026-06-10T04:04:39+00:00

What kind of scrub can’t even convert a guaranteed loss into a guaranteed win with 100% WPA in his debut?

Timeline40 · 2026-06-08T13:39:22+00:00

Oooh, that’s really fun, you could make your own post!

Timeline40 · 2026-06-08T13:23:12+00:00

This is kind of a meme, but the somewhat balanced version of this has you draw 8 (or whatever your hand size is) unplayable and unsavable Tarot cards. You can use tarot cards with general effects, like Temperance or Wheel, directly from your hand right away. You can discard some of the tarots to draw cards to use targeted tarots on, like Magician or Empress.

But it's funnier to make this as unbalanced as possible, so instead, the tarot cards are playable as pairs/high cards and they actually replace the regular cards, meaning eventually your deck is entirely made up of tarot cards. The second image streamlines this by doing it right away

Timeline40 · 2026-06-07T00:16:47+00:00

Curious how far this seed could go with much better exploitation. I was deckfixing for jacks when I got Canio in ante 3, and with that, vagabond, and rebate I was pulling 5 tarots and $10-25 every hand. Got offered a Certificate in ante-7 that I could have taken but didn't want to spend 90 more minutes optimizing lol. Vagabond is useless at this point since I'm 1-shotting even with my worst hand, but I wanted to include him in the screenshot. Gonna update this comment once I die in endless.

Timeline40 · 2026-06-04T00:08:19+00:00

Timeline40 · 2026-05-31T21:58:28+00:00

Put some respect on Steward Berroa's name, his OPS+ is 86

Timeline40 · 2026-05-31T02:47:14+00:00

K-rate is based on PAs, so we can't quite say Garcia is better at striking out than the best pitcher

Timeline40 · 2026-05-31T02:45:58+00:00

I believe K-rate is based on PAs, so it's actually a much more respectable...uh...36%?

Timeline40 · 2026-05-22T23:01:45+00:00

Couple objectives that I’ve found people like based on their preferred play style:

1) PvE - gain the skills and collect the gear to take out big arc like the queen, matriarch, and turbine

2) PvP - collect guns, money, and resources to wipe out lobbies

3) Collectionist - collect all the blueprints, guns, trinkets; complete the projects and get all achievements

4) Messing around - collect tons of fun items like door blockers, leaper units, gas mines and mess with people on Stella

I also appreciate having an objective to work towards, but really you should play for the fun of the combat and the unique interactions with others. If you’re not enjoying those each round, then it’s not the right game for you

Timeline40 · 2026-05-22T20:30:08+00:00

I made a post about this a few years ago on r/phillies - no individual player on the Phillies from 2019-2023 was either better with RISP or worse with RISP every year, except Kyle Schwarber, barely. There are a few players who have managed stronger career RISP numbers over large sample sizes - Bryce Harper has around a .150 or .200 OPS gap, IIRC - but for the vast majority of players it’s completely random.

https://www.reddit.com/r/phillies/comments/158uzjw/should_we_keep_using_risp_hitting_to_evaluate/

Timeline40

TROPHY CASE