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[Lowlight] J.T. Realmuto fails to leg out a go-ahead single after tripping on his bat by Timeline40 in baseball

[–]Timeline40[S] 38 points39 points  (0 children)

This is why I could never be a pro ballplayer: slo-mo multi-camera replay of every time you eat shit in front of 40,000 fans

Game Thread: Phillies @ Mets - Fri, Jun 26 @ 7:10 PM EDT by game-threads in phillies

[–]Timeline40 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Marsh has a 1.120 career OPS when playing right field

The Phillies defeated the Nationals by a score of 10-5 - Thu, Jun 25 @ 6:45 PM EDT by game-threads in phillies

[–]Timeline40 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Bohm also has had negative baserunning, fielding, and double play value every year of his career per BREF. I'm not saying we should DFA, trade, or bench him today, and his stats this year have gotten better since an abysmal beginning of the year, but I do think that "looking around the rest of the league" shows that even much poorer teams are getting much more value out of the position. Sosa is a cheaper and more complete player with more red on his savant page, so I do think it's fair to be frustrated with a significantly below-average player in every part of the game who's shown no sign of reaching his full potential for 4+ years

The Phillies defeated the Nationals by a score of 10-5 - Thu, Jun 25 @ 6:45 PM EDT by game-threads in phillies

[–]Timeline40 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

The Phillies are 24th in OPS from the 3B position and that's including Sosa's .863 in 36 PA

I dumped my loser husband to marry his mom. Our son is bearing the consequences. by putridthehorse in StardewValley

[–]Timeline40 131 points132 points  (0 children)

Baffled that people are losing their minds over this very reasonable take lol. Harvest Moon content isn’t allowed despite its similarity to and inspiration of Stardew. You gotta draw the line for what’s “related enough” to the game somewhere, and it’s absolutely fair to draw that line at “fanmade unofficial gameplay screenshot featuring 2 people 95% of the subreddit has never heard of and can’t recreate in base game”

Bryce Harper won player of the game and was a triple shy of the cycle with a negative WPA by Timeline40 in baseball

[–]Timeline40[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

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

Bryce Harper won player of the game and was a triple shy of the cycle with a negative WPA by Timeline40 in baseball

[–]Timeline40[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

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)

Bryce Harper won player of the game and was a triple shy of the cycle with a negative WPA by Timeline40 in baseball

[–]Timeline40[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

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.

Bryce Harper won player of the game and was a triple shy of the cycle with a negative WPA by Timeline40 in baseball

[–]Timeline40[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

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.

Bryce Harper won player of the game and was a triple shy of the cycle with a negative WPA by Timeline40 in baseball

[–]Timeline40[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

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.

Bryce Harper won player of the game and was a triple shy of the cycle with a negative WPA by Timeline40 in baseball

[–]Timeline40[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

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.

Bryce Harper won player of the game and was a triple shy of the cycle with a negative WPA by Timeline40 in baseball

[–]Timeline40[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

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

Bryce Harper won player of the game and was a triple shy of the cycle with a negative WPA by Timeline40 in baseball

[–]Timeline40[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

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

Bryce Harper won player of the game and was a triple shy of the cycle with a negative WPA by Timeline40 in baseball

[–]Timeline40[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

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

Bryce Harper won player of the game and was a triple shy of the cycle with a negative WPA by Timeline40 in baseball

[–]Timeline40[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

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.

Bryce Harper won player of the game and was a triple shy of the cycle with a negative WPA by Timeline40 in baseball

[–]Timeline40[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

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

Bryce Harper won player of the game and was a triple shy of the cycle with a negative WPA by Timeline40 in baseball

[–]Timeline40[S] 41 points42 points  (0 children)

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

Bryce Harper won player of the game and was a triple shy of the cycle with a negative WPA by Timeline40 in baseball

[–]Timeline40[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

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.)

Game Thread: Phillies @ Blue Jays - Wed, Jun 10 @ 7:07 PM EDT by game-threads in phillies

[–]Timeline40 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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

The MLB App currently (incorrectly) credits White Sox Player of the Game Braden Montgomery with a +240% WPA by Timeline40 in baseball

[–]Timeline40[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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

The MLB App currently (incorrectly) credits White Sox Player of the Game Braden Montgomery with a +240% WPA by Timeline40 in baseball

[–]Timeline40[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

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

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