Hirsch: The top 10 plays of the 2016 season by Championship WPA
From SABR member Dan Hirsch at The Hardball Times on October 5, 2016:
In a recent “Hey Bill” response on his website, Bill James said this about the difficulty of taking in the events of the season with the modern schedule:
Before the longer schedule, there would be three or four days (sometimes more) between the end of the season and the start of the World Series. The sports media used that period to register what had just happened, in the pennant race, before the postseason started. But the longer schedule and the pressure to start the multiple rounds of playoffs eliminated that time–and eliminated that period of registering what had happened in the pennant race in the public’s mind.
The fact is that we only have about 48 hours to digest all that occurred over the past six months. So while we have time, let’s look at how we got to this point and which plays had the biggest impact. To do this, we’ll use a statistic called championship win probability added.
In 2009, Dave Studeman introduced postseason probability added here at The Hardball Times. A few months later, Sky Andrecheck of baseballanalaysts.com introduced championship win probability added. While their calculations were different, they both accomplished the same goal by combining win probability added with a value that measured the importance of that game on the team’s probability of winning the World Series. The resulting value measures the impact each play has on a team’s World Series win probability.
Read the full article here: http://www.hardballtimes.com/the-top-10-plays-of-2016-according-to-championship-wpa/
Originally published: October 5, 2016. Last Updated: October 5, 2016.