Tourtellotte: The most exciting games of 2013
From Shane Tourtellotte at The Hardball Times on October 3, 2013:
The 2013 regular season is over. (As closely as you follow baseball, this may not come as a surprise to you.) With the AL tiebreaker done and the playoffs impending, our attention is naturally drawn forward to the teams still contending for the World Series, and the games that will decide who gets there. But in this short pause between season and postseason, we should take a little time to look back and appreciate the best games that the last six months have offered us.
This article counts down the 10 most exciting games of the season just past. This would be a hugely subjective exercise except that, as readers who have been regulars here for the past year or more know, I have my own method for calculating game excitement. It’s called WPS Index (for Win Percentage Sum, or Win Probability Sum). As I am rolling it back out for playoff recaps this year—and have already done so for the AL Wild Card tiebreaker: see THT Live—this is a good time to reacquaint everyone with it.
The idea actually originated with our own Dave Studeman, who in the 2007 Hardball Times Annual offered a method of counting up the Win Percentage Added of each play in a game to create a measure of how exciting that game was. Being a new THT writer in 2012 and not having read as far back as that Annual, I ended up re-inventing the wheel, though with a couple of additions.
Read the full article here: http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/the-most-exciting-games-of-2013/
Originally published: October 3, 2013. Last Updated: October 3, 2013.