Back when Time Magazine was actually a magazine, and before the time when their Man of the Year (and it was almost always a man) was a considered editorial judgment rather than a marketing opportunity, they used to give it to the person most significantly affecting the world for good or ill. So Hitler won in 1938, and the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979. After they took him though, they leaned against selecting anyone “bad,” because people got too upset.
The season’s not over yet, but as we enter the last two critical series, we can take a look back at the top ten plays of the year, for good or ill. The criterion is simple: we use Stathead’s cWPA, which takes every play and estimates the change in the probability of winning the World Series before and after the play. During the regular season, this is essentially the change in your chances of making the playoffs before and after the play. It is obviously correlated with the more often cited WPA, which is the chance of winning a particular game, but it takes into account your place in the standings, so that a team that is eliminated, for example, has every play with a cWPA of 0, no matter how important it was to winning a game.
cWPA’s can be positive or negative. I have taken the top 10 plays for Atlanta’s chances in absolute value. It will come as no surprise to Braves fans this season that there are seven negative plays and three positive ones.
10. Nick Castellanos’ walkoff single against Grant Holmes on September 1 with two outs in the bottom of the 11th. cWPA -.30%
9. CJ Abrams’ bad throw in the bottom of the 10th against the Nationals on August 23rd. cWPA +.30%
8. Raisel Iglesias inducing a 6-4-3 double play by Jeremy Peña with men on 1st and 3rd in the bottom of the 10th to preserve a 5-4 win on April 17th. cWPA +.31%
7. Jeff McNeil’s walkoff single in the bottom of the 10th off Pierce Johnson on July 25th: cWPA -.31%
6. Brendan Rogers’ 2 run double to take a 9-8 lead in the bottom of the eight in Colorado off Joe Jiménez on August 11th. cWPA -.38%
5. Spencer Horwitz’s two run homer off Jiménez to take a 2-1 lead in the top off the 8th against Toronto on September 8th. cWPA -.39%
4. Nick Castellanos’ two run homer off Grant Holmes in the bottom of the 7th giving the Phillies a one run lead on August 29th. cWPA -.39%
3. Mitch Garver’s walkoff 2 run homer in the 9th off AJ Minter on April 29th. cWPA -.46%
2. Brandon Nimmo’s walkoff 2 run homer off Minter on May 12th. cWPA -.51%
1. Marcell Ozuna’s lead changing 3 run homer in the top off the 9th against the Mets’ Tanner Scott on April 14th. cWPA +.51%
I’m not sure if this means a lot, although reviewing it was pretty depressing. I wouldn’t let Grant Holmes face Castellanos in the playoffs if I could avoid it. Three of the games featured the Mets, one to the good and two to the bad.
By focusing on discrete plays, this measure underweights those games in which a large probability of a win moved over time to a loss, like the Colorado loss which was actually considerably worse than the Rogers double alone can show. In that game, the Braves entered the 8th with a 99% chance of winning the game and left the half inning with an 83 percent chance of losing. The Rogers double contributed “only” 53 percentage points to the game probability, so the whole inning was considerably worse in cWPA than -.38%.
All that said, given the precarious state of the Braves chances, there’s a reasonable shot that more than one event in the next week will crack the top 10. And of course once we reach the playoffs, the numbers all rise substantially.
FYI: The highest Braves cWPA of all time is of course Francisco Cabrera’s 1992 single scoring Dave Justice and Sid Bream. It has a cWPA of 36.8%, which is 100 times more important than the average play in this list. The highest regular season cWPA of all time is the Sepember 29th, 1959 walkoff by CArl Furillo that eliminated the Braves from the World Series (cWPA -9.64%.) But of course that was before the playoff era. The highest cWPA in the regular season during the playoff era was Dave Justice’s 2 run homer in the top of the 9th off Rob Dibble on October 1, 1991 — cWPA of 3.25% about 10 times as important as anything on this list, but there’s clearly a chance to get something nearly that big this week — for good or ill.
I’m a little surprised that the events with the highest cwpa changes were early in the season. I see that because they were against the Mets, events that helped the Braves’ chances directly by increasing their end-of-year win total also helped them indirectly by decreasing the Mets’ end-of-year win total (or hurt directly & indirectly if the team lost). Still, it seems like early in the season there’s a high likelihood that one game isn’t going to influence the cwpa by much since one game probably won’t make the difference between making the postseason or not, while late in a tight race, the (at-the-time) importance of one game and thus one event is dramatically higher. I guess the high significance of the individual events in determining the outcomes of the early-season games outweighs the relatively low (at-the-time) importance of the games in determining whether the team makes the postseason. Still seems like a lot to overcome.
P.S. I case anybody cares, on a game level the cwpa of Matzek’s 2021 NLCS game 6 was 8%, while Rosario in that same game (2 for 4 with a walk, single, & 3-run HR) was “only” 6%. I imagine Rosario’s HR had a higher cwpa than any of Matzek’s individual strikeouts.
Your question about regular season hgames is answered here: https://www.baseball-reference.com/about/wpa.shtml?__hstc=213859787.6e9cbd893d29fa92026a504b85bd1afd.1727107271764.1727107271764.1727107271764.1&__hssc=213859787.1.1727107271764&__hsfp=141023726
In essence, an opening game day is assigned .6 percentage points because “Just as with LI, cLI is normalized so that the average game is equal to 1.00. In the case of cLI, 1.00 represents a game on opening day during the two-wild card format. During this era, the average game on opening day has a difference of .6 percentage points of World Series win probability.” Not clear exactly how they got that baseline. Now that there are three wild card teams, I assume the baseline has declined and they just haven’t updated that page.
Something I noticed today: the Braves’ team WPA is terrible. Our overall team WPA is -7.38, 21st in baseball, ahead of only Tampa Bay, Oakland, Pittsburgh, Texas, Cincinnati, Anaheim, Miami, Colorado, and, of course, the Chicago White Sox. Our “Clutch” stat is 28th in baseball. Our WPA/LI is 12th in baseball at -2.54 Situational Wins – behind every playoff team but Cleveland.
Our lack of clutchness is the difference between being on the outside looking in and on the inside looking out.
That feels directly related to losing a lot of good players and replacing them with less than good players.
But 28th place?
What do we think has to happen? At least win 5 of 6? That’s where I’m at. If we go 4-2 then we could still be ok as long as at least 2 of the wins are against the Mets. Also helps to be chasing two teams, so it wouldn’t be that crazy if one of the two plays below .500 from here out. Our playoffs start tomorrow. Confident? No. Very much no. Hopeful? Always.
Yeah, agreed.
Only starting Sale once in the last 6 games is certainly a decision. I kind of get it. Line up your pitching for the wildcard series to set up for a deep run. If we get in with Sale pitching Game 162 then our odds of getting out of the first round are not as good. And if this isn’t a strategy decision, and instead a health/fatigue decision, we’re doomed anyways.
If you need Sale for 162, then you must be in dire straits, and he’d miss the entire WC round. From that perspective, I think it makes sense. If you make it to the WC but he can’t pitch in the WC, then it’s worse than a crapshoot.
Sweep the Mets.
That’s it.
Ububba, got any rally music to suggest?
My guess is we will win 2 of 3 against the Mets and wind up 1 game behind them. However we will finish in a tie with the D’backs. We win the tiebreaker with Arizona and make the playoffs.
The Mets are playing good ball and we will be lucky to beat them 2 out of 3. D-backs were hot but they seem to have cooled down. If we lose two against the Mets, we might as well start preparing for next year. Even though we are hitting better, I still think we’ll have 1 or 2 games where we score two runs or less.
Severino-schwellenbach is not in our favor. If we lose game 1, will be tough to come back. I was at the three-game series two years ago. Do it again, Braves!
This essentially is a playoff series. So we can’t really have any gameplans that rely on a pitcher to go more than five strong innings.
Severino’s had a very impressive comeback campaign, and I’m personally really happy for him that he was able to resurrect his career after it looked like he was on his way out of the league, but Schwell’s year has been more effective inning for inning. The real trouble is just keeping an eye on Schwellenbach’s innings, because he’s never gone this deep into a season before and Severino has.
Still no word on whether we’ll see Lindor tonight. When he comes back, it could be Willis Reed-like for the team, as good as Ronald’s little brother has been for them.
New post is up. (I briefly posted it yesterday, then pulled it down when JonathanF put this one up!)