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cannatar I think this is an excellent idea and will be a very useful tool for MVP discussions.
Three questions/thoughts:
1. Are you going to combine it with WPA, so that both the leverage of the game and the at-bat are factored in?
2. Is there any way for you to adjust the formula based on whether the team's opponent is also in the pennant race?If the Phillies have a September game against the Mets, that game is more important than one against the Padres.
3. You might want to consider publishing both a pure LI and a modified one that sets a maximum and minimum LI for any individual game. The pure method will probably crown John Danks AL MVP because he pitched a shutout in game 163 against the Twins and that game will probably count 100 times more than an average game. And I'm not sure if it's fair to say that a player's performance once his team his eliminated from the race can never be worth more than 0.
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studes Thanks. Yes, I was thinking of combing it with WPA, to get the "ultimate" real-time contextual stat. It's a good idea to factor in the competition, but that's beyond my ability (and dataset) right now.
Yeah, the system does give a big boost to players like Danks, who perform in big season-ending games. Capping the leverage is one idea, though I'm not sure what to cap it to. And once you start doing stuff like that, the system starts to lose its way. If you cap the most important games, why not cap the next-most important games? That sort of thing. Still, it's a good thought. Maybe there's another way to tackle the issue?
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studes Here's one idea: I could take the average game LI of each month, or ten consecutive games, or something like that. That would even out the game-by-game swings, but still follow the general concept. -
cannatar I'm imagining a pretty liberal cap that would just prevent the most extreme outliers from getting too much weight. So, if 99% of games have a LI between 0 and 8, then the one game that has a LI of 100 would get capped at 8, or 10, or something like that. Once you've run all the numbers, it will hopefully be clear where the cap, if any, should be.
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birtelcom One thing to be careful of is equating " pennant race leverage" and "value". A player who hits a game winning home run for a team that has been eliminated from the pennant race may add no value to a pennant pursuit, but his home run surely has "value" to his teammates, the team's fans, the folks who paid to see the game at the ballpark, etc. A baseball game ends when it is impossible under the rules for the trailing team to come back to win (this wasn't always the rule in baseball but it is today). But that is not true of a pennant race: the games don't all stop around the league when a pennant race is decided. that distinction tells us that while one can fairly claim that the point of a single baseball game is pretty much entirely to win the game, the point of a baseball season is not solely to win a pennant, but rather for each team to win as many games as it can. Also appropos in this connection, the guidelines for the BBWAA's MVP vote refer to "actual value of a player to his team, that is strength of offense and defense" and also refer to the number of games played and personal character, but nowhere to team success.-
studes If that's true, then why would Ryan Howard's September performance carry so much weight with sportswriters?
Personally, I'm not equating anything with value. I'm trying to see if we can quantify the BBWAA's apparent intent.
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lookatthosetwins I do like this idea, especially if you combine it with WPA and make it Pennant Probability Added. It would be fun stat to see, when taken with a grain of salt. I just think of the play in game between the Twins and the White Sox this year. In that scenario, the WPA for that game would be directly added (or subtracted) from your season PPA. Jim Thome's HR would undoutedly have been the single most important play of the season by that measure.
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Darren At BPro they chart each teams change in probability in making the playoffs after each game. I think it is under the team link on the Projected Playoff Standings page. Anyway this is calculated the same way you are doing it Studes (I think). You could add each players game WPA by the teams WPA (or maybe PPA) and then add all games over a season for each player. That would do it.-
studes BPro's (or anyone's) postseason probability would be another way to go at it, but it's not quite what I'm doing. I prefer my approach, because it doesn't include any "a priori" assumptions about each team's quality. With assumptions about team quality, you automatically have lower leverage games for the Nationals in the beginning of the season, just cause they're the Nationals.
My approach gives the same leverage to each team in the beginning of the season, then future leverage is determined by place in the standings and games left to play.
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scapistron It may make more sense to adapt Tango's work on LI for in game situations to come up with what you need. Divide the season into 9 sections (like innings) and use game differential in the win column as opposed to runs in the game.
I can see it being a little bit of work loading each teams win loss record into a database as the season has progessed, but for the comparision of Howard and Puljos this should be quite manageable.
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scapistron Anyone know the easiest/best way to determine a teams record after X number of games?-
scapistron Nevermind, I got it. Putting a table together with the Cards, Brewers, Mets, and Phils wins after each 18 game increment and calculating the run differential.-
scapistron I have the nine groups of run differentials for each team
Cards 1, 5, 5, 3, 0, -1, -2, -4, -4
Phils -2, 1, 3, 6, 2, 0, -1, -2, 3
With these nine numbers I'm sure someone smarter than I can put a Leverage Index to those, and then we can use that and apply it to Puljos' and Howard's numbers.
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studes Thanks, scapistron. Guess I wasn't clear in the article, but I have gone ahead and loaded each team's record at each point of the season, and I'm calculating the season LI for each team on each day. Watch for my next article.
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Seasonal Leverage Index
THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball —
Studes introduced this concept as a prelude to Pennant Leverage Index.
THT: Studes: Season Leverage Index
BBTF's Baseball Primer Newsblog —
THT: Studes: Season Leverage Index Studes has a prettty interesting bit on the value of games. So, according to this methodology, September games are almost four times more critical than April games. In fact, they’re twice as critical as August games. Maybe I’m not crazy. ...
Friday Filberts
ESPN Feed: neyer rob —
... actually deserve all that MVP support he got? Well, no. But is it possible that he was a lot more valuable than we thought? Well, maybe. • As Joe Posnanski points out -- in his inimitable way -- no Hall of Fame candidate has ever received 100 percent of the vote (unless you count Lou Gehrig, which I don't because we don't know exactly what happened in 1939). And it's not going to happen in 2009. But man, it should. ...
Championship Leverage Index: How Meaningful Is This Game?
Baseball Analysts —
... Taking this to the next level, we can create the same type of metric, except instead of producing it at a game level, we can produce it at a season level, with a value of 1.0 indicating an average regular season game's impact on a team's chances of winning the World Series. LI's larger than 1.0 will indicate the game has additional meaning, and LI's less than 1.0 indicate the game is less meaningful than an average regular season game. Dave Studes touched on this subject at Hardball Times, but his study seemed only to consider the time of year the game was played while this ...
