The 2011 Brewers Season in WPA

I remember a few of the great starts of late, and then the blow-ups he had early on, but that 9/10 (7/9) split of MVP/LVP sure looks strange for an above-average pitcher.

More LVP’s than Betancourt. That’s just sad.

If you were going on a hunch, you’ll be happy to know you were right. RS/IP totals (runs scored per IP while the starting pitcher was in the game):

5.3 Greinke
4.9 Gallardo
4.8 Marcum
4.3 Narveson
3.6 Wolf

It has to do with run potential. If you take a look at the 9/28 game and the Brewers’ opening 1-2-3 inning, Hart gets a worse score than Hairston and Braun based on the LI for each PA. When Hart is batting they have a higher potential to score runs that inning – there’s no outs – but when Braun bats with 2 outs he’s penalized for less than half of Hart’s out when he grounds out to 3B because there’s already 2 outs and the odds they were going to score that innign were much lower.

And this is the 2nd year he’s done that (also in 2009). Last year only 2 players played every game. Seems like the concept of the every day player is slipping into history.

Who’s in the wind-storm??
If you’ve got a baseball, throw it and it looks so cool! I tried the forkball, and the wind resistance sort of made it look like a Kam-Loe pitch (when it’s slowed down on fsn).

I appreciate Kam Loe, and the wind helped.

The idea of run creation isn’t involved with WPA, but I wanted to bring it up because of the talent/intuition factoring into this stat (yay, Braun!)

Here is the quote on Wolf;

Randy Wolf looks like he comes out here as a great clutch pitcher, but I’m guessing it’s just more a function of his relatively bad run support.

Is there a statistic similar to that of the ability of a player having a good track record of success creating/setting up runs for pitchers? I can’t go beyond certain things without adding psychological factors, intuition etc… but does Wolf do something that can be put into numbers, in the way he tries to control the game? I think he’s wonderful at it, and calling one’s own game could certainly help (Moyer is my favorite example).

That’s all.

Actually, one more thing; it’s not a huge dock in % to a pitcher to give up a home run in the early innings, so I’m assuming Greinke’s starts (a handful of the decent-to-good starts), can sometimes still show up on the ugly end of the WPA spectrum since he’ll give up 1 or 2, dominate, and then in the 6th/7th inning, out of nowhere, he gives up another home run. If he didn’t have that run support, things would look really crappy, and opposing batters would look like the cat’s-pajamas (sorry, cliche!)

But Zack is still so good, and seems to be more in line with Wolfie when it comes to trying to control as much of the game as possible.

as a WPA rookie, I still feel like I have a better grasp than I would have without BCB.