Sandoval was the 2nd worst player in MLB

This graph pretty much tells you everything you need to know about Pablo Sandoval getting designated for assignment by the Red Sox today.

Alexei Ramirez finished out a contract in 2015, and then signed for $3M with the Padres, where he put up a disastrous 2016 and was released.

Full data available.

What is EGI?

The origin of the Exciting Game Index (EGI) is the 2008 ALCS. Game 5 was particularly riveting. Let me remind you: the Rays were beating the Red Sox 3 games to 1 and jumped out to a early lead of 5-0 against Daisuke Matzusaka. By the 4^th inning, the game, the series, the season, looked over for the Red Sox. When the Rays piled on to make it 7-0 in the 7^th inning, the Red Sox staff was probably taping up plastic in the Rays visiting clubhouse. And then something funny happened: the Red Sox won the game. Mind you, this isn’t a feel good Red Sox story (cf. 2004): the Red Sox lost this series in 7 games. However, there were few people that would doubt that Game 5 was a very exciting game to watch. A huge, improbable comeback finishing with a walk off win in the playoffs? This is why we watch baseball.

Statistically, it’s not hard to quantify the Red Sox chances of coming back from a 7-0 deficit with 2 outs in the 7^th inning. It’s less than 1%. Here’s what happens when you graph the Red Sox win expectancy in that game:

What if the Red Sox had lost that game after coming all the way back? No matter, it still would have been exciting to the casual baseball observer without a rooting interest. I reasoned that it wasn’t necessarily the outcome of the game that mattered, but how we got there. No one doubts that a 7-0 game is a laugher, and relatively boring, or that a 1-0 game is going to be exciting to watch all the way through. But, we’ve all see boring 3-0 games, where one team just dominates the other for 9 innings. That’s no fun either. What matters is the high leverage situations that teams put themselves into. A 1-0 game where the bases are loaded every inning but no one can manage to score is inherently more exciting than a 1-0 game that neither team can manage to get on base.

In an attempt to measure this, EGI was born. As it turns out, Game 5 a very exciting game when compared to other games in post season history. From 1985-2008, it was the 6th most exciting ALCS game.

EGI averages 33, and ranges between 8-75. Anything above 65 is a top 2% game.

Here’s the formula: the sum of all win expectancy changes divided by the total number of plays, multiplied by 1000.

I swear, it won’t be this hard.

The United States of Baseball

The New York Times Upshot did a great interactive on the various fan allegiances of baseball fans by zipcode. The results weren’t surprising: the Yankees are the default where there’s no teams, the Mets and A’s don’t have a plurality, and the Braves and Cubs expand well beyond their geographies – mostly because of their long standing Regional Sports Network broadcast reach. The granularity of the detail produced, however, led to some great specifics – there’s the disputed New England border that runs through Connecticut, the Northern California/Southern California dividing line pinpointed at Tulare, CA, and many other fun tidbits.

Nate Silver of Five Thirty Eight tweeted about how his office was using the map to define geographic boundaries, which I thought was enlightening.

The @FiveThirtyEight office consensus is that the Midwest begins at the Phillies-Pirates dividing line. http://t.co/WNteznrRoY

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) April 29, 2014

Pennsylvania can’t be the Midwest, but Pittsburgh can’t be the Northeast. Drawing region boundaries through states just makes sense. Using the NYTimes Baseball Map just made sense. Using that methodology, I decided to take the example to the logical conclusion: redefine the US by baseball allegiance.

There were three difficult areas on the map.

1. What to do about the Mid-Atlantic? I’ve always thought of Philadelphia as firmly Northeast, and Virginia as the South, but clearly wedged in between the two is the Mid-Atlantic. I don’t think anyone would dispute this region’s existence. However, it’s very small, especially by geographical area. I wanted to make the Mid-Atlantic bigger, but how? It made more sense to expand it south than north. Very few people from Philadelphia would call their home “Mid-Atlantic” and I would guess that almost all would call it “the Northeast.” Expanding south meant shrinking the region known as the South, and doing so along the baseball borders means that all that unincorporated land currently known as southern Virginia, North Carolina, and northern South Carolina would be part of Mid Atlantic. This wasn’t too bad, for instance, Raleigh and Richmond can definitely qualify as Mid-Atlantic. In fact, Five Thirty Eight also did a study on what the local population considers themselves, and only about 50% of North Carolinans consider themselves part of the South. However, redrawing the Mid-Atlantic in this way would mean expanding west into the unincorporated land of West Virginia. This just feels wrong. How can a state be Mid-Atlantic if it doesn’t have a coast line? As a result, I held the (very small) Mid-Atlantic region where it was.
2. How far does the Mid-West go? Pretty far, it turns out. I didn’t want to subdivide the Mid-West into things like North Central, Plains, High Plains because, while geographically impressive, there’s simply not a lot of people there. It’s not that they don’t have their own identity, as much as there’s not enough critical mass to make it an important enough region, on par with the Mid-West for instance.
3. Is Texas a Thing? Yeah, Texas is a thing, but I put them in the Southwest. People from Arizona or New Mexico might not like this, but I grouped these together. It was a little difficult to figure out where to stop the Southwest, but at some point, you hit the Rocky Mountains, and a very different fan base in Colorado. I decided to put the unincorporated land of Nevada in the Mountain West.

It’s possible that New England isn’t its own region, just like the Mid-Atlantic, but it’s tough to put Baltimore, Washington, and Northern Virginia in the same region as Boston. I took a look at the population numbers for the 60 largest Metropolitan Statistical Areas based on 2013 estimates and divided them up by my new region assignment. The 60 largest MSAs get you about 183M people, of 313M in the US. New England does seem to hold its own, as it’s slightly larger than the Pacific Northwest, and much bigger than the Mountain West. The problem with regions like New England, Pacific Northwest, and Mountain West is that they are really based only on one city. The Northeast is mostly based on one city, but it also has Philadelphia to increase its numbers.

Other fun stuff: Southern California includes Las Vegas, so maybe it needs another name. The Pacific Northwest contains Idaho, which has no coast. The Southwest includes a little bit of Louisiana. A tiny bit of Georgia sneaked into Florida, which was surprising, as I thought it would go the other way. If southern Virginia, North Carolina, and northern South Carolina were part of the Mid Atlantic, it would only have increased to about 10M in population based on the above chart, so while it would look more geographically impressive, it would still be a fairly small region.

The Mariners Have Made a Huge Mistake

• Helton ended up getting bought out of his 38-year-old season and resigned for $5M/year through 2013, but in doing so also reworked his 37-year-old season and deferred a bunch of money. I counted it as it was originally signed.
• ARod’s listing above is the $252M contract, but he opted out, so the value was only $185M.
• I left Sabathia off the list – pitcher.
• Kind of funny that the Yankees have/had 6 of the 9 players above. 2 of which are salary dumps. I suppose they have a first hand view at what they’re getting into.

There’s a bunch of pitchers I didn’t include, but that’s basically all of the $150M+ contracts in history.

David Ortiz and 6 Game Stretches

Joe Flood and I collaborated on a quick one for David Ortiz’s best 6-game performances, shortly after his amazing World Series run.

I want to add some additional insight to the data. In order to get discrete streaks, we only took the highest streak for a period and then excluded any overlapping games. Unfortunately, this did obscure some of the data. Realistically, from 9/22/2007 – 9/28/2007, OPS 1.906, was his 4th best streak. When combined with his 9/27/2007 – 10/7/2007 streak, OPS 2.329, you get a ridiculous 10 game streak that outpaces all of his 6-game streaks in his life (except for the 6-game streak inherently included), his OPS was 1.957 from 9/23/2007 – 10/12/2007. Also, if you take a look at the streaks from 2007, he was absolutely on fire from August 18th to the end of the year:

• 8/18/2007 – 8/24/2007 (OPS 1.702)
• 9/8/2007 – 9/14/2007 (OPS 1.750)
• 9/27/2007 – 10/7/2007 (OPS 2.329)

The other, slightly more obscure thing we looked at was WPA (Win Probability Added). We looked at a rolling 6-game average to see when Ortiz was the most “clutch,” fully recognizing that you have to be put into the situation, so it’s not perfectly representative of how hot Ortiz was. Obviously, 2004 playoffs was near the top of the list:

• #1: 7/25/2006 – 8/1/2006 – WPA/G 0.250
• #2: 8/29/2003 – 9/3/2003 – WPA/G 0.231
• #3: 8/7/2011 – 8/13/2011 – WPA/G 0.221
• #4: 5/28/2005 – 6/2/2005 – WPA/G 0.220
• #5: 10/8/2004 – 10/18/2004 – WPA/G 0.214

Number 5 above is the well known ALCS comeback through Game 5 of the ALCS, when Ortiz had two consecutive walk off hits in extra innings, as well as a few other RBI. It’s worth remembering that Ortiz also had a walk off HR to win the ALDS Game 3, to eliminate the Angels earlier in the week.

But what about number 1 above? What did Ortiz do that week?

July 29th – 4 for 5, 4 RBI, 1 R, 1 BB, walk off with 2 outs in 11th. Sox win 7-6, (note he has 4 RBI – half of all runs).
July 31st – 3 for 5, 4 RBI, 2 R, 1 K, Game tying HR in 3rd, walk-off 3 R HR in 9th, down by 2 runs, 1 out. Sox win 9-8

Not a bad couple of days.