My SABR Analytic presentation

Next month, SABR (that’s the Society for American Baseball Research to you people who like everything spelled out) is hosting an analytic conference in Mesa, where the Cubs play spring ball. There are going to be cool speakers, panel discussions, case studies and presentations—you can see the agenda here. Lots of THT friends will be there, including our buddies at Fangraphs, Baseball Prospectus and elsewhere. I’m looking forward to meeting people I’ve only emailed up to now.

But that’s not what I wanted to tell you. In addition of my acting as a judge during the case study presentations, I’m going to make a presentation of a favorite subject of mine: Championship WPA. If you’ve read a recent Hardball Times Annual, you may have noticed that I like to take Win Probability Added one last step further to measure the impact a player had on his team’s eventually winning the world championship. It’s sort of a guilty pleasure of mine.

Well, at the Analytic Conference, I’ll be presenting the Championship WPA of all players in the history of postseason play. This will be possible only thanks to the contributions of Baseball Reference’s data (thanks, Sean) and Sky Andrecheck’s postseason leverage index tables (thanks, Sky). I’ll be putting the two together and reporting the results. We’ll quantify the impact of Merkle’s boner, Carter’s home run, Morris’ game and Mazeroski’s home run, among many other things. Hopefully, it will be a baseball geek’s delight. At least, it will be fun for me.

See you there!