It’s a shame that fifty years from now the Oakland Athletics of the late 1990’s/early 2000’s will be known for producing more Oscar Nominees than World Series appearances.

Of course, at least those Athletics teams will go down in the history books as fielding competitive teams for the better part of a decade.  The Oakland teams of late are now better known as being lame ducks while MLB and the San Francisco Giants continue their behind-the-scenes feud over territorial rights in the South Bay.  The non-news off the field still generates more headlines for the team than the product they produce on the field.

While the Athletics haven’t fielded any embarrassing teams in recent years, they have never appeared truly close to being competitive.  Moneyball did teach us there are ways to succeed in baseball beyond simply throwing money at available free agents, though bringing in at least some talent by opening the checkbooks is both expected and required of playoff-worthy teams.

The players Oakland has signed, or considered signing, in recent years share one thing in common – baggage, whether in the form of injuries (Ben Sheets), age (Hideki Matsui) or every character issue imaginable (Manny Ramirez).  Oakland’s flirtation with Manny Ramirez in the current offseason is the type of little risk, little reward signing with which the team has been forced to roll the dice.

With the future of the Oakland/San Jose Athletics not looking any more promising in the near future, I took a look into my own personal crystal ball to see what free agent signings we should expect to see from of the East/South Bay in the years to come:

2013 – After missing over a year and a half following his walkoff celebration, Kendry Morales found himself competing with too many veterans with long-term contracts in Los Angeles and was not offered arbitration by the Angels following the 2012 season.  Billy Beane had been waiting two years for this market inefficiency to become available, however, Morales’s 2013 season ended prematurely with a hamstring pull on a trot to first base following a walk-off walk on Opening Day.

2014 – They say you can never go home again, but when you’re Barry Zito (his full name is not Barry Zito’s Albatross Contract despite what Giants fans wanted you to believe) you may be better off hiding your talents in a stadium where no one will watch you play.

2015 – For the ninth consecutive year Wells found himself alternating between good years (even years) and poor years (odd years) through the 2014 season.  Knowing full well that any string of luck has to end eventually, Billy Beane is the only GM to offer Wells a contract for 2015.  Naturally Wells continues his “streak” and is out of baseball by June 2015.

2017 – The Philadelphia Phillies’ slow decline from 2011 to 2016 was not due entirely to Ryan Howard’s diminishing power stroke.  Beane thought a change of coasts could be good for Howard, whose contract with Philadelphia seemed to exist for too long before it even started in 2012.  Following a switch to the designated hitter for the first time in his career, Howard posts a 2011 Adam Dunn-like year and is out of baseball by the end of the season.

2018 – If you can’t field a competitive team at least you can fill some seats for otherwise meaningless games by signing Alex Rodriguez.  Rodriguez finished 2017 with 755 career home runs but also found himself hitting fewer home runs every season for the tenth consecutive season.  However, the home run record is still the home run record and Rodriguez finally hits #763 against the Yankees in early September.  Upon taking a curtain call from the 12,000 in attendance Rodriguez shoots a glance upstairs towards Yankees Assistant GM Derek Jeter to see if they can now be friends.

2021 – After declining to re-sign Alex Rodriguez Beane decides to reunite the best players on the greatest Milwaukee Brewers team of all time by signing Prince Fielder and Ryan Braun.  In early June after grounding out to the right fielder for the fifth time on the season Fielder is given his unconditional release, which is followed a day later by Ryan Braun fighting his fourth drug suspension.

2023 – After finding his career arc eerily similar to that of former first round pick Phil Nevin, Bryce Harper is not resigned by the Nationals, who can simply no longer afford yet another offseason of unnecessary contracts.  Harper, determined to keep playing until he sets the career record for most ejections, signs with Oakland.  Despite hitting 150 home runs over the next five years his career is still considered a failure, mostly because no one likes him.

2024 – While Harper drew the ire of Nationals’ fans, Strasburg drew their pity.  Following a fantastic 2022 campaign, Strasburg sat out the 2023 campaign with his 6^th Tommy John surgery (recently renamed the Stephen Strasburg surgery), and determined to make up for his previous Vernon Wells mistake, Beane signs Strasburg for the league minimum.  After striking out 15 on opening day, Strasburg throws out his arm one final time on a throw to first baseman Bryce Harper following a tapper to the mound.  While trainers tend to Strasburg Harper sets the major league record for most ejections while arguing with the first base umpire that he really is the best number one pick of all time.

Selecting an MVP in the World Series and League Championship Series is usually an afterthought.  In the LCS it almost seems premature to select an MVP when there’s more baseball to be played.  The World Seres MVP, selected by a series of officials and reporters in attendance at the final game of the series (whatever that means), wins a Corvette but is otherwise overshadowed by his team winning the title.

Choosing an MVP from as few as four games can seem a bit difficult, though it will generally go to a position player with a respectable batting average (and preferably one or two “clutch” hits), or a starting pitcher who had two or more fairly dominant performances.

In any game, hitting a home run in a tie game in the ninth inning means more than one hit in the third inning of a blowout.  Similarly, a strong performance in Game 7 of the World Series enhances a team’s chances of winning the series more than a strong performance in Game 4 for a team with a 3-0 series lead.

Win Probability Added (WPA) addresses the first issue above, giving a value to every play in the form of a percent showing how much a play made it more a less likely a player’s team would win.  Freese’s triple in Game 6 had a Game WPA of .54, meaning that play alone increased the Cardinals’ chances of winning by about 54%.

Accordingly, Series WPA uses WPA to give a value to a player’s performance in the context of a playoff series.  As discussed at this post from the ESPN Stats and Info blog, Series WPA takes Game WPA and multiplies it by the leverage of that game in the series.  In other words, each Game WPA for a player is weighted by how important that game was in the series.  In Game 4 with a 3-0 series lead, the leverage is not very high.  On the other hand, leverage in a series cannot be any higher than it is for Game 7.

Over at Basketball-Reference.com, Neil Paine produced a table showing the importance of each game in a 7 game series using a 2-3-2 format (which is the format currently used for all 7 game baseball series).  The leverage can be computed by taking the value in the “Swing” column and multiplying it by two.  For example, the leverage for Game 7 equals one.  In other words, if a player produces a .300 WPA in Game 7, his performance made it 30% more likely that his team would win Game 7 and also 30% m ore likely that his team would win the series (.300 x 1 = 30%).

Using these numbers, how much Series WPA did David Freese generate in this year’s World Series?

It’s interesting to note that Freese actually produced negative value in three of the World Series games, though he still earned MVP honors due mostly to his Game 6 performance.  Using this formula Freese was a very much deserving choice for MVP.  Here are the Series WPA leaders for the Cardinals in the World Series this year:

Through Game 6, Lance Berkman actually had a lead over Freese for Series MVP, due in large part to his .832 Game WPA in Game 6.  But due to his -.008 WPA in Game 7, Freese became the deserving Series MVP.

We will never know who would have won World Series MVP had Game 7 turned out in favor of Texas, but looking at Series WPA for the Rangers, there are no clear cut favorites as well as a somewhat surprising name at the top:

Hamilton actually produced a negative Game WPA in three World Series games, as well as positive WPAs of .055 and .037, but sits atop the list solely because of his Game 6 performance (.549 WPA), including his tenth inning home run which by itself produced a WPA of .422.

This example shows the limitations in using this metric.  Had Game 7 turned out differently does it seem right to give the Series MVP award to a player who was severely limited by injuries and had just a single impactful performance in seven games?  Additionally, defensive performance does not factor into a player’s WPA (though certain baserunning outcomes do).  Furthermore, despite sabermatricians’ best efforts it is impossible to give every possible outcome in baseball a numeric value.  We  know there value in Derek Holland pitching 8 1/3 innings in Game 4 in that it gave the Rangers’ bullpen a much-needed rest, but aside from his WPA in Game 4 of .444 we do not know exactly what that value is.

Similar to this year’s World Series, choosing an MVP from the ALCS seemed a pretty easy choice, with Nelson Cruz setting a postseason record with six home runs in the series, including baseball’s first walk-off grand slam.  However, looking at the Series WPA leaders from the ALCS shows that Cruz deserved the honor but it was anything but a landslide:

Though Feliz only pitched 4 1/3 innings in the ALCS they were all high leverage situations.  And Cruz, despite his six home runs, produced a game WPA of over .01 in only three of the six games.

2010 World Series MVP Edgar Renteria seemed to be a deserving recipient, with a batting average of .412 and series-clinching 3 run home run in Game 5.  However, according to Series WPA he was only the third most deserving MVP For San Francisco in the 2010 World Series:

It is understandable that the MVP in the 2010 World Series went to Renteria instead of the perhaps more deserving Madison Bumgarner or Matt Cain, since both starting pitchers made only a single appearance in the five game series.  However, both of their appearances were dominant and they were perhaps just as valuable, if not more so, than Edgar Renteria.

In the end, who wins World Series MVP is just a footnote to the much bigger prize.  In 2011 selecting the World Series and League Championship Series MVPs were relatively easy jobs.  However, MVPs do not make themselves as visible as this year and Series WPA can be a useful tool in selecting them.

You can contact the author at jeffreywlubbers (at) yahoo (dot) com.

When it comes to the Oakland Athletics, Moneyball, and small market teams, it seems like the baseball community is still struggling with what the Moneyball revolution really means.

Last year I looked at the possible trend of teams with a lower (relative) payroll being more likely to make the playoffs.  A trend is not made in one year, however, after seeing the same results two years in a row it appears that the higher payroll teams are becoming less likely to make the playoffs.  For the second year in a row, the total player payroll of the eight playoff teams is less than 31% of total payroll throughout baseball.  Prior to 2010 no single season had seen less than 31% of payroll in the playoffs since 2002.

(All salary figures are courtesy of the USA Today Salaries Database.)

It is worth noting that without the Red Sox’ epic September collapse, the total payroll in the playoffs would have been 35.2%, the highest figure since 2005.  Had the outcome of just a couple of games for either Boston or Tampa Bay turned out any differently the figures above would be quite different as well.  But eventually that will just become a footnote that history will forget (unless stories like this keep coming out).  (The total payrolls of St. Louis and Atlanta were about $18 million apart, much less than the $120 million difference between Boston and Tampa Bay, meaning even without Atlanta’s collapse the overall numbers would not have changed substantially.)

What do these numbers tell us?  Despite Billy Beane’s assurances that baseball is much more efficient than it used to be, are the big market teams finally being outsmarted by everyone else?  And if that’s the case why is Theo Epstein in hot demand in Chicago and why is it a foregone conclusion Brian Cashman, with a two year title drought to deal with, will be back in New York?

That’s where it becomes murky.  It is true that a top ten payroll team wasn’t among the final four teams in baseball’s postseason.  However, it is also true that there wasn’t a team among the bottom twelve teams among the last four. Detroit, St. Louis, Texas, and Milwaukee are all middle payroll teams, ranking 10^th, 11^th, 13^th and 17^th in payroll among all teams, respectively.  Additionally, the Yankees and Phillies, the top two payroll teams in baseball, were both a single elimination game away from advancing to the LCS.  Had a Don Kelly home run not found the short right field porch in Yankee Stadium articles like this would not have been written.

This (sort of) trend of top payroll teams not making the playoffs is coming at a time when their collective share of baseball payroll has changed relatively little throughout the last 14 seasons (going back to 1998, the most recent expansion year for baseball).  In 2011 the top ten payroll teams paid out 49.7% of all player salaries in baseball, actually up over 3% from 1998 (46.4%).  In addition, the ten teams with the smallest team payrolls are now actually paying less in salary (18.7%) than they were in 1998 (19.3%).

Given that the middle and lower classes of baseball are playing in October with greater frequency, one might have expected these three lines to converge more than they are.  Instead the trend at least since 2009 is for the rich to keep spending and the poor to keep cutting salary.  However, even the Yankees and Phillies of the world have spending caps, while the fans of the Astros and Pirates will eventually revolt (more than they have) if they keep payroll at a minimum while still turning a profit.

While the middle payroll teams have proven more successful, they may face longer odds in sustaining their success.  St. Louis and Milwaukee face important decisions this offseason with their slugging first basemen.  To keep both Albert Pujols and Prince Fielder may vault the Cardinals and Brewers in the top tier of teams.  Looking ahead to 2012, regardless of where Pujols and Fielder are playing, are the Cardinals and Brewers considered just as likely to be successful as the Yankees and Phillies?

In short it looks like the non-elite teams in baseball are becoming smarter, while not necessarily relatively richer.  2010 and 2011 are a far cry from 1999, when the team with the lowest overall payroll to make the playoffs still ranked 11^th (Houston).  But despite Oakland’s success earlier this decade and Tampa Bay’s run in recent years, the Yankees and Phillies of the sport will continue to have the best chance to succeed year after year.