I thought I had quit watching Baseball cold turkey, until...

I used to watch way too many sports on television. When we first got married, my wife briefly supported my habit of watching every Golden State Warriors game, sometimes even enthusiastically, hoping that once the season was over there would be other things for us to watch together until she realized that the rolling seasons between Football, Baseball and Basketball meant there was always some sport to watch on television.

After twenty-five plus years of watching these games, and having seen all my favorite teams reach the pinnacle of a championship, (more than once) I am no longer gripped to the TV remote, my emotions rising and falling with every missed call, every error and every made clutch shot! I wisely thought that I have lived the good life (at least as far as watching sports is concerned) and to be only fair, I now feel it is time to let some of the other fan bases have their moment in the sun and get doused in champagne.

That is why I have stopped watching baseball for the last 5 years. It helped that my favorite San Francisco Giants have been having a few lean years, the stars were all getting old and the expected rebuilding was in full swing. I also convinced myself that baseball has run its course, the game doesn't have the appeal of a fast pace anymore. Of the top five highest-paid players in 2021 - Mike Trout, Gerritt Cole, Nolan Arenado, Max Scherzer, Manny Machado - only one is in the playoffs, so you aren't really seeing the best compete against each other.

But something strange happened about 4-5 months ago.

• There was a lot of chatter I was reading about a new manager for the SF Giants, Farhan Zaidi, who had done wonders with people off the scrap heap from other teams, and with no big-name stars, the Giants were still winning! I thought it interesting, yet I was thinking to myself, "No, I have quit baseball" and I was quite happy to stay away from the TV remote.

• And then I came across this gem, from Umpire Scorecards;

This is a site that tracks every single umpire's call statistics for every single game! They assign a weighting to each of the calls (correct or erroneous) and if the errors are slighted in one teams' favor and then compute if that could be translated to a contribution to win! Holy Cow! See the figure on the right that shows the calls from one umpire in a key rivalry game which ended by leaning about 1/2 a run closer to one team over the other. What I assumed and accepted to be a very subjective call, and one that we lived with (the best a supposedly unbiased person could do), and here we were quantifying this to unearth bias. And then it dawned on me why I had loved baseball in the first place. It was this love for statistics and the ever-increasing number of things one could track and as they say, "When you measure something, you can improve it!"

Yes, I am familiar with the whole concept of Sabermetrics that Michael Lewis initiated with Moneyball and how this has taken the sport by storm since the early 2000s, and I certainly had bought into the value/concept, but that was all in player capability. Even for statistically immersed baseball, this was a whole new level!

• And then I read an article by Grant Brisbee in The Athletic that completely blew me away! This article talks about how baseball actually tracks a thought called a productive out; In the article, he quotes Baseball-Reference, Elias Sports Bureau, and ESPN defining a productive out as follows:

A successful sacrifice from a pitcher with none out or one out Advancing any runner with none out Driving in a base runner with the second out of an inning

In effect, it outlines a "safe" way to produce a run. The concept is that with a walk, two productive outs, and a single can actually produce a run. This is sometimes called smallball as opposed to the longball or hitting home runs. And some teams embrace it, either because they don't have the kind of hitters that can easily hit home runs or their home ballpark is not conducive to hitting home runs and this smallball approach becomes an easier way to generate runs. It is also generally considered appropriate when you are playing against teams with better pitchers, where you might not get a chance to hit a lot of home runs, instead, you use smallball to compete and win a game.

In the article, Grant points out, that the SF Giants are actually the worst at this number of productive outs statistic; Not just this year, but in the entire history of baseball! Holy Cow again! This must mean that the SF Giants are not a very good team and not winning a lot of games. Wrong and Wrong! The SF Giants finished the season with the best record in the entire league and bested their entire franchise history with 107 wins (out of 162)! I had to study this a bit more. Yes, it turns out that SF Giants were actually the National League leader in hitting home runs! But as Grant points out in the article, it seems the old adage in baseball, "See ball, Hit ball", actually is a better way to measure success. It turns out the SF Giants' approach of hitting the ball, - hard, every single time -, is a better approach than a 'safe' productive out!

But what really caught my fancy was the quantification of the word "Clutch"; We sports' fans have always marveled at the ability of the athletes being able to deliver when the game was on the line, or producing that key hit/out when it mattered the most! I learned about this also from a different article by Grant Brisbee; In this article, he explains two new statistics that baseball is tracking now called WPA and Leverage Index. He explains WPA thus:

The quickest, dirtiest explanation of Win Probability Added is this: If a team has a 50 percent chance of winning a game and a player’s hit moves those odds to 75 percent, that player’s WPA for that hit is .25. If he makes an out and the team’s chances drop to 25 percent, he gets a -.25 WPA. Add those events up over a season and you get a number.

The article also explains that Tom Tango of Inside the Book, explains Leverage Index thus:

Within a game, there are plays that are more pivotal than others. We attempt to quantify these plays with a stat called leverage index (LI). LI looks at the possible changes in win probability in a given situation; situations where dramatic swings in win probability are possible (e.g. runner on second late in a tie game) have higher LIs than situations where there can be no large change in win probability (e.g. late innings of a 12-run blowout).

The stat is normalized so that on average the leverage is 1.00. In tense situations, the leverage is higher than 1.00 (up to about 10) and in low-tension situations, the leverage is between 0 and 1.0

Take these two stats WPA and Leverage Index and mash them up and Baseball-Reference comes up with a statistic simply called 'Clutch'. Baseball-Reference has computed the Clutch statistic for players across the entire history of Baseball and you will see a lot of familiar names in that list (Ty Cobb, Joe Dimaggio for example).

While is all this relevant, you ask? There is a kid in the SF Giants lineup named Lamonte Wade Jr. who has played less than 100 games, but if he is up in the 9th inning he seems to deliver hit after hit. He shows up as 2nd in this Cluth statistic list -- all time (!!) for players who have played less than 100 games. But even if you consider the entire list of all players historically, he is in the top 25! No doubt this is a case of small sample statistics and shouldn't be ascribed to being understood prescriptive, but it is sure is descriptive of how he has played this season.

But to understand Lamonte Wade Jr.'s clutch performance, you just consider his 9th inning heroics. Quoting again from his article,

But we don’t just need to use WPA, LI, Clutch, or the other newfangled situational stats to point out just how unusual Wade’s late-game performance has been this season. How about simple ninth-inning stats? No context required, no parsing the in-game situations, just rank these suckers by raw OPS in the ninth inning.

Wade’s OPS in the ninth inning is 25th all-time among hitters with 20 or more plate appearances.

The company he’s keeping there is impressive and hilarious. There are all sorts of Hall of Famers, from Ty Cobb to Joe DiMaggio, but the best ninth-inning OPS of all time belongs to Joe Crede in 2002. That’s a perfect way to describe what Wade is doing: He’s performing like an inner-circle Hall of Famer in this small sample, even if he’s as likely (or less likely) to repeat this performance as Crede was.

So why is all this relevant? The hype machine is in full swing... because the 107 win SF Giants are going to play the 106 Win Dodgers in the National League Division Series (NLDS) starting Friday. What I cannot figure out is why this is as much a storied rivalry if the two teams have not met in a playoff series in like "EVER" !?

Nevertheless, if you are watching the game and in the ninth inning, Lamonte Wade Jr. comes up against Kenley Jensen (The LA Dodgers all-time saves leader with 350 saves, 38 saves in 2021, and 5 blown saves) it will be interesting to see what transpires.

According to Stathead, Lamonte Wade Jr. is 2-2 in two plate appearances (both singles) against Kenley Jansen in the 9th inning in the regular season in 2021, and yes, one of them was a blown save by Kenley Jensen.