Looking Back at the 2016 Postseason

The 2016 season is over, and the postseason is in the books. There were story lines a-plenty in these playoffs: from Toronto and Texas meeting again in a grudge match, to Trevor Bauer’s bleeding finger, to Kyle Schwarber’s arrival on the World Series roster after a season lost to an ACL injury. Truth to tell, though, there is just one thing that we will remember from this year, one story that overwhelms the rest.

The number “1908” cannot wound Chicago Cubs fans any longer. Foul balls to left, grounders through the legs, black cats, billy goats, called shots, sunbeams in Hack Wilson’s eyes, and even the haunting shade of Fred Merkle have all been banished. I could say so much more, and still not reach to the core of it. I have lived to see the day the Chicago Cubs won the World Series, and it remains somehow unreal to me.

Still, the rest of the postseason deserves to be thought of. Today I will be looking at the games, not for the excitement of the overarching narratives, but for the excitement of the games themselves. For that purpose, I am bringing out what is by now a somewhat long-standing creation of mine: the WPS Index.

Back in 2012 and ’13, I did daily Hardball Times reports on postseason games, supported by a metric I call the Win Percentage Sum, or WPS. When THT’s format changed in early 2014, I shifted to a post-postseason wrap-up, of which this is my third.

Readers who saw my recent comparison of the two classic World Series Game Sixes in 1975 and 2011 have already gotten a brief reminder of how WPS works. Others can read the following paragraphs for a precis of the methodology, or refer to my original article for the full course. As always, I will first credit THT’s Grand Poobah Emeritus Dave Studeman for creation of the original game excitement metric. I did not know of his work, published in the 2007 Hardball Times Annual, when I conceived my related system. It is thanks to his forbearance that I continue to use WPS, while giving credit where it is due.

WPS is calculated with a base score that adds together the change in game Win Expectancy created by every play, meaning every continuous action that changes the base-out state of the game. For example, if a player’s popout lowers his team’s chance of winning by four percentage points, that’s a score of four. If Carlton Fisk leads off the bottom of the 12th with a home run that takes his team from a 64 percent chance of winning to actually winning, that’s 36 points added to the WPS score.

To the base score I make two additions, meant to reflect fans’ subjective enjoyment of the high points of a game. I add the three plays with the highest Win Expectancy changes to the base, then add the value of the game’s final play. These reflect, respectively, the highlights of the game and how much the game was in doubt at the very end.

If a walk-off play is one of the top three, that means it counts three times: in the base, in the highlights, and as the final play. This is intentional. As walk-off wins, especially those going from defeat to victory in one play, are generally remembered as the most exciting, the WPS system favors them.

The median WPS score of a game is roughly 300, with wide variations running from below 100 to over 1,000. Under 200 means a snoozer, while 500 points is my criterion for a “great” game. The mean of WPS scores is somewhat higher than the median, because there is more numerical room for a game to be great than to be boring.

The system isn’t perfect. It can’t measure superb individual performances or milestones, save by how they affect the game’s competitiveness. No-hitters and perfect games usually score badly because they lack the give-and-take between offense and defense, or between the competing teams, that builds up good scores. I hope I have captured some subjective experience with best-play and final-play bonuses, but other subjective reactions are beyond a system that does not overload itself with a thousand little additions.

Another bug, or perhaps feature, of the system is that it believes more baseball is always better. WPS points can only accumulate, not be subtracted. This means that extra-inning games have a structural advantage, growing greater the longer the game goes.

How much long extra innings affect one’s enjoyment of a game depends on the type of game. A mid-June marathon is likelier to exhaust our patience and fascination than one deep in October. A related question is how the time duration of a game affects our enjoyment. WPS does not touch on this matter, but I will have occasion to refer to it in my accompanying commentaries.

A quick note before I start delving into WPS. I used FanGraphs’ WPA numbers to work out WPS game scores this postseason, but for games before 2012 (which arise in historical comparisons), I used Baseball-Reference data. This will produce small differences in scores, but not enough to turn a good game bad or vice versa.

Postseason, by the Numbers

The first four years of the Wild Card round were a wet fizzle as far as WPS is concerned. The numbers ignore the drama of the 2012 Cardinals-Braves infield fly controversy and Pittsburgh fans shaking the foundations of PNC Park, and Johnny Cueto, with their cheering in the 2013 Pirates-Reds contest. WPS found only the classic 12-inning Royals-A’s showdown in 2014 ranked as above average, with five of the eight clearly below the median.

That changed this year, and about time. The 11-inning Wild Card game between the Orioles and Blue Jays, walked off by Edwin Encarnación’s three-run homer, scored a robust 450.3. While the WPS system usually doesn’t enjoy pitchers’ duels that go scoreless through eight, it liked Madison Bumgarner and Noah Syndergaard, to the tune of 354.0 points for the Giants-Mets match. The Royals and A’s in 2014 is still the gold standard for Wild Card games, but this year’s contests were a nice investment in silver.

The divisional round did not quite maintain that hot start.

There have been 92 League Division Series played (including the 1981 strike season), and this year’s versions covered the quartiles, one apiece. Cleveland-Boston came in 84th best, Texas-Toronto was 69th (just barely in the third quartile, but it counts), San Francisco-Chicago was 38th, and Los Angeles-Washington was the seventh-best Division Series by WPS scores.

The two weaker series were, naturally enough, the sweeps. The Indians and Red Sox had the only series of the round without a great game, and a 146.0 Game Two dragged down two other fairly good games. The Blue Jays-Rangers series went from bad to average to excellent, ending on Rougned Odor’s wide throw and Josh Donaldson’s dash for home.

Game Three in the Cubs-Giants series was not only the best of the entire postseason, it had the best half-inning of the playoffs (if just by three-tenths of a point). This was when the Giants, six outs from elimination, jumped on three Cubs relievers, including Aroldis Chapman, to swing a one-run deficit into a two-run lead. Connor Gillaspie’s one-out, two-run triple off Chapman was worth 55.1 WPS points (the highest WPA play of the postseason) in an inning that scored 102.5 total.

Chicago would get off the canvas and tie the game in the ninth, setting the stage for extra innings and an excellent WPS score. The only pity is that the game will probably fade fairly rapidly in baseball’s collective memory. It was the Giants’ only win of the NLDS, and their even-year magic was no match for the destiny that finally alighted on the Cubs’ shoulder.

The Dodgers-Nationals series was great or miserable, depending on one’s viewpoint—and I don’t mean the viewpoints of Los Angeles or Washington fans. The great is demonstrated, not only by its overall WPS score, but by the individual ones. There was not a below-average game in the whole series.

This isn’t all that rare: LA-Washington was the seventh LDS, and the 12th postseason series overall, to have all its games score better than 300 WPS points. But the Dodgers and Nats went five games. Four of those other 11 series were just three games, and six of them went four. The only other postseason series at least as long as this one to have all above-average games was the 1990 NLCS between the Cincinnati Reds and the Pittsburgh Pirates. It went six, with all of its games between 337.5 and 435.2 WPS points (and 2226.9 total).

By one standard, with five above-average games, LA-Washington was the best League Division Series ever played. Their total score is held down by four of the games being just moderately above the median, though they saved the best for last. Game Five cracked the 500-point ceiling in regulation, an uncommon and pretty special feat.

The seventh inning of Game Five fell just short of the highest-scoring full inning of the 2016 postseason. Trailing by 0.3 points (174.9 to 175.2), it’s really in a dead heat. The Dodgers’ four-run rally to erase a 1-0 deficit, and the Nationals’ two-run reply that ended with the bases loaded, scored almost identically themselves, 87.7 and 87.2. WPS loved that inning.

It was viewers who may have felt differently. That single inning took an hour and six minutes to play. The five pitching changes Washington made by Washington manager Dusty Baker is one culprit, against which Kenley Jansen’s intentional walk of Daniel Murphy vanishes like Venus under a noonday sun. What should have been a gripping inning of baseball was instead a trial of endurance more than half as long as a world-class marathon.

The whole game required 4:32, just over half an hour per inning, and it was not a fluke in this NLDS. The shortest game of the series, Game Four, took 3:44—without a bottom of the ninth. Game One, taking 3:46 to play a full nine, had the quickest pace in the series at just over 25 minutes per inning. Television announcers throughout the series commented on the slow pace of the pitchers, notably the Dodgers, and specifically reliever Pedro Báez. And he wasn’t even involved in that slogging seventh.

When people bringing you an entertainment product willingly and un-ironically mention how boring part of it is going to be, something has gone wrong. I’ll get back to this later.

Then came the League Championship Series round, which ended up being historic. But that was only in terms of who advanced. In how they did it, the numbers are a little shocking.

Last year’s series between the Mets and Cubs put up the worst WPS score ever for a best-of-seven LCS, at just 886.1 points. The Indians-Blue Jays matchup this year looks a good deal better at 1229.1, but it lifts them just two spots from the cellar. Of 62 LCSes in the best-of-seven era, Cleveland and Toronto played the 60th best, and the worst ever to last more than the minimum four games. (The only other LCS it beats was the 1990 ALCS, Oakland over Boston. The one with Roger Clemens ejected for cussing an umpire.)

What made it so weak? Mostly the dearth of offense: just 20 runs scored in five games. WPS likes back-and-forth action, and it’s hard to have that with muzzled offenses. Game Three did have the Blue Jays coming back twice from one-run deficits before Cleveland scored the decisive runs in the sixth, which gave the game a 323.9 score. That was well and away best in the series, but when your best game is a smidgen above average, you have trouble.

The NLCS was surprisingly not much better. It got off to a fine start with a 404.2 tally in Game One, due mainly to the most exciting inning of the postseason. Los Angeles, down 3-1 in the top of the eighth, loaded the bases with nobody out. Aroldis Chapman came in to strike out the next two batters, but Adrián González’s single up the middle tied the game. Chicago answered with Ben Zobrist’s leadoff double, then two outs and two questionable intentional walks later, Miguel Montero hit a pinch-hit grand slam. Dexter Fowler followed with a solo shot to put the cherry on top.

That eighth inning scored 175.2 WPS points, turning a middling game into an exciting and memorable one. It was also the peak of the series. No other game reached 300 WPS points. Two Dodgers shutouts were followed by a Cubs blowout, then Game Five struggled to be roughly average. Game Six had the lowest score of the whole postseason. The Cubs built a good early lead while Kyle Hendricks and Aroldis Chapman faced the minimum 27 batters, smothering any prayer of a Dodgers comeback. The three highest Win Probability Added plays of the game all happened in the first inning, a sure indicator of anticlimax.

This, of course, is where a purely statistical system like WPS can fail, and perhaps must fail. It can simulate subjective reactions within a game, but it’s helpless to measure the outside factors. Any system that did try to put numbers to such things would be insanely complicated, not to mention contaminated by all the subjective assumptions its creator was making. Neither WPS nor anything like it can capture everything, including a 71-year drought ending in a downpour of joy.

And then there was the World Series, which recapitulated that lesson on the grandest of stages.

Of the 112 World Series played, this one came in 41st, comfortably above the midpoint. Out of the 38 Fall Classics to go seven games, however, it came in a distinctly sub-par 26th. Looking at the game scores themselves, it’s hard to argue the point. Four dull-to-terrible contests plus one average one would put a drag chain on almost any series.

The WPS scores are what some people would argue, though. They’d argue that Game Five was better than just average, which I admit surprised me when I ran the numbers. Seven 1-2-3 frames and just three scoring innings are a partial explanation, damping the back-and-forth swings that WPS likes.

What really will get fans hot is the Game Seven rating. Great, yes, but only by a little for what some commentators in the following days were saying was the greatest baseball game ever played. Such hot-take reaction reminds me (a touch ghoulishly) of the response to the death of José Fernandez, when some were calling for him to be elevated to the Hall of Fame. Time, not to mention a dismaying autopsy report, brought needed perspective.

My WPS numbers will perhaps bring their own. This was, by WPS, the fifth-best all-the-marbles World Series game ever played. (I would say “best Game Seven,” except that a tie caused the 1912 World Series to go eight games.) A list of the best will offer some surprises.

Everyone knows Game Seven in 1960, with Bill Mazeroski. Everyone knows Game Seven in ’91, with Jack Morris. (WPS generally dislikes pitcher’s duels: it took an incredible one like this to score so well.) People don’t know the 1912 and 1924 games, because virtually nobody alive today saw them.

Game Seven in 1997, by its score, should be remembered more clearly and fondly than it is. Why is it neglected? Well, the Cleveland drought hadn’t reached half a century left, and had several longer ones ahead of it (Boston, both Chicagos), so that wasn’t as strong a narrative. The Florida Marlins were in their fifth pro season, which should have made their ascent memorable, but four years later Arizona eclipsed them on that score. Also, the postseason fire sale that sent Florida tumbling into the cellar in 1998 curdled Marlins fans’ pleasant memories.

I won’t cover the deciding games of 1912 and 1924 here, but I encourage you to find out about them yourselves. The games themselves were remarkable, and the narratives leading into them were not lacking either. (For example, 1924 had a historically futile Washington Senators team trying to win its first title, largely on behalf of their outstanding and beloved pitcher Walter Johnson, whose career was nearing its end. Football fans may compare it to the Denver Broncos and John Elway.) Had those games taken place in the television era, Maz and Carlton and Mookie and Jack might stand in their shade today.

Taken from WPS’s perspective, it was a pretty good World Series, with a great final game that fell shy of being the all-time best. Perhaps in a few years, the mass of fans will see it that way. In the immediate aftermath, I feel awfully lonely making that assessment.

Turning Back the Clock

This is the traditional portion of my postseason recaps where I offer grumbles, or plaudits, on the length of the games just played. In 2014 I was grumbling hard. In 2015 I was much pleasanter to be around, though I hadn’t gone fully Pollyanna. In that piece, I had this to say about the pace-of-play reforms that had quickened games, both regular and post.

“Commissioner Manfred accomplished something good for baseball this year. If I have even the slightest hesitation in lauding him for it, it is because I don’t want him relaxing and letting things slide.”

I was wise to hesitate, however slightly. Manfred did let things slide in 2016. The enforcement of pace-of-play strictures such as not allowing batters to leave the batter’s box at will during an at-bat, which had been fading late in 2015, effectively disappeared in 2016. This affected the speed of games in both regular play and the postseason, as this table shows.

I give paces in both absolute numbers and time per inning to take extra-inning games into account. There were three of those in the playoffs both this year and last, while 2014 had six, including an 18-inning ironman triathlon between the Giants and Nationals.

The numbers in all four columns concur. Baseball in 2016 gave back most of the pace-of-play gains it made in 2015, ending up with times worse than 2013, when the matter began impressing people as a crisis. If the reversal continues, next season should see the longest average game times ever recorded in baseball.

Games are getting slower again, and I wasn’t the only one noticing. Dave Cameron of FanGraphs bemoaned the near-interminable Game Two of the World Series, and Rob Arthur of FiveThirtyEight joined his lament. (That 5-1 game went four hours and four minutes.) One has to believe the fans are noticing, especially the young ones who get sent to bed long before the game is over.

The Commissioner’s Office is already reacting. There are strong indications that the pitch clock, tried out in Double-A and Triple-A the last two years, will be brought to the majors in 2017. Likewise, the intentional walk may be changed, allowing the defensive team merely to wave a batter to first base rather than taking the time to throw pitches.

These, in my opinion, would be retrograde steps. The beauty of the changes in 2015, aside from working well, was that they were effectively invisible. Umpires enforcing measures against time-wasting by themselves, with no change in equipment used or rules governing play, was a light touch. The measures now foreseen will change baseball.

Why would baseball abandon the gains it made with those near-invisible changes, in favor of something more disruptive? The cynic in me suggests a reason: the previous reforms were too invisible.

Rob Manfred may want more than to solve the pace-of-play problem. He may wish to be seen as solving the problem. Silent reforms might not accomplish this, but bigger, more visible acts would. Withdrawing the silent reforms and making the bigger acts necessary accomplishes the goal. It’s not a flattering theory, but I cannot dismiss it.

And while I’m suggesting selfish motives, I might as well posit another one going the other way. Could the MLBPA have pressured Manfred to stop implementing the earlier restrictions, seeing them as MLB’s way of enforcing control over the players? Asserting the players’ right to mess around and waste time could have been a move in the management/labor chess match, and forced Manfred to find different means to quicken the pace.

I won’t guess which theory, if either, is true. I will simply rue that we’ve slipped back into a situation where such theorizing is possible.

Epilogue

This was my third annual look back at the postseason just concluded. I am wondering whether it will be my last, at least my last using WPS as the foundation of my analysis.

This postseason, far more than any other, has shown me the limitations of trying to calculate the excitement of a game with a short statistical formula. I always knew those limitations existed, but never before has the gap between the numbers and the reactions of fans that those numbers purport to reflect been wider.

Perhaps it’s a one-time effect, the result of a literally once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. (No offense to Cubs fans looking for a 2017 repeat. Historically, Cubs titles do come in pairs.) It gives me something to think about in the offseason, once my astonishment at what the Cubs did fades away.

If it ever does.

References and Resources

• FanGraphs for Win Percentage Added data in this postseason
• Baseball-Reference for past years’ WPA and other data
• Rob Arthur, “Baseball’s Biggest Games Are Taking Forever,” FiveThirtyEight
• Dave Cameron, “Let’s Hope We Never See Anything Like Game Two Again,” FanGraphs