An ongoing look at the 2024 season through the WPA lens.
When you go down an internet rabbit hole, you can’t be entirely sure what is going to be on the other side. When the corner of the internet that you enter involves the intersection of Baseball Reference and Fangraphs looking at baseball statistics, that is doubly true. Baseball will surprise you.
It came as no surprise that Shohei Ohtani was the 2024 WPA leader. So I knew where I’d start looking for some offseason discussion. I suspected my second stop was going to be in New York with Aaron Judge and the Yankees. I’d have been wrong. Judge did have the highest WPA among AL batters. That was true despite Juan Soto being second among AL batters.
The AL leader in WPA is also the leader among all pitchers and the second highest WPA in baseball. WPA tends to favor run producers, starters and closers. That last tag breaks us to Emmanel Clase. At 6.4, Clase was the cumulative leader in WPA. It’s an over simplification, but at 6.4, Clase added about 13 wins over the course of the season.
I’ll provide a quick explanation of the methodology behind that last statement. At the start of the game, both teams are at .000 WPA. The winner ends up at .500 and the loser at -.500. So technically, .5 is equal to a win. At 6.4, that’s just shy of 13 wins. Of course, occasionally a player will get more than .5 in a game (or lose more than .5. Eight Cubs achieved that feat in 2024.
This isn’t massively different than WAR. In theory, a player could hit 10 home runs in a very long game and massively impact their WAR in one game. Any stat can be massively amplified in a single game. I suppose the only exceptions are statistics like wins, saves and games played. They are all one per game stats. But most of the other stats can be accumulated heavily in a game.
We know that a whole lot more goes into WAR than WPA and produces a much more meaningful valuation of players. But WPA has some level of metric for “clutch” or leverage production. WPA is the tool of Heroes and Goats. I don’t want to ever overstate it’s significance. But I do think it is worth more than a passing curiosity.
Very much like the two part look into Ohtani and the Dodgers from last week, I planned to look into the Guardians leaders via the lens of Heroes and Goats. I can expect that at the end of the journey that Clase will be the leader. But, along the way, I found a really interesting game.
Without further buildup, I take you to Houston on April 30. The Astros and Guardians locked up in early season game. This kind of graph doesn’t show up very often and I thought some of you might find it as interesting as I did.
Fangraphs
Heroes:
- Superhero: Estevan Florial (.344)
- Hero: David Fry (.326)
- Sidekick: Steven Kwan (.235)
Goats:
- Billy Goat: Carlos Carrasco (-.574)
- Goat; Hunter Gaddis (-.565)
- Kid: Will Brennan (-.177)
WPA Play of the Game: Victor Caratini hit a two-run homer with two outs in the tenth inning off of Hunter Gaddis, walking it off for the Astros. (.842)
So let’s journey through this game. Josh Naylor hit a three-run homer in the top of the first. They held the lead into the bottom of the third when Alex Bregman hit a three-run homer of his own off of Carlos Carrasco. In the fourth, Carrasco surrendered five more runs. He allowed three singles, hit a batter and yielded a second three run homer. Carrasco was charged with eight runs on six hits, two walks and that hit batter.
This game wouldn’t be half as fascinating if it ended there. In the sixth, the Guardians rallied back with five more runs. A leadoff triple was followed by an Andres Gimenez two-run homer. One out later, Astros starter Hunter Brown walked Josh Naylor and that was it for him. One out later, a hit batter led to a second three-run homer for the Guardians by Estevan Florial. For those keeping track, that was the fourth three-run homer of the game in just six innings.
The game settled down from there and neither team scored again until the 10th inning. The Guardians did threaten in the seventh, loading the bases, but came up empty. Emmanuel Clase will be the focus of this series, but he only played a small role in this one. He threw a scoreless ninth inning. He could have been the winner in this one. David Fry doubled with two outs in the tenth off of our old pal Josh Hader, driving in the ghost runner and giving the Guardians the lead.
Sadly for the Guardians, that isn’t where the story ends. The Astros were down to their last out in the bottom of the 10th when Victor Caratini walked it off. Caratini’s homer produced WPA of .842. That was one of the larger WPA events of the season. The homer was of the pinch hit variety. It was just the third pinch-hit homer of Victor’s career. The other two were both in 2019. It was the third walk-off homer of his career. The last of those was on July 4, 2022 for the Brewers against the Cubs.
Caratini has 46 homers in his career, three pinch-hit, three walk-off, two multi-homer games. That feels like an impressive split. Nineteen of his homers have come with two outs. He’s homered more against the Pirates (6) than any other team, with the Cubs second (5). And probably my favorite Caratini homer stat, the two pitchers he has more than one homer against are Jacob deGrom and Max Scherzer.
I’ll continue this series and let you know what the cumulative numbers looked like for Clase, but I wanted to share this very interesting WPA game. I hope you’ve enjoyed.