Beckett Wins ALCS MVP?
After last night’s Red Sox game 7 victory, I was rather curious to see who would win the ALCS Most Valuable Player award. Without looking at the numbers, I thought it should go to Kevin Youkilis. I thought there was a chance it would go to Manny Ramirez and also a chance it could go to Josh Beckett. When Beckett was announced the winner, I was a little surprised and went to check the numbers.
It turns out that Josh Beckett did lead all players in Win Probability Add (WPA) in the ALCS. In two starts his WPA was .516 wins compared to Youkilis’ .203 wins. Manny Ramirez‘s WPA was just slightly below Beckett’s at .483 wins. Jon Papelbon and Hideki Okajima also were also contenders for the WPA title with .467 and .286 wins respectively.
If you look at things just in terms of run production taking the context out of the situation. Youkilis was indeed the most productive player with a Batting Runs Above Average (BRAA) of 9.3 runs. Ramirez came in second with 6.2 runs, while Beckett was the next best with 4.7 runs.
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Is batting runs essentially the same thing as BaseRuns or Linear Weights, or is it a different concept altogether?
The Batting Runs Above Average I used uses Run Expectancy on a play-by-play basis to determine how many runs each batter/pitcher contributed to the team. It’d be similar to Linear Weights, but it includes the base state and outs, so it’s not completely context neutral. WPA/LI would be the completely context neutral stat.
David,
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