Finally a Stat Indicator of How Bad A-rod is…
from A-Rod is a $300 million migraine By Jeff Passan, Yahoo! Sports hat tip to Yankees.LHblogs.com
…Never has it been as bad for Rodriguez as this season. Numbers back up the cries of Yankees fans, whose complaints about Rodriguez look, on the surface, like those of a scorned lover, what with his .306 batting average, 29 home runs, 81 RBIs and .968 OPS. They say he never hits when it counts – home run No. 29, a solo shot Sunday when the Yankees were down 4-0, is a prime example – and a deeper look, with a metric that analyzes clutch hitting, shows they are onto something.Win Probability Added (WPA), as tracked by fangraphs.com, assigns a different value to every situation. For example, a run-scoring single to tie a game in the seventh inning is worth significantly more than a bases-empty single in the first inning. Over the entire season, it adds up the positives, subtracts the negatives and produces a number that shows how many wins a player contributed to his team – and, ostensibly, an indicator of how well a player fared in clutch situations.
This year, Rodriguez’s WPA ranks 93rd of 158 eligible players.
It gets truly ugly when compared to another metric that takes away the extra credit for coming through in a close game – the Leverage Index, it’s called – and treats every at-bat equally. Rodriguez’s WPA/LI is 18th in baseball.
In other words, the difference between how well Rodriguez produces in regular situations compared to how poorly in high-leverage ones is staggering. The resulting metric, called “Clutch,” ranks A-Rod last in the major leagues this season, 158th out of 158…
