Crooked Pitch

Dave Cameron over at FanGraphs posted a few days back about the heroes of April; the top offensive guys for the first month of MLB. He used WPA/LI to determine offensive production. Very cool!

Let me just go ahead and define WPA/LI right now. [from FanGraphs]

WPA/LI (context neutral wins / game state linear weights): How many wins a player contributes to his team with the Leverage Index aspect removed, invented by Tom Tango.

Calculating WPA/LI: WPA is divided by LI for each individual play attributed to a specific player and then the WPA/LI for the individual plays is then added up to create WPA/LI for an entire season. This is considerably different then taking a player’s WPA and dividing it by pLI.

Why you should care: Unlike standard linear weights, WPA/LI does take into account the situation. So at times when a walk would be just as valuable as a home run, WPA/LI accurately weights the walk and the home run, where linear weights would still give .13 wins to the home run and the walk .03 wins.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 at 7:28 pm and is filed under Fantasy Baseball. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.