Even as the Cardinals lost the NLDS battle, Adam Wainwright earned a Pyrrhic victory: He had the most cumulative WPA in the series, with .374. The Dodgers’ Mark Loretta was second with .348 on the strength of his Game-2-winning hit.

Ryan Franklin getting saddled with a -.899 is a bit unfair. In reality, WPA for pitchers is more like “pitching plus defense,” since we know that “a great deal of what is perceived as being pitching is in fact defense.” Although he was in large part responsible for the Dodgers’ Game 2 blitzkrieg (walking two and striking out none), the fact remains that one of his fielders in particular was responsible for a 17.4% swing in Win expectancy.

By the way, congrats to Victor Willis and “Nic,” who were the only respondents in our pre-NLDS survey to correctly guess that Wainwright would lead the team in WPA. And thanks, everyone, for playing.

This entry was posted by Pip on Tuesday, October 13th, 2009 at 4:26 pm and is filed under graph of the day. 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.