After Tony La Russa perhaps unintentionally showed confidence in his offense by not pinch hitting for his pitcher down by a run in the sixth inning, David Freese bailed out his manager with a momentous three-run home run to swing an imminent loss into a key win. It was the biggest hit of Freese’s burgeoning career, and the third-biggest of the team’s season:

On the strength of his first-inning run-scoring triple and game-changing home run, Freese added a whopping .702 win-probability to the game (per Baseball-Reference; .685 by Fangraphs), the second-highest single-game WPA by a batter on the Cardinals’ season:

We love that he struck out twice, too (if only he had hit into a double play). In addition to surpassing last year’s WAR of 1.5 with more than 2.0 this season, he has supplied that production during more key moments this year, improving from negative WPA (-0.66) to well into the positive (0.91). He is one of the team’s most valuable players this season (even if TLR occasionally still treats him like a rookie) — yesterday we unveiled the sabermetric MVP leaders in the AL; today let’s look at the Cardinals. First, the batters:

We confess a bit of schadenfreude seeing the departed Colby Rasmus ahead of TLR-loved regulars Skip Schumaker and Ryan Theriot (speaking of departed, Brendan Ryan has an MVP score of 1.69, more than Schumaker, Theriot and Rafael Furcal combined). Anyway, the pitchers:

And overall:

Jason Motte, another of last-night’s heros, has climbed the list to #8. And of course Albert Pujols, the team’s perennial MVP, has again risen to the top, even in an off year.

This entry was posted by Pip on Thursday, September 22nd, 2011 at 9:44 am and is filed under by the numbers. 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.