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Mariano

By Bill James

July 22, 2008

Just a quick note here. . ..I had a question in “Hey, Bill” about Mariano Rivera’s Win Shares/Loss Shares. I knew that I had figured that somewhere, but I couldn’t get to that computer at the time. But I have found it, so I thought I would post that here. As you can see, Rivera still has relatively modest totals of Win Shares, but his impact is that the Wins are in a context of extremely small totals of Loss Shares, so that his impact on the pennant race is comparable to that of a player with larger totals.

YEAR	Team	AGE	W	L	PCT	G	GS	SV	GF	IP	I3	H	R	ER	BB	SO	ERA	Wins		Losses
1995	Yankees	25	5	3	.625	19	10	0	2	67		71	43	41	30	51	5.51	4		5
1996	Yankees	26	8	3	.727	61	0	5	14	107	2	73	25	25	34	130	2.09	13		0
1997	Yankees	27	6	4	.600	66	0	43	56	71	2	65	17	15	20	68	1.88	12		1
1998	Yankees	28	3	0	1.000	54	0	36	49	61	1	48	13	13	17	36	1.91	10		0
1999	Yankees	29	4	3	.571	66	0	45	63	69		43	15	14	18	52	1.83	11		1
2000	Yankees	30	7	4	.636	66	0	36	61	75	2	58	26	24	25	58	2.85	11		2
2001	Yankees	31	4	6	.400	71	0	50	66	80	2	61	24	21	12	83	2.34	12		3
2002	Yankees	32	1	4	.200	45	0	28	37	46		35	16	14	11	41	2.74	6		3
2003	Yankees	33	5	2	.714	64	0	40	57	70	2	61	15	13	10	63	1.66	12		0
2004	Yankees	34	4	2	.667	74	0	53	69	78	2	65	17	17	20	66	1.94	14		1
2005	Yankees	35	7	4	.636	71	0	43	67	78	1	50	18	12	18	80	1.38	14		0
2006	Yankees	36	5	5	.500	63	0	34	59	75	0	61	16	15	11	55	1.60	10		1
2007	Yankees	37	3	4	.429	67	0	30	59	71	1	68	25	25	12	74	3.15	9		3

																			138	21

COMMENTS (10 Comments, most recent shown first)

tangotiger
Bill, expanding on the easiest of the conversation piece, if you go here:
http://www.billjamesonline.net/StatisticsReport_new.aspx?Type=114&Team=0&Player=1&men=2
You will sse that Mo has over 200 Career Win Shares, which obviously doesn't match what you have in this article.

4:40 PM Jul 27th

bjames
I discovered a glitch in my spreadsheet, and have corrected the totals, which are different now than when this article was first published. I had him at 136-24 before; it’s actually 138-21. (I was counting all runs against him as Earned Runs.)

I am reading your comments and trying to understand what you are saying.
1:53 PM Jul 27th

tangotiger
Bill, I hope you are monitoring posts here, but Mariano's Win Shares on this page bears nothing like his Career Win Shares page.
9:29 PM Jul 24th

tangotiger
The Fangraphs page I linked to shows his leverage numbers. He's around 2.0 as a reliever, which is standard or a bit above. So, the answer is "no". But I encourage you to look at the Fangraphs site, as it implements my leverage numbers.
9:13 PM Jul 23rd

Trailbzr
Looks like his "Shares Record" almost every season (as a closer) is about WS=(Win+Save)/4; LS=Loss/2. I wonder if this translates into the records of closers generally to provide an approximate career record-equivalent.

To Tango: Is is possible that since Rivera has played for a very good team all his career, he doesn't get as much leverage as a typical closer, because he's protecting fewer one-run leads?
9:03 PM Jul 23rd

tangotiger
Even if you look at the year-by-year, the best season Mo has ever had registered as +2.17 wins above average. On a non-leveraged basis, that sounds about right. That is, if his 70-80 innings were just random innings, and he's got an ERA that is 3 runs per 9IP better than the league average in his best season, then he'd be some +25 runs better than average, or +2.5 wins. Basically, he seems to get no credit at all for his leverage.

I just noticed that Retrosheet has Palmer's numbers here:
http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/R/Privem002.htm

And Mo's career number is +43 wins above average, a number very close to what Fangraphs has using WPA, and over twice what Win Shares is suggesting.

7:18 PM Jul 23rd

tangotiger
Mariano's 136-24 WS/LS means that he has 45.3 wins and 8 losses. That gives him 53.3 game slices. If you take Mariano's IP, divided by the Yanks team IP, multiply by 0.35 times the number of team games played, Mariano gets 37.4 game slices. We need to leverage those. The typical closer gets his peformance to affect the game twice as much as the standard pitcher, "pound per pound". He had time as a starter and setup guy, so let's figure he should have about 65 game slices. From this little viewpoint, it looks like WS/LS doesn't give closers the right balance.

45.3 wins and 8 losses means that Mariano is +18.7 wins above average (a .500 pitcher would have gone 26.6 - 26.6).

According to Fangraphs.com: http://www.fangraphs.com/statss.aspx?playerid=844&position=P
Using the change in Win Expectancy states (Win Probability Added), Mariano is +43 wins.

Even unleveraged, if you look at Baseball-Reference.com, he has a 2.30 ERA in a league/park of 4.54 with 1000 innings (including 2008). A simple runs above average gives you that he is +2.24 runs per 9 inning above average, which over 1000 innings is +249 runs, or close to +25 wins.

His WPA/LI at Fangraphs (which is Situational Wins, without the extra effect of the leverage) is +26 wins.

At this point, it looks to me like WS/LS doesn't fairly value the effect of Mariano Rivera's regular season.
3:48 PM Jul 23rd

elricsi
A much better picture than just win shares. But Mariano, more so than maybe any other player in history, has made enormous contributions in the post season. It would be amusing to see his post-seaon win and loss shares too.

P.S. Is there really a book coming about Loss Shares?
2:16 PM Jul 23rd

monahan
It's amazing that more than 20% of his loss shares came in his very first season, whereas no more than 10% of his win shares have come in a single season. The man is a machine.
6:45 PM Jul 22nd

cderosa
I think win shares and losses have done a better job appraising his seasons than win shares alone did.
4:39 PM Jul 22nd

Mariano

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