As you probably know, OOTP awards a “Player of the Game” for every game its engine spits out. This is a subjective award usually awarded to the best-performing player on the winning team, but it occasionally goes to a player on the losing team if there is a truly exceptional performance.
I counted all the Player of the Game awards throughout the whole season in the UMEBA to see what I’d end up with. Turns out, it’s a pretty complete list of the top players in the league, though it tends to slightly favor starting pitchers.
PLAYER OF THE GAME AWARDS
Player | Times Won |
---|---|
Allan Stallard (BGH) | 18 |
Neill Fenomore (BUC) | 16 |
Mahad Einan (TRI) | 16 |
Adam Backhouse (JER) | 14 |
Joshua Koka (MAN) | 13 |
Weaver Ripley (MUM) | 12 |
Susila Kartosuwiryo (MAN) | 12 |
Owen Geddes (BUC) | 12 |
Frank Mahaffey (MUM) | 12 |
Hsuang-Tsung Xú (JER) | 11 |
Gary Goodchild (JER) | 11 |
Alejandro Cruz (BEI) | 11 |
But the downside of this list is that it’s a little too pitcher-heavy. OOTP’s formula is a sucker for things like Quality Starts, and it doesn’t consider the leverage of individual situations, instead simply looking at the game as a whole and telling us who had the best stat line.
We can add something to this, though, which can also be found on the game recap page. In the game recap text, after the Player of the Game and the winning and losing pitchers are announced, OOTP tells us what the top WPA play of the game is, and the player responsible for it. It’s a paragraph that looks like this:
Or, in cases where the top WPA play is an out being recorded, it can also look like this:
I tallied up all these Top WPA plays and fashioned these into their own list. Here are the players with the most Top WPA plays this year:
TOP WPA PLAYS
Player | Top WPA Plays |
---|---|
José Serrano (TRI) | 14 |
Frank Mahaffey (MUM) | 13 |
Mario Guerrer (MAN) | 12 |
Bert Cleaver (BGH) | 11 |
Alberto Robles (ATH) | 11 |
Mitch Dalrymple (BUC) | 10 |
Adam Backhouse (JER) | 10 |
Raúl Hernández (BGH/MUM) | 9 |
Virgil Shafer (TRI) | 8 |
Miguel Angel Perales (BGH) | 8 |
Kevin MacKeith (TRI) | 8 |
Quick note: I only counted a Top WPA play for a player if that player didn’t also win Player of the Game (this will be important in a minute).
Now, since these are almost exclusively batting events, you won’t find many pitchers on this list. There are a few instances of a pitcher making the top WPA play, like Gary Goodchild escaping a jam on July 4th, but for the most part it’s all offense.
So let’s combine this list with the first list, with each of them weighted in a way that gives both pitchers and hitters roughly equal representation. That should give us a balanced list of the most valuable players in the league.
Here’s a list with the Player of the Game awards weighted at 1, and the Top WPA plays weighted at 0.5.
PLAYER OF THE GAME + TOP WPA PLAYS, WEIGHTED
Player | PotG | TopWPA | Total Weighted |
---|---|---|---|
Adam Backhouse (JER) | 14 | 10 | 19 |
Frank Mahaffey (MUM) | 12 | 13 | 18.5 |
Allan Stallard (BGH) | 18 | 0 | 18 |
Joshua Koka (MAN) | 13 | 7 | 16.5 |
Neill Fenomore (BUC) | 16 | 0 | 16 |
Mahad Einan (TRI) | 16 | 0 | 16 |
Weaver Ripley (MUM) | 12 | 7 | 15.5 |
Mario Guerrer (MAN) | 9 | 12 | 15 |
Susila Kartosuwiryo (MAN) | 12 | 0 | 12 |
Owen Geddes (BUC) | 12 | 0 | 12 |
Gary Goodchild (JER) | 11 | 1 | 11.5 |
Tai Minh (BGH) | 10 | 3 | 11.5 |
Masaki Sato (RIY) | 8 | 7 | 11.5 |
Mahdi Kojo (BUC) | 8 | 7 | 11.5 |
Raúl Hernández (BGH/MUM) | 7 | 9 | 11.5 |
Hsuang-Tsung Xú (JER) | 11 | 0 | 11 |
Alejandro Cruz (BEI) | 11 | 0 | 11 |
Vinnie Youngberry (ATH) | 8 | 6 | 11 |
José Serrano (TRI) | 4 | 14 | 11 |
Ronald Eglinton (MUM) | 10 | 0 | 10 |
Liam Dalton (BEI) | 10 | 0 | 10 |
Johan Trojka (CAI) | 10 | 0 | 10 |
Jayden Nicholls (TRI) | 10 | 0 | 10 |
David Díaz (BEI) | 10 | 0 | 10 |
Bert Hackworth (RIY) | 10 | 0 | 10 |
Wally Geoghegan (MAN) | 9 | 2 | 10 |
Luis González (MUM) | 7 | 6 | 10 |
José Figueroa (JER) | 7 | 6 | 10 |
Mitch Dalrymple (BUC) | 5 | 10 | 10 |
What insights can we take from this? Well, in general, if a guy is listed higher than you’d expect, it means he produced in key spots more often, maximizing his value for his team. Conversely, if you see a player with good numbers surprisingly low or absent from the list (Jeremy Owbridge or Éamon Sherrill, for instance), it means his team didn’t win when he produced, or that he got more of his hits in blowouts when it didn’t impact the game.
It also helps put a number on the commonly-posed question, “Where would (team) be without (player)?” In the case of, say, Tripoli and José Serrano, there are 18 wins in which he either was the Player of the Game or had the top WPA Play, and that’s a pretty big impact.
Context is an important thing, and context-independent stats like WAR don’t always tell the whole story (although both should be taken into account when evaluating a player’s contribution, since WAR includes defense and this doesn’t).
Full lists are available upon request; I truncated them to keep the post a manageable size.