Great Performances - Part 1: Hitting

Perhaps one of the most heartbreaking moments of a fantasy week is when, after being away from your computer for a while, you check how your matchup is going and you see that your opponent has pulled far ahead of you. Looking more closely, you see that one of his (or the Peachz'z) playerz has accounted for most of that damage through a monster day.  Especially when those performances are early in the week, you feel like someone has just punched you in the stomach and, while you are bent over with no breath, made sweet love to your spouse.  I have been in the dugout for my precious Ackbars when I saw Adrian Beltre go yard twice, and when I saw Ubaldo rise to national prominence by pitching his no-hitter in April. At the end of both of those matchups, though, I found myself comfortably winning, leading me to question the value of those single great heart wrenching performances.
Rather conveniently, ESPN has put together their 20 best single game pitching and hitting performances of the year.  I looked at these performances and came up with how much of an effect they had on the final weekly scores in our league.  I should note that, of the 20 pitching and 20 hitting performances, our teams only owned 9 of each when they went berzerk, perhaps highlighting how exceptional these performances are and how anyone can have an amazing day any time regardless of whether he is routinely a good enough player to be noticed by the league.  I will highlight a number of performances, but you can click here to go to the spreadsheet yourself where all 18 of the performances are calculated.  The sheet totals what the team's numbers were with the great performance, without it, what the opponent's numbers were, and what the differential is assuming that the player went 0-fer for that day.  Also, on the right, you will notice the amazing performance and the amount that they contributed to the overall numbers with dOBP, dSlg,  and dOPS being (as scientists and mathmagicians know), the difference or "delta" of those categories:


1.  Adrian Beltre goes yard twice and knocks in 6 against the Ackbars.



As you can see, if Beltre had gone 0/5 instead of 4/5 with all those extra numbers, there would have been a 2.5 game swing in the final weekly total.  It is interesting that all of the categories that Beltre's performance had an impact on were the quantitative categories rather than the average ones.  With the average categories, your other players have a much greater effect than they do on the quantitative categories; the great hitter can carry your team with R, HR, RBI, and SB while the rest of the team slacks off, but that slacking will have a much more drastic effect on the Avg and OPS.  Truly, Beltre was the life preserver for this week for Woo Woo.

4.  Miguel Cabrera rings the bell 3 times against the Orlandos/, /ICU last weekend.



Miggy's amazing performance against the Orlandos was entirely wasted, unfortunately, as even if he had come up hitless, the pre-Kendry-disaster-Andruses would have still walked away with all 6 of the offensive categories that week.  Judd's team had built up a large enough lead in all of the offensive categories that, while dealing a psychological blow, had no impact on the final numbers.  It is interesting to think about how if I had said that Miggy was on the bench that day, Judd would have surely been cursing himself, but in the final reckoning, it would have made no difference.

3.  Albert hit 3 bong-bong-bongs to celebrate the armed services against Woo Woo.



Albert Pujols was coming off of a rough May, but finished strongly with these 3 dings.  While his performance that glorious Sunday was terrific, the overall swing in the score for that week was only 0.5 games, coming from the 3 runs that he scored as a result of his Hamas.  It is interesting that, while I was initially quite excited when I saw on my iPhone MLB at Bat that "A Pujols Homered off of J Grabow," the fact that none of my scoring categories turned over tempered that feeling.  Indeed, Adam Wainwright's win in that same game was the more important stat.  I would have easily traded all of those moon shots for a few more runs on singles by my team throughout the week. 
The average differential with and without these great performances was 1, which is much less than I was expecting.  Of the 9 total games swung with these 9 performances, only 2 were in the "average" type category highlighting how little one performance can affect your averages.  With between 250-300 ABs per week, it is not so surprising that 5 or 6 would not have a huge effect, but I would have thought that the matchups were in general close enough that 3 or 4 runs and 2 or 3 ding a lings would have a big difference on the final numbers.  Hmmmmm, average margin of victory.....that sounds like a good future topic!
Great pitching performance analysis coming, shorty.  I mean shortly.