Normally, in this spot, I do our weekly WPA game of the week. I sit and watch a game on ESPN with my laptop and I score the game on the WPA spreadsheet. I then spend an hour or two after the game putting together a table, a graph, and a writeup about what I got to watch.

But I wanted to try something different today.

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Sometimes, you get some good luck.

As a Met fan, I had some luck in two ways this evening:

• The Mets won.
  
• I scored the game on WPA.

And what better way to have a WPA Game of the Week, in a game that might be regarded as one of the four or five best of the season, when it's all said and done?

Check out that graph.

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This was a terrible game. The Red Sox were unbelievably sloppy and were as pathetic as a Little League team, at times. I'd like to say that was hyperbole, but there were some VERY routine plays (the flip to second) that were completely botched.

The game was pretty much sealed on the grand slam in the first, and it just got worse from there.

Here's the graph.

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This week, I tried to do the WPA as a sort of running diary, where I commented on various things that I noticed while listening to the game on the radio and I kept tabs on the changes in the Win Expectancy, throughout the game. I might do this format more often; it makes for an interesting look... kind of like a primary source of exactly what was going on when it happened, rather than a retrospective look at it, like we normally do when we evaluate things.

As an aside, I was unable to use my own subjective judgments in assigning fielding scores, so I relied on the descriptions of the commentators on the radio in assigning defensive credit.

Anyway, here's the graph.

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Wow!

Our second game of the week was ESPN's second Sunday Night Baseball broadcast. I'm going to try to use ESPN games for these, but I'd also like to cover every team, if possible.

Anyway, this was a fantastic, back-and-forth game. The graph shows it, but we can also learn a lot about the dynamics of baseball through some of the things that happened in this game.

Here's the graph.

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We picked a bad game to start this on.

We're going to try to do one WPA game every week, and so we logically picked the season opener. In addition to a massive and unbelievable rain delay, Cleveland collapsed, my sleeper-closer of choice malfunctioned, and the White Sox won big.

But we did it anyway. Here's the graph.

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