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The 2016 regular season is deader than the late-90s swing revival. We’re careening through the Championship Series, and ready to write the stories of success for these remaining playoff teams. It is one of the most exciting times of the baseball season, but punctuated by the relative silence and disappointment from those teams that just missed out on playing at least one extra game in October.

No team lives and dies by the success of one player, but occasionally we can point to a disappointing performance that our projection systems didn’t exactly forecast. When you pair that with a team that just barely missed out on the playoffs, you can–if one is so inclined–start to draw a line. “If only Player X had lived up to his expectations, we’d be in the Wild Card game.

Don't get me wrong, it’s not a particularly fair argument. Teams that just missed out on the playoffs had successful seasons by many standards–all the teams I’m about to talk about had winning records–and it is never the performance of one person that drives a team to distress. Beyond that, plenty of teams with winning records also had insurgent performances by players whom the projection systems didn’t anticipate. Look no further than Aledmys Diaz or Jedd Gyorko or Michael Fulmer or Alex Bregman, thank you very much.

So join me on a fun but not entirely scientific leap where we look at the PECOTA projections for a few players and imagine a world in which they’d lived up to their projected WARP. If they did, and that WARP translated to actual team wins, then things might be different: they might have been in the mix to get shut out by Madison Bumgarner or walked off by Edwin Encarnacion during their respective Wild Card game. Fun!

St. Louis Cardinals: Matt Holliday

Projected WARP: 3.0. Actual WARP: 1.1.

Riding out the last year of his long-running contract with the Cardinals, Holliday finally showed signs of slowing down at the plate after years of workaday excellence with the bat. For four full “decline” seasons, he posted a True Average between .292-.309 and an OBP north of .370–the kind of numbers that set general managers to salivating and fans to cheering. But while Cardinals' Devil Magic is strong, Father Time is mighty and ruthless. Holliday saw his walk and hit rates skid even as he turned in another 20-homer season.

Instead of hitting like a star during his age-36 season, he hit like an OK third outfielder (.279 True Average), but also missed time to injury and did his usual butcher job defensively (-4.5 FRAA). That was good for a two-win dip from what PECOTA projected for the year; the projection was mostly guided by the system’s estimate that a .291 True Average that just wasn’t in the cards. Of course, St. Louis was the first runner-up in the NL Wild Card race, landing just a single game behind both the Mets and the Giants.

Two extra Holliday wins perhaps could have translated to two extra Cardinals wins, granting the team home field advantage in the one-off Wild Card game. While perhaps no team was going to beat the playoff version of Madison Bumgarner in a win-or-go-home game, the thought of facing a depleted Mets squad or a Giants team coming off Game 163 before trying to knock off the reviled Cubs seems far preferable to spending October on the golf course. Perhaps Holliday could’ve drastically moved the needle for St. Louis if he’d only come up with the spreadsheet’s projected performance?

Detroit Tigers: Justin Upton

Projected WARP: 3.8. Actual WARP: 1.2.

Justin Upton’s first season in Detroit did not exactly go according to plan. A consistently above-average hitter for eight consecutive seasons, he was as sure a thing as exists in baseball. Instead, we have Upton here, on a list of players who failed to live up to lofty expectations. As you may have heard, the first half of Upton’s season (.235/.289/.381) was an unmitigated disaster; the second half was a triumph of power (.260/.337/.579) as Detroit made their late-life play for the postseason. He ended up with a .261 True Average–solid, but nothing special.

Only 27 other position players were projected to be worth more WARP than Upton in 2016; the Tigers’ new outfielder was imagined to be a top-50 player in baseball. While he played like that late in the season, an extra two-and-a-half wins earlier in the year could have made all the difference. That might have put Detroit in the catbird seat going into the end of the season, a particularly apt metaphor given their competitors in the Jays and the Orioles.

Seattle Mariners: Not Felix Hernandez

Projected WARP: 3.1. Actual WARP: 1.1.

Are you surprised? I’m surprised. Flabbergasted, even. Three games out of the Wild Card, and PECOTA and our DRA-based WARP metric don’t even flinch at Felix Hernandez’s full collapse this season. So why is that?

First things first: despite 10 years of posting between 5.5-9.0 WARP and despite a career DRA of 2.52, PECOTA was very ready to regress King Felix’s 2016 performance. When PECOTA takes its pass at predicting a season, the system tends to give out numbers that are lower than the highs that some players are going to hit. Remember, projection systems traffic in the mean, not in the extremes of performance. So 3.1 WARP was a very low projection for a pitcher with Felix’s pedigree, but it was also the 12th-highest projection of any starter in baseball, just between Zack Greinke and Carlos Carrasco. A low 50th-percentile projection isn’t personal, it’s a feature of the system.

Despite the low bar to hurdle, the greatest pitcher in Seattle’s history failed to clear it. Frankly, he pitched more like Felix Heredia than Felix Hernandez. This year was possibly the weakest season of Hernandez’s career (3.53 ERA, 2.73 DRA), and the Mariners stalwart was only getting older. Unexpectedly, Hernandez saw his strikeout rate dip, his walk rate rise, and as well-documented, his velocity faltered further.

At the same time, a two-win dip wouldn’t have actually changed the calculation too much for the Mariners–they were three games out of the Wild Card. It turns out that the Mariners really didn’t have too many players who, by themselves, would’ve saved their season. Instead of pinning the disappointment on one player, you have to look at a broad range of disappointments. Adam Lind was a big one–he was the second-worst player in baseball–but the delta between his expected performance and actual was only 1.6 WARP, even less than Felix’s difference. While perhaps both Lind and Hernandez living up to their projections might have changed things for the Mariners, one single person (or projection) probably wasn’t responsible for the team coming up short.

Houston Astros: Maybe Carlos Gomez, Maybe Not

Projected WARP: 2.9. Actual WARP: -0.8.

From a pure wins perspective, Gomez’s delta between projection and delivered performance (in Houston) was about -3.7 WARP, which doesn’t actually make up for the five-game difference between how far out the Astros were from the Wild Card. But Gomez did something pretty special: he sapped value from the Astros early in the season, and added value to their rival Rangers later in the year. Given that, as well as how poorly the Astros played in games against the Rangers, you could even imagine that the Gomez swing might have been greater than his nearly-four-win drag on Houston’s team WARP.

As was widely reported, the Astros just sucked against the Rangers this year. On the season, they went 4-15 against Texas. Gomez didn’t have an outsized effect on the games that he played for either team in cross-Texas contests this year, but was his regular ineffective self in games against the Rangers. Against the Rangers, Gomez hit .111/.250/.259 in 32 plate appearances over nine games and the Astros were 2-7 in those games. Once he moved across the state, he improved to a much more respectable .238/.360/.333 mark over 25 plate appearances and six games. The Rangers’ record in those contests was 4-2, and two of the games were decided by a single run.

Look, it’s extremely hard to posit that Gomez could have been a five-win swing between the Astros and Rangers, and even if he was, well, it’s not like Houston was five games behind Texas. The difference between the team that won the West and the team that missed the Wild Card by five games was a lot more substantial. It’s more about the timing and placement of Gomez’s play. WPA doesn’t show that Gomez had an outsized effect on the particular Rangers vs. Astros tilts, but he had a huge effect on two teams that played an integral part in the way the playoffs turned out.

***

In the end, this is all kind of an exercise in futility. After all, each of these teams likely wouldn’t have gotten as close as they did to the playoffs without some remarkable PECOTA-beating performances that outstripped anything projected for them. (I’m looking at you, Aledmys Diaz, Michael Fulmer, and Mike Zunino.) What it is helpful for is putting some of the season’s biggest disappointments in context, understanding how tenuous even some of the best projections can be, and allowing us to imagine an alternate reality where one shake of a butterfly’s wings changes the outcome of a playoff race. Making or missing the playoffs typically doesn’t come down to a single player, but this what it could look like if one player could swing it.

Thank you for reading

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TGT969
10/17
You missed Andrew Mccutchen. While the Pirates would not have made
the Playoffs his drop off was very deep
bhacking
10/18
Picking just one player on a team is kind of a 'warped' way of looking at things.