Sometimes a strategy that’s successful less than 50 percent of the time - like splitting eights in blackjack - is still the right move because the alternative is even worse. The point is that if even Gordon had been a 2-to-1 underdog to score, he should have tried. That brings the Royals’ overall win probability up to about 16 percent. The 30 percent of the time that Gordon scores, Perez still has his 6 percent chance of scoring the winning run in the ninth. What if Gordon rounds third and tries to score? If he’s successful even 30 percent of the time, the Royals’ win probability is at least 15 percent - a 30 percent chance of Gordon scoring, multiplied by a 50 percent chance of the Royals winning in extra innings. Not coincidentally, this matches FanGraphs’ in-game win probability for the Royals (after Gordon held at third) almost exactly. If we assume the Royals are even money to prevail in an extra-inning game, their chances of winning at that point are: The other 19 percent of the time, Gordon is the only Royal to score in the ninth and the game goes to extra innings. Six percent of the time, Perez (or pinch-runner Jarrod Dyson?) also scores, and the Royals win outright. So, after Gordon holds at third, he has a 25 percent chance of scoring. We can turn to Tangotiger’s tables again, which suggest that a league-average batter has about a 6 percent chance (I’m rounding down slightly) of eventually scoring from home with two outs. What was the probability of that? Perez homered in about 3 percent of his plate appearances this season, but he could also have scored in other ways - by doubling, for example, and then scoring on a base hit by Moustakas. If he’s thrown out at home, the game’s over it forecloses on the possibility of Perez scoring as the winning run, like with a walk-off homer. With the Royals down 3-2, Gordon represented the tying run rather than the winning run. It’s just a touch more complicated than that. So, Gordon should have tried to score if he had even a 25 percent chance of being safe? So let’s round that 27 percent down to 25 percent. Still, I feel comfortable asserting that Bumgarner was an above-average pitcher at that moment: Certainly not the first guy you’d want to have on the mound if you were the opponent. Instead, you should look toward longer-term averages. There’s extremely little evidence for a “hot hand” in pitching: In-game performance tells you next to nothing about how the pitcher will fare in future at-bats. That Bumgarner had been so dominant in the World Series is not as relevant as you might think. More importantly, they were facing Madison Bumgarner. The Royals had Salvador Perez at the plate - a league-average hitter - and the light-hitting Mike Moustakas due up after that. We should probably round that down a bit in this example. It would have been the right move if he was safe even 30 percent of the time.īetween 19 - I’m using this period because it better approximates baseball’s current run-scoring environment than the offensive bubble of the 1990s and aughts - a runner scored from third base with two outs about 27 percent of the time, according to the tables at. Here’s what I know: Gordon should have tried to score even if he was a heavy underdog to make it. It seemed to take an eternity - it was actually just 13 seconds - but I was surprised that Gordon wasn’t rounding third base by the time the TV cameras returned to the infield. But mostly I’m referring to that penultimate play: When Gordon hit what was officially scored as a single and wound up on third base because of defensive miscues by San Francisco Giants outfielders Gregor Blanco and Juan Perez. Partly because it involved the Kansas City Royals, who were making their first World Series appearance since 1985. Game 7 will leave us with that sense of what might have been. It would have been one hell of a moment: Gordon, 220 pounds, who looks like he could have been a strong safety at the University of Nebraska, bearing down on Buster Posey, the catcher whose season-ending injury in 2011 helped inspire baseball’s home-plate collisions rule. I’m sure there will be Zapruder-film-type breakdowns, and I’ll look forward to seeing them. Alex Gordon might have scored, particularly if he’d been in the mindset to do so all along.
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