This diary is a thread that outgrew its holding pen.  Here is the original comment on the Sep 10 game v Texas with Street's ultra-clutch 5-out save under some very trying conditions. Read  the first Winexp articles to see what this is about.

Street Has a Nice Butt

Baby WinExp (v31) says (recall this doesn't account for defense, like Swish's nice plays; the software definitely has bugs, no wagering please, etc.)

1. The three stars of the game are Huston Street (by a long shot), Michael Young and Hank Blalock.
   
2. Interestingly, it didn't even rate DJ's dinger as the biggest play of the game. I believe the idea is that once you've got the bases loaded with no one out, you are going to usually score some runs, so DJ did great, but he had a lot of help.
   
3. The A's offensive star was... Hatteberg?  Huh?  Basically, it loved his walk to load the bases before DJ's dinger, and it loved  his double to score Payton and remain in scoring position with 1 out in the 6th increasing our lead from 2 to 3.
   
4. It also thought Huston's biggest out was the second out of the 9th, with a runner at 2nd and 1 out, even bigger than his two big outs in the 8th.
   

Sep 10, 2005    TEX    Michael Young     +0.267    4    
Sep 10, 2005    TEX    Hank Blalock      +0.211    4    
Sep 10, 2005    TEX    C.J. Wilson*      +0.087    6    
Sep 10, 2005    TEX    Mark Teixeira     +0.054    4    
Sep 10, 2005    TEX    Mark DeRosa       +0.000    1    
Sep 10, 2005    TEX    Adrian Gonzalez    -0.035    4    
Sep 10, 2005    TEX    G Matthews Jr.    -0.129    4    
Sep 10, 2005    TEX    Gerald Laird      -0.155    4    
Sep 10, 2005    TEX    David Dellucci    -0.157    5    
Sep 10, 2005    TEX    Kevin Mench       -0.161    4    
Sep 10, 2005    TEX    Kameron Loe*      -0.262    30    
Sep 10, 2005    TEX    Alfonso Soriano    -0.262    4  

Sep 10, 2005    OAK    Huston Street*    +0.437    7    
Sep 10, 2005    OAK    Scott Hatteberg    +0.155    4    
Sep 10, 2005    OAK    Dan Johnson       +0.136    4    
Sep 10, 2005    OAK    Jay Payton        +0.093    4    
Sep 10, 2005    OAK    Jay Witasick*     +0.011    4    
Sep 10, 2005    OAK    Jason Kendall     +0.010    4    
Sep 10, 2005    OAK    Eric Chavez       -0.003    4    
Sep 10, 2005    OAK    Ricardo Rincon*    -0.009    2    
Sep 10, 2005    OAK    Marco Scutaro     -0.019    4    
Sep 10, 2005    OAK    Mark Ellis        -0.056    4    
Sep 10, 2005    OAK    Nick Swisher      -0.062    4    
Sep 10, 2005    OAK    Joe Blanton*      -0.072    25    
Sep 10, 2005    OAK    Mark Kotsay       -0.079    4  

Top Plays

Sep 10, 2005. OAK v TEX. Bot 6.0. R:-3. B:1. M. Teixeira homered to deep right center, M. Young scored (0.402, +0.193)
Sep 10, 2005. OAK v TEX. Top 2.0. R:-1. B:123. D. Johnson homered to deep right, J. Payton, S. Hatteberg and E. Chavez scored (0.738, +0.177)
Sep 10, 2005. OAK v TEX. Bot 9.1. R:-1. B:2. G. Laird grounded out to third (0.114, -0.164)        
Sep 10, 2005. OAK v TEX. Bot 8.2. R:-1. B:12. K. Mench struck out swinging (0.151, -0.133)          
Sep 10, 2005. OAK v TEX. Bot 9.0. R:-1. B: . A. Gonzalez singled to right (0.315, +0.126)          
Sep 10, 2005. OAK v TEX. Bot 8.1. R:-1. B:12. A. Soriano flied out to right center (0.284, -0.115)  

Larry E Has a Nice Butt

Larry E wrote: Its too bad we don't have more enough data to do these stats based solely on games in Ameriquest Field. I think it would value pitchers getting outs even more. So Street's performance (even at .427)would be even more off the charts if the field of play was taken into consideration.

Baby WinExp replies:

Ooooh, that would be interesting to just look at site-specific data.

There are mathematical models that do adjust for different "run environment".  I just haven't gotten around to writing those plug-ins yet.

Street Has The Nicest A's Butt since Zito's August Butt

Some context: it is HARD to rack up that much win expectancy contribution (WXC).   Here are Baby Winexp's picks for the Top 10 individual game performances in A's games since Aug 1:

Date    Team    Name            WXC Events
12-Aug-05   MIN Johan Santana*  0.83    31
4-Aug-05    OAK Barry Zito*     0.489   30
5-Sep-05    SEA Fel Hernandez*  0.461   26
3-Aug-05    MIN Michael Cuddyer 0.46    3
21-Aug-05   KC  Jimmy Gobble*   0.451   9
1-Sep-05    ANA Ervin Santana*  0.444   31
10-Sep-05   OAK Huston Street*  0.437   7
30-Aug-05   OAK Barry Zito*     0.433   31
3-Sep-05    NYY Aaron Small*    0.432   33

So Street's save last night was the best WXC game by an A's player since Zito's Aug 4 masterpiece in MIN.

Why is Santana's Butt so Nice?

I was surprised by Santana's shockingly highly rated performance. I thought it had to be a bug, but it looks legitimate. Basically, he and Haren (+0.346) had a complete game awesome duel where the batters kept decreasing their chances to win by doing naught at the plate and the pitchers kept shutting down the other side and increasing their chances. Unfortunately, Haren gave up the run that counted.

Date    Team    Name            WXC Events

12-Aug-05   OAK Dan Haren*      0.346   31
12-Aug-05   OAK Mark Kotsay     0.025   4
12-Aug-05   OAK Nick Swisher    -0.003  3
12-Aug-05   OAK Bobby Crosby    -0.023  4
12-Aug-05   OAK Bobby Kielty    -0.052  3
12-Aug-05   OAK Crosby Error    -0.058  1
12-Aug-05   OAK Dan Johnson     -0.065  3
12-Aug-05   OAK Jay Payton      -0.106  3
12-Aug-05   OAK Jason Kendall   -0.174  4
12-Aug-05   OAK Mark Ellis      -0.175  3
12-Aug-05   OAK Eric Chavez     -0.257  4

12-Aug-05   MIN Johan Santana*  0.83    31
12-Aug-05   MIN Lew Ford        0.103   4
12-Aug-05   MIN Michael Cuddyer 0.088   3
12-Aug-05   MIN Justin Morneau  -0.021  4
12-Aug-05   MIN Shannon Stewart -0.027  3
12-Aug-05   MIN Joe Mauer       -0.058  4
12-Aug-05   MIN Matt LeCroy     -0.073  3
12-Aug-05   MIN Michael Ryan    -0.077  3
12-Aug-05   MIN L O. Rodriguez  -0.118  3
12-Aug-05   MIN Nick Punto      -0.163  4

The numbers check out too... the visiting team has about a .460 chance of winning, so you would think there's only .540 WXC to be collected. However, each half inning the Twins didn't score reduced their winning chances by about .05. Over nine innings, that's another .450 WXC or so to be collected by a pitcher at the plate IF your team does extremely poorly at the plate. Lew Ford (+0.103) and Cuddyer (+0.083) got the only hitting credit and Crosby got dinged for an error (+0.058 for MIN) , so Santana picks up the rest of the credit.

Disclaimers

ps. If you got a different answer for the historical chances of the visiting team winning at http://walkoffbalk.com/tools/winexp/index.php, they are wrong. The actual data is different and they rounded off the number of games to 2^15 for some reason.

pps. Baby Winexp is cool, but still has bugs as does the play-by-play from sportsline.com. For any one game, my results will be pretty close to right; for 510 games (played league-wide since Aug 1), there are definitely errors which I haven't had time to look over, so take huge aggregate data with an extra three grains of salt.