Cubs Heroes And Goats: 2014 Revisited

The 2015 season starts tonight!  For all of you number-lovers out there, that can only mean one thing:

It's only one more day until Heroes and Goats starts again! (Insert celebratory music and thunderous fanfare here.)

Yes, Heroes and Goats will be making its triumphant return (or at least it's coming back) for the 2015 season.  For those of you who are not familiar with the Heroes and Goats feature, here's how it works.  During each game, Fangraphs has a chart that is updated after each batter that shows each team's probability of winning the game based on the situation at that point in time. Here's the chart from last season's opening game as an example. They also keep track of the typical box score statistics for each game as well as a statistic called WPA, which stands for Win Probability Added. This statistic measures each player's contribution to a team win or loss based on their performance in the game.

After each game ends, the final chart and statistics will be posted here and the players will be ranked based on their WPA performance in the game from highest to lowest. The three highest WPA scores for the game become the game's three Heroes, while the lowest three scores become the game's three Goats. A running tally of each player's "Hero Points" and "Goat Points" are also kept, using a completely unscientific and unoriginal method designed by me which gives three points for the top position in a game, two points for second and one point for third.

There will be one change to Heroes and Goats this season, and that change is in regard to how pitchers are handled. This season a pitcher will only be judged on his pitching performance, meaning that pitchers will not potentially show up twice in the Heroes and Goats list for a particular game if they have a good or bad night hitting. If a pitcher ends up with a score in the top or bottom three because of their hitting, it will not be included in the official rankings but I will keep a separate record of it to see how it would have impacted each pitcher's total points.

With this change for the 2015 season, I wanted to go back to the 2014 season to see how the points would have changed had pitchers only been judged on their pitching.  As a frame of reference, here are the final rankings from last season with pitchers' hitting included. I went back to each game from 2014 in Fangraphs and separated out the hitting performances for the pitchers where they would have ended up in the top or bottom three in a particular game.  There was also some re-balancing done by Fangraphs to the percentages in each game which caused some shifting in the rankings on a game-by-game basis. The majority of the rankings from each game stayed the same, but there were some changes here and there.

Here are the points that were given to pitchers in 2014 as a result of their hitting performances:

Not surprisingly, Travis Wood had the best hitting performance of the pitchers last season and gained the most points as a result of it. Jason Hammel had a particularly bad time at the plate which dragged down his overall ranking last season. The surprise to me was the positive score for Edwin Jackson; I didn't recall him being that great of a hitter last season, probably because it was hidden by the awful pitching performances.  Regrettably for him, that made his 2014 total look even worse than it already was.

After factoring out the pitchers' hitting and factoring in the re-balancing done by Fangraphs, here are the revised totals for the 2014 season:

Anthony Rizzo stayed at the top of the list but fell under the plus-50 mark that he originally had. It was still an extremely impressive performance for him nonetheless. On the other side, Jackson fell from his original total of minus-29 to a new total of minus-37, almost 10 points behind Nate Schierholtz who was second from the bottom.

Who will be the big Hero of the 2015 season? Who will be the top Goat? Will anyone surpass the plus-50 mark again this season? Will anyone be bad enough to hit the minus-40 mark? (Man, let's hope not.) We'll find out starting in just a few hours, when the road to the top Heroes and Goats begins for the 2015 season!