I'm almost always a lurker here at SSS, but the recent hubbub on the South Side inspired me to create this infographic. (Fair warnings: (1) I'm too lazy/tired to fact-check this, so there may well be spelling errors/typos/factual errors contained therein; (2) it'll probably be hard to read unless you go full size, and probably won't look pooty goo on your phone; (3) I think there's still a minimum word limit, so I'm just typing this now to make sure that I fulfill it.)

I've been working on some new methods for graphing stats, and this is part of that project. So any feedback that you guys have would be much appreciated.

via www.tim-marco.com

As we all know, the Sox haven't had an eleven game winning streak during the lifetime of almost everyone on this site. So that's pretty awesome, and it got me interested in looking into how exactly this all happened. Obviously, a winning streak that long requires a lot of things going right and more than a bit of luck.

But to get a better sense of which players contributed the most to the streak, I got a bunch of WPA data from fangraphs. The chart below shows the net WPA contributions from every player on the team during the streak.

My understanding of WPA is that .5 WPA is roughly equal to a win (since both teams start with a nearly 50% chance of winning the game).

via i771.photobucket.com

Most of this isn't too surprising to me; AJ has been awful in these games, Paulie, Q! and Peavy have been very, very good. But the extent to Peavy's dominance is pretty ridiculous: in two starts he added more than two wins' worth of WPA.

(I didn't include offensive WPA lost for pitchers in the chart, as I figured it'd be unfair to take away from their pitching dominance. Because of this, the numbers add up to closer to 6 than 5.5, which is what they should be).