
MikeP
Jun 20, 2008 Sep 10, 2009 1 30
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Four most exciting Indians games of 2008
Pardon me if this has been done before, but I had an idea for quantifying how exciting a game is. Generally, an exciting game is one where the conditions of the game change a lot: lead changes, men on base, and each team's winning chance changing dramatically (this is somewhat different in my mind from a tense game, where the score is close, but there isn't necessarily much action). Now that we can calculate the win probability for any situation, we can also calculate the change in win probability, sum up the changes in win probability. The more the win probability changes, the more exciting the game. As a proof of principle, I went through the Indians 2008 data on Retrosheet, and calculated the cumulative change in win probability, and found the 4 most exciting games from 2008 (2009 data not yet available, win probability graphs from fangraphs.com):
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