Looking at the playoff teams I started to notice a lot of decent former Wild players start to stick out and score goals.

This got me thinking. Could you fill out an entire roster with former Wild players? Would they be any good? Could they beat this year's Minnesota Wild?

Continue reading this post »

Back in April, I took a look at the success of Twins relief pitchers based on the Fangraphs Saber-stats Shutdowns and Meltdowns, to refresh everyone's memory, here's the definition of how Shutdowns and Meltdowns are calculated (from Steve Slowinski's FanGraphs post introducing SD and MD)

But how do we determine if a relief pitcher helped or hurt his team? Using Win Probability Added (WPA), it’s very easy to tell exactly how much a specific player contributed to their team on a game-by-game basis. If a player increased his team’s win probability by 6% (0.06 WPA), then they get a Shutdown. If a player made his team 6% more likely to lose (-0.06), they get a Meltdown. These cutoff points put Shutdowns and Meltdowns on a similar scale as Saves and Holds, meaning that 40 shutdowns is roughly as impressive as 40 saves.

Jump for the second look.

Continue reading this post »

Last week, FanGraphs debuted a two stats on their player pages to better evaluate relief pitchers, outside of Holds and Saves: The "Shutdown" and the "Meltdown". Rather than attempt to explain how they're calculated, Steve Slowinski explains it better on FanGraphs blog:  

But how do we determine if a relief pitcher helped or hurt his team? Using Win Probability Added (WPA), it’s very easy to tell exactly how much a specific player contributed to their team on a game-by-game basis. If a player increased his team’s win probability by 6% (0.06 WPA), then they get a Shutdown. If a player made his team 6% more likely to lose (-0.06), they get a Meltdown. These cutoff points put Shutdowns and Meltdowns on a similar scale as Saves and Holds, meaning that 40 shutdowns is roughly as impressive as 40 saves.

Follow the jump for some the "Twins specific" analyis

Continue reading this post »