Lots of folks think Win Probability Added (WPA) is a useful statistic. Many coverages, often including our own game wrap polls, like to refer to it. Others think it’s just something dreamed up by a FanGraphs intern in 2008 in order to at least have something to put on a resume and has little purpose for anyone who can easily figure out the important moments in a game’s flow without it (raises hand, looks around to see if anyone is nodding in agreement).
(Not that useless stats aren’t a lot of fun. Back in my youth, when dinosaurs roamed the planet and the original Senators were still in Washington, they had an announcer who used to say things like, “That’s the first time ever that a left-handed hitter born in Montana has flown out to a right fielder with the initials F.L with one out in the seventh inning and a man on first,” a tradition upheld through the years by Bob Uecker and others.)
For those who don’t follow WPA, and more power to you, it ostensibly measures how much a given situation — batter gets a hit, pitcher strikes him out — changes the odds of a team winning or losing. Thus the walk-off one-run homer has a higher WPA than the one with a team losing 8-2 in the seventh. Bet you couldn’t have guessed that.
Beyond single incidents, if you dig deep enough, you can find cumulative WPA stats for the season, which should be more meaningful, and would be if the stat itself was more meaningful.
Consider the White Sox cumulative individual WPA numbers through the end of the Kansas City series. At the top is Kyle Teel at 0.9 — note the highest total amounts to less than one win — followed by Mike Tauchman at 0.5, Andrew Benintendi (really!) at 0.4 and Colson Montgomery at 0.3.
Fair enough, but at the bottom among players still with the team we have the useless Josh Rojas at -1.9, which you’d expect, followed by Michael A. Taylor at -1.6, perhaps no surprise. But then there’s Lenyn Sosa (among the team leaders in OPS) at -1.3, Chase Meidroth at -1.1, and Brooks Baldwin and Edgar Quero (who is second to Montgomery in bWAR among position players) tied at -1.0.
Still think WPA is really meaningful? Well, you’re right — if we look beyond the field of play.
The real Win Probability Added (or Subtracted) is that of the only person who matters in the White Sox organization
That is, of course, is the man The Athletic once headlined as “The Owner Who Thinks He Knows Everything.” Jerry Reinsdorf may not actually know everything, or barely anything, but he controls absolutely everything in the organization, top to bottom, and control freak that he is, isn’t about to let that change. So it’s his WPA that is the one that matters.
Surprisingly, that WPA may be horrible these days, but through his 44-year tenure it hasn’t been as awful as you might have thought. When Reinsdorf and a bunch of other investors bought the Sox from a desperate Bill Veeck in January 1981 (and the investors somehow let their corporate set-up make his the only voice that would ever matter, even though he owned a very small share) the White Sox had an 80-year record of 6,179-6,130-99, almost all the ties coming in the early part of the 1900s when such things were common. That’s slightly better than absolutely mediocre, a winning percentage of .502. Since then (through the Royals series), the record is 3,463-3,567, a winning percentage of .492.
Now if you take the record pre-Reinsdorf, a continued flow would have produced 3,529 wins, 66 more than actuality, tagging Reinsdorf with -66 wins — just the loss of 1 1/2 games per season. That’s roughly the same as Rojas bWAR this year.
It’s a reasonable argument to say a team in the No. 3 market should play better than .502 ball, and the promo line “The Chicago White Sox — 125 Years of Meh,” isn’t particularly inspiring, but no fair entering subjectivity into a statistical analysis.
What it is fair to enter into the analysis, though, is that true statistical WPA isn’t the one that matters to Reinsdorf. He may have once liked baseball as a youth in Flatbush, but his only use for it these days is as a (legal) tax dodge so he can screw over his fellow citizens by not paying his fair share of the cost of running the city, state, or country. Reinsdorf has always loathed players, disdained fans, and any more doesn’t even seem to even like the game. So we bring you:
The WPA That Matters to the Only Person Who Matters in the World of the White Sox — WEALTH PROBABILITY ADDED
When Reinsdorf, et. al, bought the White Sox in 1981 because of Veeck’s desperation and MLB’s rejection of a better bid from Eddie DeBartolo for spurious reasons, the pair got the team for $19 million. Today, Forbes lists the value of the White Sox as $2 billion — the only team to go down in value from 2024. Still, that’s a terrific 100 times the purchase price!
Wow! Reinsdorf must be a genius, right?
Well, he was certainly smart to get in on the action of professional sports, with both the Sox and Bulls, even if he may well have done it because of a then-recent ruling (pursued by Veeck, of all people) that gave teams an inexplicable tax situation of a double depreciation beyond the bizarre, given his penchant for (perfectly legal) tax dodges as a way of life. But within that action? Not so much.
Baseball team values have skyrocketed since 1981. Though Forbes didn’t compile values back then, we do have a comparison that shows Reinsdorf was just grabbing the runaway horse by the tail and hanging on for dear life, if we may mix metaphors.
A few months after the purchase of the White Sox, the Wrigley family sold the Cubs to the Tribune for barely more, $20.5 million including Wrigley Field. Today, Forbes now lists the franchise’s value as $4.6 billion, or 224 times the purchase price on that sale. So the Cubs have more than doubled the rate of growth of the Sox.
Not such a genius anymore, is he?
Reinsdorf likes to blame location for his relative financial woes (he’s only worth a couple billion, after all), but that’s just his typical b.s. whining. In 1981, Wrigleyville was a much worse area than Bridgeport. It was an neighborhood of more than a few street gangs, where it was good there were no night games (lights came in 1988) because people warned you not to park far from the field if possible, which it often wasn’t. The gentrification that the gay community brought to the region of the ballpark was still several years off (yes, Cubs fans who think the team made Wrigleyville the fine area it is today except when drunken overgrown frat boys are puking all over the sidewalks along Clark Street after games, it was Boystown that changed things, not your Cubs).
In the immediate pre-Reinsdorf season of 1980, the White Sox official attendance was 1,200,365. The Cubs drew a nearly-identical 1,206,776. His first year it plunged to 946,651, but that was a strike year of only 104 games, and it leaped up over 1.5 million in 1982 and two million in 1983, with only two years below that 1.2 million level since. In 1984, in fact, the White Sox became the first Chicago franchise to draw two million fans in consecutive seasons.
Reinsdorf just bitched as usual all along, even complaining the team didn’t draw over three million in 2006 as the defending World Series champs — he doesn’t mention it only fell short by a grand total of 42,586. The Cubs have drawn over three million 11 times this century, so the whining may be sheer jealousy.
One team has been a huge success financially since the time of the two sales while one has muddled along, albeit with some very nice muddling from the shareholders’ point of view. Guess which team is which.
So there you have it, the only WPA that really matters to the only person who really matters for the White Sox is Wealth Probability Added. And while it has made him and other shareholders extremely rich, if you scored it, it has actually been a giant loser.