How great was Ramon Hernandez's opening day?

Great win for the Reds.  I am always struck in baseball that often your heroes of the game come from the most unexpected players.  I have an unjustified poor perception of Ramon because he takes playing time from the probably definitely better player in Ryan Hanigan.   So when Hernandez hits a home run it was certainly one of the unexpected hero moments for me.

This made me think, while Ramon is certainly not done at age 34 and still playing well,  this home run very likely be the most valuable hit he will have for the rest of his career.  Also I wondered how valuable was this home run in the context of his entire career?

Below is the win expectancy chart from FanGraphs of the game. The Reds were down to a 9.8% win expectancy.   That means Ramon’s hit was worth 90.2% of a win!  

I looked through the play logs of Ramon’s career which are available on FanGraphs since 2002.  The next biggest hit he had was on 4/17/09 when he hit a two run home run in the top of the 9^th where he made a 66.3% change in the Reds win expectency.

So the answer is while we don’t have his entire career we can safely say it was his most valuable hit since 2002.  It is also very likely to be the most valuable hit of the rest of his career.  This would likely be the most valuable hit of most careers as you have to be pretty lucky to even be in the situation where you can make this valuable of a hit.

What I also found interesting is that for his entire career Ramon’s WPA at the end of 2010 (adding up all these win expectancies from every at bat he ever took) was  -0.57.   That is pretty good for a catcher as his offense has been right about average (0) over his entire career.  This single game (.929 WPA for the game) pushes him into positive territory.

Why is The Reds Menace being unleashed on the baseball world?

I have decided to start my own blog on the Reds.  I have three reasons that I am starting a Reds blog. 

First, I have at least a minor obsession with baseball.  I spend more time than I’m willing to admit trying to maximize the performance of my fantasy baseball teams, reading baseball websites, or listening to MLB Network on XM in my car.  I read baseball books, listen to baseball podcasts when I run, and play baseball simulations on the computer.   I figure if I am going to waste this much time on baseball I might as well do something with this time that will improve myself as a human being.    Being forced to write coherently (or as close to it as I can) for a public audience should at the very least build my communications skills.

Secondly, I am a huge fan of the work done by RedLeg Nation, Baseball Prospectus, FanGraphs, and many more.  There is excellent work out there by people who seem to have started the same way I’m starting here with this blog.   I don’t pretend I have the talent or time to reach the quality that those sites.  But perhaps I can put out some work that allows me to make connections particularly among the Reds community.

Third, I enjoy messing around with statistics and base analysis.  If I stick to a goal of publishing something once a week or more I’ll be ”forced” to spend some time messing around with baseball statistics, pitch FX data etc.  This will make a great excuse to my wife to why I “need” to focus on playing with all those excel sheets on the home computer.  

Overall, I look forward to this adventure.  My goal is to put the blog out by Opening Day 2011 and make at least one update a week through the season.   After the Reds win the World Series I'll check back to see if I met any of the above goals or not.