2025 MLB playoffs: WPA leaderboard (post-NLCS edition)

Let’s ignore the fact that the 2025 MLB playoffs began on the last day of September and might end on the first day of November — because it’s always October when it comes to playoff baseball — and ask this: Who is this year’s Mr. October?

We last checked in after the LDS round, and things have changed, not the least of which is that we’re now down to the last three teams still vying for a World Series crown. Our leader last time was the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Roki Sasaki and while that’s no longer the case, Los Angeles’ collective playoff blitz still paints the leaderboard a vivid Dodger Blue.

At least that’s the answer through the rubric of Win Probability Added (WPA, a metric that’s been around for a while now and has a lot of utility in putting numbers to the narratives that emerge as the October bracket plays out.)

Between Shohei Ohtani’s unprecedented performance in the Dodgers’ Game 4 win to close out the Milwaukee Brewers in the National League Championship Series and the ongoing dominance of the L.A. rotation, led by Blake Snell, this WPA exercise has a chance to reverberate beyond the crucible of this one postseason. There is potentially historic stuff happening. Let’s dig in.

Jump to:Methodology | Top 5 | WPA hero of the dayTop 10 for eliminated players | Ohtani tracker | The all-time WPA champs

Methodology

The way WPA works is that play-by-play during a game, if you do something that improves your team’s chances to win, you get a positive credit. If you don’t, it’s a negative. In small samples, one play can have an outsized effect on WPA. A grand slam in a 10-0 game? Great for your stat line, but the blast does little to change the game’s outcome. Hit the same homer with your team down 3-0 in the eighth, and you’ve made some history. Because of that, there is a bias toward players who end up in a lot of close games — but only if they come through.

All we’ve done here is to marry the hitting and pitching versions of WPA together based on the version of the system at Baseball-Reference.com. Why add pitching and hitting WPA together in 2025, the era of the universal DH?

Well, you know why — Mr. Ohtani — and it was his historic debut as a two-way postseason player this season that inspired us to watch the WPA results a little more closely this October. Ohtani had been pretty quiet during this postseason, but his epic Game 4 against the Brewers shows why we wanted to track this.

Top 5 alive

Best postseason WPAs from players on teams still playing

1. Blake Snell, Dodgers | 1.203

Snell’s .622 WPA showing from his Game 1 masterpiece against Milwaukee is easily the best score from any player so far this postseason. Whereas Ohtani’s two-way brilliance in the clincher of that series came in a mostly one-sided game, Snell’s 90 game score over eight innings was posted in a more intense context.

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That game was scoreless until Freddie Freeman’s sixth-inning homer, and the Dodgers didn’t tack on the second run of their eventual 2-1 win until the ninth, after Snell departed. And it was only when that happened that Milwaukee was finally able to crack the scoreboard. Snell was not just brilliant, but he was brilliant in a game that allowed for no margin for error. WPA loved it.

Snell has been lights-out in all three of his playoff starts and the 1.203 WPA he has rolled up already ranks in the top 30 all time among postseason pitchers. If Snell gets two starts in the World Series and approaches the .401 WPA per game he has averaged so far, he’s going to crack the WPA pantheon, and if the games in the Fall Classic are close, he might end up leading the way.

2. Cal Raleigh, Seattle Mariners | .800

Raleigh was already having a great postseason, but his eighth-inning, game-tying homer off Toronto reliever Brendon Little was the kind of game-turning event (.320 WPA all by itself) that flips a leaderboard. It wasn’t quite enough to overcome Ohtani for the WPA crown for the night, but it did put Raleigh in position to win Mr. October if Seattle keeps advancing.

3. Alex Vesia, Dodgers | .708

Vesia has strung together six straight scoreless outings, all in close Dodgers wins. The outings have yielded four holds and two wins. Vesia has been understandably overshadowed by what some of his teammates have been doing, but he has played a key role in Los Angeles’ playoff spree.

4. Andres Munoz, Mariners | .704

Not all of Munoz’s outings have been high-leverage, but they’ve all been virtually spotless. Over six outings, Munoz has posted 7⅓ scoreless and hitless innings.

5. Roki Sasaki, Dodgers | .686

Sasaki’s shaky Game 1 outing in relief of Snell against Milwaukee cost him a little ground in the series by WPA. But he has posted two clean outings subsequent to that, and as long as he’s finishing close games, he can climb on this leaderboard.

Next five: 6. Tyler Glasnow, Dodgers (.596); 7. Nathan Lukes, Toronto Blue Jays (.506); 8. Bryce Miller, Mariners (.478); 9. Eduard Bazardo, Mariners (.467); 10. Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Blue Jays (.462)

About last night

Golden Guy: Shohei Ohtani, Dodgers (.349)

Alas, WPA doesn’t really capture the full breadth of what we saw Ohtani do as the Dodgers swept the Brewers out of the NLCS. The .349 is impressive but because the Dodgers jumped to an early 3-0 lead (aided by Ohtani’s first homer to begin the onslaught), the rest of the game had limited leverage potential. Besides, there’s not one number that can fully do justice to what Ohtani did. It’s all of the numbers.

Three homers? It’s been done in the postseason, 12 other times in fact before Ohtani. Babe Ruth — Ohtani’s most common historical comparison — did it twice. But none of those previous instances were done by a game’s starting pitcher. And even if you want to get technical and point out that Ohtani’s third homer came after he had shifted to DH, well, no pitcher had homered even twice in a postseason game.

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Ruth never homered in a World Series game in which he pitched. He owns the third-lowest career postseason ERA (0.87) among pitchers who have made at least three starts. But none of his amazing World Series outings as a pitcher also featured anything close to what Ohtani did with the bat against Milwaukee.

Ten whiffs? A 75 game score, which Ohtani earned in Game 4? Sure, many pitchers have exceeded those numbers in a postseason game. But none of them also hit three homers. In fact: No one had ever hit three homers while striking out 10 batters in the same game, period. Postseason, regular season, any season.

More than anything, the awe with which we watched Ohtani on Friday wasn’t just what he did, but how he did it.

According to the timestamps in Statcast’s play log, Ohtani struck out William Contreras swinging for this third straight whiff in the first inning at 7:45:18 p.m. PT. He then stomped off the mound, threw on his batting helmet and grabbed a bat, then hit a 446-foot homer at 116.5 mph off the bat against Jose Quintana at 7:50:05 p.m. — less than five minutes later. How is that possible?

Well, how is it possible that he struck out Jake Bauer on a splitter at 8:49:47 p.m. then, seven minutes later, hit a 469-foot bomb over the roof at Dodger Stadium against Chad Patrick? Or that, after finishing up his six standout innings on the mound, he then hit one out to center off Trevor Megill? Three homers off three different pitchers. Three homers during a six-inning start in which he allowed two hits. Who does that?

How is it possible that the same player who threw the 11 fastest pitches of the game — and the only two over 100 mph — also recorded the game’s three hardest hit balls, all at 113 mph or more? It’s not just that no one had ever done what Ohtani did on Friday. It’s arguable that no one else has even been capable of doing all those things in the same game. And oh yeah: That game happened to put his team back in the World Series.

There’s no one number that proclaims Ohtani’s Game 4 performance as the best single-game showing in baseball history. But if you want to make that argument, I for one am not going to stand in your way.

Good while they lasted

Top 10 postseason WPAs from players on eliminated teams

1. Will Vest, Detroit Tigers | .848

2. Tarik Skubal, Tigers | .609

3. Kerry Carpenter, Tigers | .591

4. Aaron Judge, New York Yankees | .579

5. Jose Ramirez, Cleveland Guardians | .482

6. Keider Montero, Tigers | .441

7. Jacob Misiorowski, Brewers | .362

8. Cristopher Sanchez, Philadelphia Phillies | .349

9. Garrett Crochet, Boston Red Sox | .348

10. Cam Schlittler, Yankees | .314

Ohtani tracker

Since Ohtani inspired all of this, we should keep tabs on his WPA progress.

Through the NLCS:

Hitting WPA: minus-.062

Pitching WPA: .109

Overall WPA: .047 (98th of 284 players this postseason)

Ohtani jumped from 277th to 98th on Friday night. Let’s cross our fingers for two Ohtani starts in the Fall Classic.

The WPA pantheon

Top 10 single-season postseason WPAs since 1903

Note: It’s a big time frame, but the cumulative nature of the leaderboard heavily favors the recent decades when there have been more playoff rounds.

1. David Freese, 2011 St. Louis Cardinals | 1.908

2. David Ortiz, 2004 Red Sox | 1.892

3. Curt Schilling, 2001 Arizona Diamondbacks | 1.748

4. Alex Rodriguez, 2009 Yankees | 1.704

5. Yordan Alvarez, 2022 Houston Astros | 1.646

6. Carlos Beltran, 2013 Cardinals | 1.582

7. Bernie Williams, 1996 Yankees | 1.545

8. John Wetteland, 1996 Yankees | 1.522

9. Eric Hosmer, 2014 Kansas City Royals | 1.443

10. Mariano Rivera, 2003 Yankees | 1.420

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Snell’s total at the end of the NLCS puts him in range of this select group. With two more outings in the World Series like his start in Milwaukee — in tight games — it’s conceivable he could challenge Freese for the all-time Mr. October throne. It’s a long shot, but either way, this has been an amazing run for Snell.

As for Ohtani, here are the four instances in which a player posted at least .200 WPA on both the hitting and pitching sides during the same postseason. This is the list we thought Ohtani might join. He has some work to do to get there, but at least we know that if he doesn’t do it, in 2025 baseball, no one else will.

• Christy Mathewson, 1913 New York Giants (1.054 WPA | .447 hitting; .607 pitching)

• Rube Foster, 1915 Red Sox (.883 WPA | .303 hitting; .580 pitching)

• Babe Ruth, 1918 Red Sox (.710 WPA | .209 hitting; .501 pitching)

• General Crowder, 1935 Tigers (.923 WPA | .207 hitting; .716 pitching)

• Jake Arrieta, 2016 Chicago Cubs (.480 WPA | .218 hitting; .262 pitching)