The five most important Atlanta Braves home runs of 2019

It’s been an exciting season full of clutch hits and home runs for the Atlanta Braves. Let’s take a look at the most important homers to date.

The Atlanta Braves are almost at the finish line, on track to win back-to-back NL East titles, setting themselves up for what should be an exciting postseason.

But before we delve too much into the excitement of the upcoming postseason, wouldn’t it be fun to look back at some of the most thrilling and crucial Atlanta Braves home runs so far this season?

ESPN put out a piece on the day the MLB home run record was shattered, listing the most important home runs of this season, league-wide. That write-up inspired me to put together a list for the Atlanta Braves

There’s no crime in reminiscing!

But before we get started, we need to clarify how this exercise is going to work. How the heck are we supposed to pick and choose which Braves’ home run has been the best or most important?

What makes a home run better or more important?

Don’t worry… there’s a rather savvy stat for that, one in which ESPN’s David Schoenfield used in his list  — Win Probability Added, or WPA.

Yes, there are many different ways one could quantify such a thing, and I’m not about to try and list them all.

With any objective exercise or examination, you have to choose something in which to measure or quantify what you’re trying to accomplish… and today I’m using WPA.

What is WPA?

Before the first pitch of any given game, each team has a 50% chance of winning (duh!); but within the game, a player’s actions or results at the plate can obviously alter his team’s win expectancy, either in a positive or negative fashion.

The positive or negative impact a player has on his team’s win expectancy — the percentage chance of a win — is his WPA, illustrated in decimal form.

Think of Win Probability Added as points a player can either add  or subtract to his team’s win expectancy. Obviously, the more WPA a player scores in a given game, the better.

For example: Freddie Freeman comes to the plate in the 7th inning with the Braves wielding a 65% chance of winning (I’m making this up). Freeman proceeds to crush a solo-home run, increasing the Braves’ win expectancy from 65% to 85%.

That 20-percent swing in win expectancy for the Braves, in decimal form, is .20, meaning Freeman’s solo home run (in that specific situation) was worth .20 WPA.

The subtraction of WPA works the same way. If, for example, Freeman struck out in that plate appearance, he would’ve caused a negative impact on the Braves’ win expectancy, resulting in negative WPA.

For this piece, though, we just want to know which single Braves’ home run had the largest positive win expectancy swing. Which Braves’ homer tallied the most WPA, plain and simple.

Also, because we are using WPA as our metric to determine the importance of a home run, this list will not be limited to just game-winners or walk-off homers.

The great thing about WPA is that it’s able to calculate the difference between a 1st-inning home run and an 8th-inning home run, however, that doesn’t mean that only walk-off homers weigh the most.

It’s all about the situation in which the home run was hit, or how large the win expectancy swing was after the home run was hit. So don’t confuse this as simply a list of walk-off and game-winning home runs. That’s not what this is.

Thanks to Alan Carpenter (site co-editor) for his help with the research.