[ChiefsCountry]

Originally Posted by DJ's left nut

But again - no he didn't.

If he was consistently blowing leads in high% situations, his WPA would be a mess. If he came into a bunch of 8th inning games with 2 run leads (what, an 80% likely win) and turned them into 1 or 2 run defecits, that would cripple his WPA. He did have some games like that and those dropped some nasty numbers on his WPA (we'll get to those later). If he did that often, he damn sure wouldn't have held a positive WPA on the season.

Like I said - nobody likes their 7th/8th inning relievers because when they do their job it's just a 'ho hum' moment. But 48 times in 59 games, Joakim Soria left the mound with his team having higher odds of winning than they had when he entered. So more than 80% of the time he took the mound, he did his job, high leverage and low leverage included.

But he had 4 REALLY tough outings in there (4/28, 5/29, 7/31 and 8/15), two of which were against divisional opponents - Min and Det, the other 2 against 2 recent playoff foes for KC - Bal and Oak. So those stand out something awful.

No, there's not a single stat that tells the whole story and I'm not arguing that there is. But what I am arguing is that the stats on aggregate absolutely do tell A story and that story is that of a relatively forgettable, slightly above average reliever. That's all Soria is. His numbers say that. His gamelogs say that. His stuff says that.

Everything says that but your memory and frankly, we fans are not reliable narrators.

Soria had a lot of bad luck that doesn't show up on the stat sheet.