There are times when the traditional numbers, or even the advanced numbers, do not quite match what your eyes have been telling you all season.
I think Gunnar Henderson’s 2026 season is a perfect example.
If you look at Gunnar’s WAR, you might come away thinking he is having a down year, but still a relatively productive one. He is a shortstop who plays every day, provides some power, gets on base at a decent enough clip, and adds value defensively and on the bases.
WAR captures all of that.
But if you have watched the Orioles every night, Gunnar’s season has felt much worse than simply saying he is having a decent WAR season.
It has felt disappointing.
It has felt like far too often, when the Orioles have really needed Gunnar Henderson to do something offensively, he has not.
That is where Win Probability Added, or WPA, becomes very interesting.
And Gunnar’s WPA is ugly.
What exactly is WPA?
WPA does not really care whether you went 2 for 4.
It cares when you went 2 for 4.
Every situation during a baseball game has a win expectancy attached to it. The score, inning, outs, runners on base and whether you are home or away all factor into the calculation.
If you hit a solo home run in the third inning of a game you are already winning 8 to 0, congratulations, you padded your OPS, slugging percentage and overall offensive numbers.
But you did not change your team’s chances of winning very much.
Now hit that same home run with two outs in the ninth inning of a tie game.
That is enormously valuable.
That is what WPA measures.
It is not a predictive statistic. I would never use WPA by itself to tell you who is going to be the better player next year.
For that, give me things like wRC+, exit velocity, barrel rate, chase rate, strikeout rate and the other underlying indicators of actual offensive talent.
But WPA is a terrific descriptive statistic.
It tells you what happened.
More importantly, it tells you when it happened.
And perhaps no statistic better explains the frustration surrounding Gunnar Henderson this season.
Gunnar is at negative 0.9 WPA
Among the major league hitters in the data, Henderson ranks 535th with a negative 0.9 WPA.
That is not a typo.
The Orioles supposed franchise player has accumulated more than 600 plate appearances, yet the results of his offensive plate appearances have actually decreased Baltimore’s cumulative win expectancy.
The breakdown is just as telling.
Gunnar has generated 10.7 WPA from his positive plays, but his negative plays have cost the Orioles 11.6 WPA.
His overall Clutch score is also negative 0.8.
That is how you end up with a season that looks considerably different depending on which statistic you are examining.
Gunnar has still accumulated respectable WAR because WAR is evaluating the entirety of his contribution.
He plays shortstop.
He plays regularly.
He provides some power.
He contributes on defense and on the bases.
Those things matter.
But that is also not the standard we are talking about here.
We are talking about Gunnar Henderson.
We are talking about a player who is supposed to be the centerpiece of this Orioles lineup and one of the best players in baseball.
And this year, when the game has been hanging in the balance, he simply has not delivered nearly enough.
This is why the season has felt worse than the WAR
This is where I think WPA becomes especially useful.
WAR does not care very much whether Gunnar strikes out with runners on second and third in the eighth inning of a one run game or strikes out leading off the second inning of a game in May.
From an offensive value standpoint, an out is an out.
WPA absolutely cares.
Orioles fans do too.
That is the part of this season that some of the broader statistics have trouble capturing.
You can look at the overall stat line and convince yourself Gunnar has still provided value.
He has.
That is not really the argument.
The argument is that he has not been impactful enough when Baltimore has needed him to be impactful.
Those are the plate appearances fans remember.
Bases loaded.
Runner on third with one out.
Tie game in the seventh.
One run game in the eighth.
Runner in scoring position with two outs.
That is where stars separate themselves.
That is also where Gunnar has come up empty far too often this season.
WPA strongly supports what Orioles fans have felt watching those situations play out.
Now compare him to Pete Alonso
Want to see the opposite?
Look at Pete Alonso.
Alonso has been the Orioles best hitter this season by WPA, and it is not particularly close.
Alonso has a positive 2.8 WPA.
That ranks ninth among all major league hitters in the data.
Think about that difference for a second.
Pete Alonso is at positive 2.8.
Gunnar Henderson is at negative 0.9.
That is a difference of 3.7 WPA between the two Orioles hitters.
Alonso has generated 12.9 WPA on his positive offensive events against 10.2 WPA lost on his negative events.
His Clutch score is also positive.
In other words, Pete Alonso has not just put up good offensive numbers.
He has put up good offensive numbers when they have mattered.
And that certainly passes the eye test.
When Alonso comes to the plate in a big situation, it feels like something can happen.
There has been a presence in the middle of the lineup that the Orioles desperately needed.
With Gunnar this season, that confidence simply has not been there.
Alonso’s traditional offensive statistics tell you he has been good.
His advanced statistics tell you he has been good.
His WPA tells you his production has actually mattered in determining whether the Orioles won baseball games.
That is exactly what you want from the middle of the order.
Taylor Ward tells a similar story to Gunnar
Taylor Ward is another interesting example.
Ward accumulated some respectable traditional and advanced numbers with Baltimore, and depending on which statistics you looked at, you could convince yourself he was having a reasonably productive season.
But watching him every day told a different story.
His WPA helps explain why.
Ward’s overall WPA this season is also negative 0.9.
Incredibly, that puts him right alongside Gunnar Henderson.
Gunnar ranks 535th.
Ward ranks 537th.
That is remarkable considering the different perceptions of the two players.
Nobody expected Ward to be the face of the franchise.
Nobody expected him to be one of the best players in baseball.
But Orioles fans watching Ward understood the frustration.
He would draw walks.
He would have stretches where the overall numbers looked fine.
Then a big situation would arrive and too often nothing happened.
That is exactly the kind of thing WAR can sometimes hide because WAR is trying to measure total player value.
WPA is telling you something different.
It is telling you whether the player helped his team win in the actual situations he was given.
Ward did not do that enough.
Neither has Gunnar.
WPA is not saying Gunnar Henderson is a bad player
This distinction is important.
I am not arguing that WPA proves Gunnar Henderson is suddenly a bad baseball player.
It does not.
I would not use 2026 WPA totals to determine who I want on the 2027 Orioles.
Clutch performance can fluctuate.
Players do not completely control the situations in which they hit.
A player batting with nobody on base obviously has fewer chances to generate huge swings in win probability than someone constantly hitting with runners aboard.
WPA is also not intended to predict future performance.
That is not why I find Gunnar’s number interesting.
What WPA does extremely well is describe what already happened.
And that is why I think it is perhaps the best statistic available to explain why Gunnar Henderson’s season has been so disappointing despite accumulating respectable WAR.
WAR asks a broad question.
How much total value did this player provide compared with a replacement level player?
WPA asks a very different question.
Did the things this player actually did increase or decrease his team’s chances of winning when they occurred?
For Gunnar Henderson in 2026, the answer is negative 0.9.
For Pete Alonso, it is positive 2.8.
That is an enormous difference.
And for anyone who has spent this season watching Orioles games and wondering why Gunnar’s WAR does not remotely feel like the season they have watched, WPA provides a pretty compelling answer.
Gunnar has produced some numbers.
He has still provided value.
He is still a very talented baseball player.
But the Orioles needed Gunnar Henderson to be one of the players carrying this offense.
Instead, far too often when the game was there to be changed with one swing, one hit, one walk or simply one productive plate appearance, Gunnar did not deliver.
That is why this season has felt so disappointing.
And this time, there is a statistic that backs up exactly what Orioles fans have been watching.
