How does a player get WAR points ?

[Peter_Spaeth]

Originally Posted by insidethewrapper

If Trout is like all the others before him , his SB's will go down a lot in the next few years (look at Canseco, Sosa, Soriano etc). I think he is already in the $ 30+ million/year range. In his 30's, his baserunning will no longer be an asset, in fact he has not had over 30 SB since 2013 (not over 30 for the last 5 years). 7 years and he has hit the 100 RBI mark 2 times (100,111).

I know he is a great player but I thought his stats were much better than this. Watching MLB Network I thought he was the greatest of all-time ( lifetime average is . 307 , you would think it was .350+ ).

Also I watch a lot of baseball games and I think most CF's are very good and fast. Not sure how some get rated higher than others, they all make great plays.

Teams win games by who scores the most runs. I still like RBI's .

Of course my prior post was facetious, sort of, but there is something about Trout and this metric that is an uncanny marriage. I vividly recall an article last year in May or June speculating that if he kept up his pace he was on track for perhaps the greatest season ever. I looked and he was hitting .294 as I recall. WTF.

[bnorth]

Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth

Of course my prior post was facetious, sort of, but there is something about Trout and this metric that is an uncanny marriage. I vividly recall an article last year in May or June speculating that if he kept up his pace he was on track for perhaps the greatest season ever. I looked and he was hitting .294 as I recall. WTF.

If you want a real laugh compare Trout and Pujols. According to WAR Trouts #s are way better. Then look at real #s like batting average, home runs, and RBI and Pujols are better.

Pujols 7 years Trout 8 years
1091 games 1065
1344 Hits 1187
282 HR 240
861 RBI 648
332 BA 307
54.9 WAR 64.3

[insidethewrapper]

Somehow WAR must favor Outfielders , but they are only in a few plays a game, mostly non-significant. Just think of a firstbaseman who is involved with several plays, mostly snagging a ball out of the dirt to save the SS 3b or 2b an error and save several runs per game. Not sure how WAR handles all the saves the first basseman makes in a game. Do they only count their errors ?

[nat]

Originally Posted by insidethewrapper

Somehow WAR must favor Outfielders , but they are only in a few plays a game, mostly non-significant. Just think of a firstbaseman who is involved with several plays, mostly snagging a ball out of the dirt to save the SS 3b or 2b an error and save several runs per game. Not sure how WAR handles all the saves the first basseman makes in a game. Do they only count their errors ?

No, it doesn't only count their errors. The problem that first baseman have got is that pretty much any major league baseball player can make almost all of the plays that a first baseman gets called on to make. (With the occasional exception.) Scooping those throws is important, but WAR measures wins _above replacement_ and pretty much any replacement first baseman would be able to make most of those plays. The really good defensive first basemen do well by WAR. Pujols himself (who was really good at first when he was young) was averaging about 2 WAR a year from defense from 2006 to 2009.

[steve B]

Originally Posted by nat

No, it doesn't only count their errors. The problem that first baseman have got is that pretty much any major league baseball player can make almost all of the plays that a first baseman gets called on to make. (With the occasional exception.) Scooping those throws is important, but WAR measures wins _above replacement_ and pretty much any replacement first baseman would be able to make most of those plays. The really good defensive first basemen do well by WAR. Pujols himself (who was really good at first when he was young) was averaging about 2 WAR a year from defense from 2006 to 2009.

That's the part I just can't agree on. Centerfield in most parks isn't much more than a test of running speed. Especially in a typical symmetrical fan shaped park.

But to say that's harder than either left or right field at say Fenway is just silly. Left field especially has made even some excellent fielders look silly.

[Peter_Spaeth]

Originally Posted by steve B

That's the part I just can't agree on. Centerfield in most parks isn't much more than a test of running speed. Especially in a typical symmetrical fan shaped park.

But to say that's harder than either left or right field at say Fenway is just silly. Left field especially has made even some excellent fielders look silly.

I agree with you on left field in Fenway, but surely there's more to center field than speed, there is throwing, a huge question of judgment and instincts on whether to charge a sinking liner or play it on the bounce, same for judging the flight path of a deep ball. And so forth.

[steve B]

Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth

I agree with you on left field in Fenway, but surely there's more to center field than speed, there is throwing, a huge question of judgment and instincts on whether to charge a sinking liner or play it on the bounce, same for judging the flight path of a deep ball. And so forth.

Other than the throwing, those things are mostly the same for other fields. Maybe marginally more difficult because of covering more ground, but in many parks not by much. And the speed usually balances that out.


What seems weird now you mention it, is that the two best I've seen for throwing both played right field. Evans and Ichiro, I can't count Mays because I only saw his last year when he was way past his prime, but I hear he was amazing.

And of course the Sox had Damon in center who couldn't throw well at all.

[nat]

I wrote up a whole explanation of how to calculate WAR and then my computer crashed and ate it. Maybe I'll try again tomorrow.

Anyway, regarding Trout in particular: he does so well by this metric because he's good at everything. He has a good batting average, a good walk rate, he hits for power, he steals bases, he plays an important defensive position, he even does little things like advancing from first to third on a single really well. Being a well-rounded player is a big advantage. (Willie Mays, the classic well-rounded player, is 5th all-time in WAR, behind Ruth, Cy Young, W. Johnson, and Bonds.)

On the Trout/Pujols comparison: there are three big reasons for the difference. One is what I mentioned above, Trout is more well-rounded than Pujols ever was. Pujols may have been the better hitter, but the other stuff makes up for the difference in their bats.

The second is that Trout is a center fielder and Pujols was (mostly) a first baseman. WAR gives players a positional adjustment, weighted to the number of games that they play at each position. First basemen, left fielders (and especially DHs) get a negative adjustment; guys who plays hard defensive positions get a bonus. Trout has been getting about +0.3 WAR bonus each year for playing center, Pujols lost about 0.8 per year for playing first. The rationale for this is that its easier to find a guy who hits well and plays first base than one who hits well and plays a tough defensive position. Clearly a shortstop who could hit like Pujols would be more valuable than a first baseman that could hit like Pujols, and the positional adjustment is what lets us account for that fact.

Finally, Pujols' prime seasons were during a more offense-heavy era. There's about a 20 point difference in league average OPS between 2001 and 2018. Because it was easier to put up impressive offensive numbers in 2001, that performance isn't as valuable as the same performance would be in 2018.

That's all I've got time for right now. Hopefully I manage to recreate the post on calculating WAR tomorrow.

[Peter_Spaeth]

Nat it would be interesting to hear you weigh in on why Edgar Martinez's WAR is so high.

[Jim65]

Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth

Nat it would be interesting to hear you weigh in on why Edgar Martinez's WAR is so high.

I bet his career OBP of .418 has a lot to do with it, he was an On Base machine.

[nat]

Here’s the brief explanation of how to calculate WAR.

First we start with all of the things that a player can do on offense: hit singles, double, triples, home runs, walks, steal bases, strike out, get thrown out stealing, etc, etc. Including some marginal things like reaching base on error. For each one of these events we know (historically) how many runs a team has scored, on average, from the occurrence of an event of that type to the end of the inning. This gives you the run value of each event. (In practice it makes sense to use the run value from recent seasons, what was going on in 1912 doesn’t really matter.) For example – and going from memory here, so numbers may be off – the run value of a home run is about 1.4, a single is about 0.3, a walk is a little bit less than a single. That is, in recent years, from the time that a player hit a home run (including the home run itself) to the end of the inning, on average a team will score 1.4 runs. So the first step in the calculation is to take all of the things that a player does on offense, all the singles that he hit, all the doubles that he hit, and so on, and multiply them by their run values. (Of course the run values for bad things – like striking out – will be negative.) Add that all up.

The next step is to convert the player’s offensive run value into wins. This is pretty straight forward. As a rule of thumb, if the number of runs you score, plus the number of runs you prevent, equals 10, you should expect your team to win an additional game. (There will be some year-to-year variation on this, but 10 is a nice rule of thumb.) So divide the player’s run value by 10 to get his expected offensive win value.

Then we need to look at defense. There are a few ways to do this, but we’ll keep it simple. (Differences in WAR that you find on Fangraphs or Baseball-Reference usually come down to the fact that they calculate defense differently.) Cut the field up into zones – basically think of them as concentric circles radiating out from where fielders usually stand. The further the circle is from the player’s usual position, the more credit that they get for making a play in that zone. (Roughly speaking at least; how one fielder interacts with another’s chances changes this some, and shifts throw things off a bit, but it’ll do for our summary.) If a ball is hit right toward you, since almost anyone could catch that ball, you don’t get much credit for making that play. But you lose points if you boot the ball. On the other hand, if you have to go a really long way to make a play, you’ll get lots of credit for making the play, and lose basically nothing if you don’t manage to make it (since we shouldn’t have expected you to make it anyway).

Each ball that gets hit has an expected run value attached to it – a screaming line drive down the first base line has a high run value, since it’s probably a double or a triple, whereas a soft grounder right to the shortstop has a very low run value because it’s almost always an out, and even when it’s not it’s just a single. So take the run value of each ball that gets hit, note whether the player in question made a play on it or not, and then multiple the run value of the ball by the weight attached to the zone that it was hit to. So if a center fielder makes a diving catch deep in the hole, you take the run value of a double and multiply it by something close to 1, since it almost certainly would have been a double if the play wasn’t made, and since it was a hard play to make, we shouldn’t just expect any old center fielder to make it. Or say that a shortstop fails to make a play on a ball hit up the middle. Take the run value of a single (0.3), since the play wasn’t made, reverse the sign (-0.3), and then multiply that value by the weight of the zone, say 0.5, since we’d only expect a shortstop to make that play half the time. Failing to make that play then costs the shortstop 0.15 runs. Once you’ve done all that, add up the results, and again divide by 10 to get the player’s expected defensive wins.

Now, WAR doesn’t measure wins, it measures wins _above replacement_, so we need to know what replacement level is. Essentially, replacement level is supposed to be the amount of performance – runs scored and prevented – that you could get from freely available talent. The kind of guy that almost every team has stashed in AAA. We’re not talking top prospects here, just career minor leaguers who can get called up in a pinch. Figure out how many runs such a player should be expected to score and how many he should be expected to prevent. Convert that to wins (divide by 10). Then subtract that amount from our target player’s win totals.

Finally, we need a positional adjustment. Good hitting shortstops and catchers are hard to find. Good hitting first basemen are easier to find. We need to adjust for that. So take the number of games a player plays at each position and multiple that by the per-game adjustment for each of those positions. A full-time center fielder gets a bonus of about 0.3 WAR from this, a full-time first baseman gets a penalty of about 0.8 WAR. Catchers (IIRC) get the highest bonus, DHs get the largest penalty. Once you’ve made the positional adjustment you have the player’s WAR.

The run values and the weights are all determined historically, it’s important to see that they are just records of what has happened in the past. Replacement level is also an empirical matter, as there are plenty of replacement level players. Guys who are on the border of being MLB bench players but also spend a lot of time in the minors. Replacement level is just what those guys, on average, can give you. There’s nothing theoretical about these components of WAR, they’re all determined by what happened on the baseball diamond.

It is important, however, to recognize that statistics are tools, and, as with any tool, that are some jobs that WAR is good for and others that it isn’t. Don’t try to turn a screw with a hammer, and don’t try to pound a nail with a screwdriver. What WAR tells you is how many extra games an arbitrary team would be expected to win or to lose if they added the player in question. This is a useful thing to know for some purposes and not for others. It makes sense, for instance, when talking about the hall of fame, or when trying to evaluate a player’s career as a whole. But it’s not so helpful if you are a team’s general manager and are trying to decide whether to sign a player. In that case you don’t care about wins above a generic AAAA player, you care about wins above the actual guy whose job this player would take. But the general strategy can still be useful. If you are considering signing a third baseman, but you’ve already got a good one, then you can keep the win calculations and adjust replacement level up to reflect the good incumbent. Alternatively if you’ve got a black hole at third base and no help on the farm team, you can keep the outlines of the calculation but drop replacement level down.