Surprisingly low WAR
 

Lou Piniella. 12.4. I thought of him as a pretty good hitter, expected it to be much higher.

Joe Carter (19.5) and Dave Kingman (17.3) were considered important parts of their teams, especially for power, for guys that didn't get WAR respect.

Alfredo Griffin - 3.1. He wasn't a superstar or anything, but there certainly was not a belief that Griffin borderline did not even belong in the major leagues through his long career.

Ryan Howard - 14.7. Difficult to believe this one.

Dante Bichette - 5.6. He only gets 1.2 for 1995. Again, not a real superstar but hard to see him as not really even deserving of being a starter.

Paul Konerko - 28.

Tommy Davis 20.4 in a LONG career and half of it came in two seasons.
Bill Buckner 15.0

I like the surprisingly High WARs. 60 is a reasonable shot at the HOF in most cases:

Kevin Brown 67.8
Willie Randolph 65.9
Reggie Smith 64.5
Willie Davis 60.7
Bobby Abreu 60.2

Can someone please explain Dante Bichette's 1.2 WAR from this year? Just can't understand how it can be that low with those numbers.
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It's primarily because dWAR hates him, the park factor, and that he didn't walk at all. Walks are heavily valued in bWAR.

I think this is a good example of it being a little silly even for a modern player. It's hard to argue that Reggie Sandes was 5X as valuable that year.

Buckner is astonishing. He had 2700 hits. WTF.

He had a career OPS+ of 100. He basically never walked so his OBP was .319 and he had very little power. He was a poor defensive player by the metrics used. And he spent much of his career at 1B which is a position that generally has strong hitters.

LOL don't need metrics to evaluate his defense. Little roller up along first... I can't believe he came back to Boston in 1990.

I was born in 1987, so I did not experience his career, and I know that at times the defensive metrics disagree. That said, I've heard, "and the ball gets by Buckner" many, many times.

Things mentioned above as well as (and because of) his extreme home/road splits.

31 of his 40 homers came at home and his slash on the road was .300/.329/.473

He also played terrible D that year. It was never good, but 1995 was his first year in LF as a regular and it did not go well.

It was 212.4, but he lost 200 coaching the Mariners

Stop. That loss wasnt his fault. The relief pitching sucked.

I grew up with the Bronx Zoo Yankees of the late 1970s. In addition to Randolph, there was Graig Nettles with 67.9 career WAR.

Added in Edit: His more famous teammate on those teams, Reggie Jackson, had career WAR of 74. Reggie was certainly Hall-worthy, but you would think he would be separated from Nettles by more than 6.1 WAR.

It's not "low" low, but
 

You'd think with all those hits, Pete Rose would be higher than 79.5. dWAR didn't hate him, but it did actively dislike him. Look at his base running numbers though, and apparently Charlie hustled himself into a lot of extra outs.

Nightmarish.

Randolph is right there statistically with Biggio and Alomar. Of course if Whitaker can't get in (75 WAR), neither can Randolph.

When I see the strangely high or low numbers, I'm all the more for ignoring this modern-day statistical invention that so many people decided to hang their hats on as the penultimate stat. I didn't need this statistic for all the years prior to its popularity and don't need it now.

If WAR is penultimate, what is ultimate? :)

Nettles comes up in these discussions a lot, I was trying to focus on guys who don't, but I agree. Nettles is tragically underrated.

WAR is a flawed tool that is overused. Steve Garvey's war is only 38 while Willie Randolph's is 65. Does that really tell you the story? Who was the more impactful player? To me, its Garvey by a mile.

It had just been too long since we had a cameo from something in the Bruces' lexicon.

Then again, long before the new metrics, Garvey got little love for the Hall despite all the counting stats.

I'll never understand people who dismiss WAR because it doesn't tell them what they feel is right. Isn't that the POINT of a new stat? Why would we need a stat to tell us what we already knew?

You can argue about it's supposed shortcomings, but to dismiss it out of hand because it disagrees with you instead of learning WHY it disagrees with you doesn't seem to be a productive way of going about things.

Maybe so. But he got more love than current Hall of Famers like Ted Simmons and Jim Kaat (both over 50 WARs)

A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.

How about the prototype for the current slugger Adam Dunn? He hit 462 homers, hit 40 homers 5 years in a row and finished with 17.9. Ouch he even walked a lot.

On the pitching side there’s Joe Niekro. He spent 22 years in the league, pitched more than 3500 innings and won 221 games. His career WAR is 29.7.

As a Denver resident (at that time), I can honestly say that it is virtually impossible to comprehend just how bad Dante was in the field.

Adam Dunn's glove cost him. He holds the record (by a lot) for worst single season dWar with an epically bad -5.2 in 2009. While that was his worst season, he was never a plus fielder. Only a valuable hitter gets a chance to cost you that many games with his glove.

Buckner was a very good player for many years! Has won the batting title for 1980 with .324 Avg! He is not HOF worthy, but few are. That’s the point.

Garvey was an out-making machine and a defensive liability! Randolph was a helluva player, a winner (and this from a Yankee-hater).

8 straight all star appearances, but stunningly, in the "WAR7" metric reflecting the peak 7 years, he is 55th among first basemen.

As a Dodger fan, I always felt that Garvey was over rated. When WAR came out , I eagerly checked to see if it would confirm my suspicion that Garvey was the second most valuable member of the that infield behind Ron Cey.

In this case WAR did not confirm my bias. Garvey was third behind Cey and Lopes :p

(note: if you count just their time together instead of their whole careers, it does indeed go Cey-Garvey-Lopes, but this is more fun to say)

I was just discussing Joe Carter with a friend last week.

I realize that the RBI is not a favored new age stat and the “clutch gene” cant really be measured quantitatively, but his WAR seems to really run counter to what I saw when I watched him. He is one of the few on this list where I saw his entire career and it just doesn’t add up.

Check Garvey's post season numbers. He was winner enough. Higher OPS than Mantle in the Post Season.

Getting way off topic, but Garvey also won 4 Gold Gloves. But, I have ceased to put weight on awards like that. The fact that Derek Jeter won 5 Gold Gloves and Jim Kaat won the Gold Glove in 1969 despite a .826 fielding percentage tells me that the GG is often more about flash than fundamentals.

And Palmeiro won one in a year I believe he only played 30 games at the position.

WAR is one of the only newer stats that I actually care about. Some of the others just take the fun out of baseball when people start yapping about them. WAR rewards complete players. If you're slow and awful on defense, WAR reminds you that your team isn't getting the greatest value, despite the offense. One-tool hitters feel the wrath of WAR. Mark Belanger is one of the greatest defensive players ever, plus he had a few decent hitting seasons (mostly due to walks/steals), yet he was 41.0 WAR. Almost all of that is defense.

I'll say the one player who surprised me was Willie Montanez with 1.6 career WAR. I never saw him play, he retired in 1982, so my surprise was from what I remembered as a kid. I got some slightly older cards and remembered seeing the very small print on the back of his 1982 Topps card, with some big RBI seasons (101, 99, 96). I always figured he was a better overall player, but he lost a lot of value for poor defense, plus he's one of the few players with a below 50% success rate stealing bases and more than a handful of attempts. He homered 30 times one year, yet he hit just 139 homers in 14 years.

Wow!

So many of his contemporaies said that Billy Cox was the finest defensive 3B of his era and one of the best ever. You often heard it said that before Brooks came along, Cox was the guy you'd want manning that corner. That's saying something. Brooks himself even wrote me the same thing. That's saying everything! :) He wasn't any sort of terror at the plate, though, yet fared better than Belanger in certain offensive categories. He's at a lowly 10.1. Mark was definitely more of a full-season player than Cox, who unfortunately wasn't most of the time.

I like ops a lot. WAR seems overused and often incorrect. Seems like a starter that plays every day but is decent is going to have an outsized war against a player that for whatever reason is killing it but doesn’t get to play every day.

Alfredo Griffin's last year in Toronto was 1984. He had over 440 PAs and accumulated a grand total of 4 walks, none of which were intentional. His WAR of 3.1 may be on the high side. WAR is a tool, but not the sharpest tool in the shed.:D

Well, just taking Buckner, in 1985 he played 162 games and hit .299, but his WAR was only 1.5. 46 doubles, 16 HR, 110 RBI.

WAR punishes outfielders, 1B, and DHs. It seems to put a huge premium on OBP as well. In other words, sluggers who didn’t hit for average or walk much and played one of those positions tend to have lower WAR than expected. Just as 2B, 3B and SS who didn’t put up great #s can have surprisingly high WAR.

Yeah, but what a glorious 30 (actually 28) games those were.

Carter hit .259 and never walked. Career .258 with 2 outs and RISP and .239 in late & close situations.

He drove in a lot of runs because he got a ton of chances. He had 115 RBI in 1990 in his one year with the Padres - while putting up a .681 OPS. He stunk that season, somehow still had 115 RBI.

Yeah, WAR loves to reward players who happen to be the one good player at their position. Joe Morgan is a perfect example of this. In 1975, he won an MVP after a great season where he hit .327 with a .974 OPS. He had an 11.0 WAR meaning WAR thinks he had one of the greatest seasons ever (19th for WAR among position players ever - ahead of every season in the careers of Ted Williams, Hank Aaron, and Mike Trout). And it's all because he played 2B, a position where two NL starters had an OPS under .600. Morgan had 50 extra base hits in 1975, a fine total that netted him 12th place in total bases. His 50 was a full third fewer than Mike Schmidt's 75 but Schmidt somehow had just 7.7 WAR that year. Morgan had an incredible WAR because his 2B contemporaries all sucked.

Morgan was actually much better in 1976, increasing his extra base hits by 24% while increasing his OPS despite playing 5 fewer games.

His WAR actually went DOWN because of his defense.

I like WAR in general but it has to be viewed with skepticism and put in proper context.

I will say a 2b leading the league in OPS (both of his MVP seasons) cannot be overlooked. That simply didn't happen back then and I feel the WAR accurately represented his value. I honestly feel those seasons are legitimate candidates for all time greatest seasons. He did have 40 less plate appearances in the second season in addition to his fielding being less stellar than the year before. That certainly accounts for a small chunk of possible WAR helping to explain the difference.

Morgan was a much better base runner than Schmidt also. Not just steals, but advancing extra bases and not making outs and not hitting into double plays. That's a very underrated aspect of what adds to WAR, and legitimately adds to someone's value as a player. Schmidt hit into 50% more double plays than Morgan in 1300 less plate appearances.

The early question about Dante Bichette's low WAR in 1995 shows that just playing every day doesn't necessarily lead to a high WAR.

For anyone interested, here's a link to the baseball-reference.com page that shows how WAR is calculated:

https://www.baseball-reference.com/a...position.shtml

Getting back to the original focus of this discussion - Lou Piniella - his low career WAR is probably explained by a fairly short career (he didn't catch on in the majors until he was 29; deducting two meaningless tryout years and two seasons at the end when he was barely a part time player, you get 14 years); a lack of walks; almost no stolen bases; and genuinely poor fielding. He had no range in the outfield. He was, in fact, the stereotypical big, hard-hitting white guy who would be planted at first base so he would cause the least harm, and would clog up the bases if he didn't hit a home run. He was a good player, no doubt about it, but he wasn't as good as many people thought at the time.

It's human nature. We do overrate the players we like.