Quote:
Originally Posted by G1911
WAR directly reduces the value for 19th century pitchers, because otherwise the lists would be dominated by them and their high inning counts. The shorter seasons lead to hitters having lower values of WAR naturally without the direct lowering it does to punish pitchers. Defensive values use a lot of assumptions to fill in missing datapoints, adding to the many problems.
I think WAR is useless for the 19th century, personally. 19th century baseball is pretty much 1/6 of professional baseball history, but rarely gets anywhere near 1/6 of the star credit or fame or attention, unfortunately.
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As you know, WAR is a comparison vs. a theoretical replacement player. It doesn't compare across different eras or years.
So I am confused as to what you mean by "WAR directly reduces the value for 19th century pitchers".
Individual season WAR leaders ARE dominated by 19th century pitchers.
Just look at this list:
https://www.baseball-reference.com/l...h_season.shtml
ALL of the top 28 single season WAR leaders for pitchers were from the 19th century, with exception of 4 seasons (2 by Walter Johnson, one by Cy Young, and 1 by Dwight Gooden).