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[John1941]

Originally Posted by sports-cards-forever

The interesting thing about WAR is it compares players from the same era, but if all the 2B from that era are below average and one player is average, wouldn't they have a high WAR, but still not considered a Hall of Famer compared to the greats?

The positional adjustment WAR makes for Grich is not substantially different from second baseman of other modern periods. Grich is given 5-6 runs of WAR per full season for being a second baseman. For 2023 and 2024, Marcus Semien is given 6 runs of WAR for being a second baseman and Gleyber Torres is given 4 and 5 runs. For the late 90s, Roberto Alomar is given 4 runs per full season for being a second baseman. For the 1950s, Bobby Avila is given 6-7 runs per full season for being a second baseman.

Grich's high WAR has little or nothing to do with his contemporaries being unusually incompetent. He's slightly helped compared to a few periods, but slightly hurt compared to others. WAR rates Grich highly because his batting was far above league average - a 125 OPS+ is extremely good for a second baseman of any era, as others have pointed out.