In Honor of Mo Rivera: The All Time Single Team All-Stars

WAR is a flawed concept. If one did not have enough evidence against it already seeing it put Koufax on second team here would be sufficient.

Well, no stat is perfect, but I would suggest that WAR (while synthetic rather than a counting stat), has a certain amount of value in that it allows comparison across different eras.

It also tends to balance the value of long-term performance against peak performance, which is kinda useful in constructing this particular kind of all-star team, which is designed to honor long-term value to a single club.

In the case of Ford and Koufax, you've got two very different kinds of pitchers with careers of very different shapes who ran up virtually identical WARs: Ford's 53.9 vs Koufax's 53.4, which is basically a tie. Ford was an outstanding pitcher for 14 years, from 1950 to 1965 (with two years out for miltary service.) Koufax was a flat out awesome pitcher for six years. This was preceded by six years during which Koufax was quite ordinary (4.10 ERA, 36-40 W/L). Koufax gets 6.6 WAR for his six ordinary years and 46.6 for his six awesome years (during which the Dodgers won 3 pennants and 2 WS). Ford gets 52.3 WAR for his 14 excellent years (during which the Yankees won 11 pennants and 6 WS) and 1.6 WAR for a couple of years when Ford was hanging on at the end.

For me, WAR provides a handy shortcut that offers a fair measure of value between these two very different kinds of careers. One could probably arrive at similar results—i.e. differing careers of roughly equal overall value—using another set of stats. Of course, one might want to make the case that Koufax was a much better pitcher than Ford in terms of overall value to his team—which is what I'm trying to measure. But if so, one might need to find a convincing way of measuring that value. Please note, again, that I'm not saying that Ford's value was higher than Koufax's but that taking their careers as a whole, I think their long-term value was roughly equivalent and that both belong in the second tier of single team All-Stars.

BTW, having thought further about it, I believe Feller should replace Lyons on the first team, and Lyons should go down to team #2. Feller was really a much better pitcher than Lyons. Feller was a dominant pitcher for a very long time, and he lost three prime seasons and most of a 4th to WW2. Without those WW2 years, Feller would simply blow Lyons away, and overall, I'd much rather have Feller on my team. Also, as noted, Ford lost two prime years to military service in 1951-52, though I'm not factoring that in to the Ford / Koufax comparison.