This Means WAR!!

Recently I discovered the Fangraphs website (http://www.fangraphs.com) and it's opened up a whole bunch of doors for exploring player evaluations and pricing.

The first door I walked through is Wins Above Replacement (WAR). From the website:

Wins Above Replacement (WAR) is an attempt by the sabermetric baseball community to summarize a player’s total contributions to their team in one statistic. You should always use more than one metric at a time when evaluating players, but WAR is pretty darn all-inclusive and provides a handy reference point. WAR basically looks at a player and asks the question, “If this player got injured and their team had to replace them with a minor leaguer or someone from their bench, how much value would the team be losing?” This value is expressed in a wins format, so we could say that Player X is worth +6.3 wins to their team while Player Y is only worth +3.5 wins.

Calculating WAR is simpler than you’d think. If you want the detailed (yet very understandable) version, check out the links at the bottom of the page; Dave Cameron does a good job of walking through the process step-by-step. The short answer, though, is that as follows:

● Offensive players – Take wRAA, UBR & wSB, and UZR (which express offensive, base running, and defensive value in runs above average) and add them together. Add in a positional adjustment, since some positions are tougher to play than others, and then convert the numbers so that they’re not based on league average, but on replacement level (which is the value a team would lose if they had to replace that player with a “replacement” player – a minor leaguer or someone from the waiver wire). Convert the run value to wins (10 runs = 1 win) and voila, finished!

● Pitchers – Where offensive WAR used wRAA and UZR, pitching WAR uses FIP. Based on how many innings a pitcher threw, FIP is turned into runs form, converted to represent value above replacement level, and is then converted from runs to wins.

With WAR in mind, I set off to build the following team:

http://onlinegames.strat-o-matic.com/team/1378207

Pitchers (WAR)

Fister (4.6)
Chacin (4.3)
Verlander (5.2)
Shields (4.5)
Torres (1.3)
Melancon (2.5)
Jones (2.0)
Brothers (1.1)

Total pitching: 25.5 WAR

Hitters (WAR)

Salty (3.6)
Mesoraco (0.4)
Belt (4.0)
Utley (3.9)
Donaldson (7.7)
Lowrie (3.6)
Ramirez (3.1)
Ross (1.8)
Trout (10.4)
Ellsbury (5.8)
Parra (4.5)

Total hitting: 48.8 WAR

Combined pitching and hitting: 74.3 WAR

I wasn't super strict with the concept, as WAR doesn't break down into vs RHP or vs LHP only (ie, platoons) and with a low dollar staff I needed a big R2 regardless of what Torres' WAR number is.

In fact, with the low WAR numbers of virtually all the relievers, I wonder if that can be read as "relievers don't matter all that much." This has my attention because I've had some early luck with super low dollar bullpens (as have other teams I've noticed).

Not sure how it will all play out, but it's usually fun to watch things unfold in real time...

Calculating WAR is simpler than you’d think

I challenge anyone to take the raw stats of a player and calculate WAR without a computer.
I posted a while back an article that looked at the various sites that post WAR numbers. That article highlighted Upton his last couple years before going to Atlanta. Depending on which site you got the WAR numbers he was either a top 50 hitter or a bottom 50 hitter. Different sites will include different sets of factors or weigh different contributions differently. For example for a position player one might weigh fielding more than another and there was one site which did not include fielding at all.

It can be an interesting discussion topic but careful about depending on it as a measurement of a player's true total contribution.

Saber stats are interesting and can be informative. But the more you stray from literal actual stats the more the margin for error grows. In the case of WAR I think there is a substantial margin of error.

An interesting side note on WAR. I originally encountered this years ago in writings from Baseball Prospectus. Now that it has caught on and several different sites have their own calculations for WAR the 2014 version of Baseball Prospectus refers throughout to WARP (Wins Above Replacement Player). They describe the calculation as using the contribution value of the average player added to a team roster during the season. That means that the better a team's callups from the minors are the lower WARP will be for a given player.

Not saying WAR has no merit. Just saying there are a lot of subjective elements to it.

Good luck J! This will be interesting to follow

Saber stats are interesting and can be informative. But the more you stray from literal actual stats the more the margin for error grows. In the case of WAR I think there is a substantial margin of error.

I completely agree. In fact, I think WAR is more akin to torturing the data until they confess than it is some magic number.

The problem I'm currently having is that the winning teams I'm seeing look so very much alike. We're only two months into the card set and I'm already yawning. I dove into this WAR experiment to see if it could kick up some new players to rally around...

In choosing my team, I did use some veteran best practices in addition to trying to maximize the WAR. For instance, WAR is somewhat dependent on innings pitched, so you could add more WAR by selecting two or three big SP/RPs. But to what end? I'd rather have Torres clean up after six innings than just about anyone else, no matter how much more WAR value is added.

So yes, this was more for the purposes of "conversation starter" than for "magic bullet finding." I was reading about the sad state of affairs on the boards here and want to do my part...

Thx Steve!

Informal WAR proxy:

Pitchers: SPs who give up less hits than innings pitched with above average strikeout ratios and below average ballpark HRs allowed.

Hitters: Guys who field well and hit a crazy number of doubles.

See, you can do this without a supercomputer!

Combined pitching and hitting: 74.3 WAR

JPAV, what's the WAR of the other teams in your division (for comparison purposes).

Good question.

In my division:

Abita Turbodogs are 18.5 pitching plus 35.3 hitting for a total of 53.8.
Mayville Wildcats are 26.0 pitching plus 23.2 hitting for a total of 49.2.
Local Natives are 27.3 pitching plus 27.8 hitting for a total of 55.1.

The three averages are 23.9 pitching plus 28.7 for a total of 52.6.

On the Fangraphs website click on Teams, then Batting, then select 2013. Note: You have to toggle between Batting (for hitters) and Pitching (for pitchers), otherwise you get the pitchers "hitting WAR" and not the pitching WAR. At the bottom of the page you can create a Custom Player List. When you hit the "Create" button it will list the selected players in order of their WAR.

It's a bit too cumbersome to do the other eight teams just now, but I would suspect 25+25=50 would probably be about "average" (if not actually a little above average). If WAR means anything at all, my roughly 50% improvement above average should yield significant results.

But maybe not.

Thanks for sharing J-Pav. I am going to spend some time on this site as I like baseball statistics. I also want to see if there is any correlation between WAR and the success rate of my strat teams.

Definitely worthy topic as a conversation thing. It will be interesting to see how you do. Please update periodically.
At least 2 major factors in play. How accurate is WAR? Assuming it is accurate how closely does the strat model reproduce it?

For fun on your next effort at this something to consider. For pitching WAR factor in to your calculation that pitching card only controls outcome about 35% of the time. Forget the exact number and too lazy at the moment to calculate it. Of course that is because the x fielding plays/ratios are the same for every pitcher. So you probably want to have some type of calculation to split the 50% of rolls on pitcher cards between pitcher WAR and your hitters fielding WAR. And of course your hitters WAR numbers used should not include their fielding WAR or if it does weigh it accordingly.

In other words using your example just adding pitching WAR to hitting WAR may not give you the true WAR value of your team given the strat model. Also, when you get your WAR numbers to play with from the web site remember some sites only calculate WAR for a player's offensive stats with separate charts for fielding. Some sites combine hitting and fielding WAR and present in a single chart. And if you really want to get in to it some sites also factor in a baserunning WAR that attempts to objectify how many runs a player adds or subtracts with baserunning.

There. That should make creation of your next team take a few days. Maybe if it takes long enough there will even be a league close to filling by the time you finish.

I have tried for years to correlate/compare Strat cards using the runs created formulas. Still have not decided how things like a given steal rating or throwing arm for example should be factored.