Highest season WAR

I wondered who in history had the highest season WAR stat (I'm still not sure I understand WAR in a definitive sense, but that's another story.) So I looked it up on Baseball Reference, and of course it's a bunch of 19th century guys and deadball types who dominated their small-talent pool peers.

Anyhow, I noticed that the highest ranked most recent contemporary is Dwight Gooden '85 at 20th (!), Steve Carlton's '72 is 30th, Carl Yastrzemski is tied with others at 32nd. Roger Clemens '97 is at 39. Awfully low, my opinion -- another point, why doesn't STRAT make those cards better?

To top if off, Barry Bonds' monster 2001 season is ranked 45th.

Here's the Baseball Reference link: https://www.baseball-reference.com/lead ... ason.shtml

Mmmm...I'm all for advanced stats, but not sure how they carry meaning across eras. Like Edwin Starr's song says, "War, what is it good for. Absolutely nothing!?" Maybe more than that, useful, but very murky.

I think it's less about dominating a smaller pond (although that's definitely part of it) and more about just much heavier workloads for early pitchers. WAR is a counting stat, so it sees guys throwing 500 innings of above-average production as massively valuable, even if they weren't totally dominant on a rate basis. If you just filter out pre-1893 pitchers you get a more reasonable list with more variety in terms of era.

For me the biggest flaw is catcher defense is probably undervalued. Fangraphs addressed this by adding framing value for recent catchers, but I'd love to see framing extrapolated back through history to make comparisons across eras easier. Should be able to get a rough estimate by analyzing walks and strikeouts allowed.

Catcher is by far most important defensive position and by the far the one position for which we can least measure its defensive contributions. Framing, calling games, blocking the plate, throwing arm affecting the strain on the pitcher from the running game. You can isolate to a large extent the defensive contribution of a shortstop or a centerfielder from the pitcher, but thats harder to do with a catcher and pitcher. So much of it is hard to measure.

Makes sense to me, before 1925 the replacements sucked. Today's replacement players are of a much higher caliber.

My favorite WAR is Jim McCormick of the 1879 Cleveland Blues. He had a WAR of 10 and a W-L record of 20-40.

I guess this means that the team was so bad that a replacement level pitcher would have gone 10-50.

Intuitively a very high WAR would be for a super player on a very, very bad team. Disclosure I think Sabermetrics is a bunch of BS, including WAR.

The replacement players of the 1800s might not make top notch high school rosters of today. They definitely wouldn't be as good as AA players of today.

I think you would find that given the same physical training, healthcare, game specific training and equipment that there would not be much difference between those players and these. In truth human beings have not evolved that much physically over 140 years or so. The human DNA has not changed as much as those other factors. I am not a scientist but I will bet that could very well be proven.

I wondered who in history had the highest season WAR stat (I'm still not sure I understand WAR in a definitive sense, but that's another story.) So I looked it up on Baseball Reference, and of course it's a bunch of 19th century guys and deadball types who dominated their small-talent pool peers.

Anyhow, I noticed that the highest ranked most recent contemporary is Dwight Gooden '85 at 20th (!), Steve Carlton's '72 is 30th, Carl Yastrzemski is tied with others at 32nd. Roger Clemens '97 is at 39. Awfully low, my opinion -- another point, why doesn't STRAT make those cards better?

To top if off, Barry Bonds' monster 2001 season is ranked 45th.

Here's the Baseball Reference link: https://www.baseball-reference.com/lead ... ason.shtml

Mmmm...I'm all for advanced stats, but not sure how they carry meaning across eras. Like Edwin Starr's song says, "War, what is it good for. Absolutely nothing!?" Maybe more than that, useful, but very murky.

That Gooden Strat card is an absolute joke! I said this before, and that little nugget just confirms it in spades. Just unbelievable how they could screw up the ultimate yearly performance of the whole modern era.

That card needs a major overhaul.

I think you would find that given the same physical training, healthcare, game specific training and equipment that there would not be much difference between those players and these. In truth human beings have not evolved that much physically over 140 years or so. The human DNA has not changed as much as those other factors. I am not a scientist but I will bet that could very well be proven.

It has nothing to do with evolution or equipment. THE PLAYER POOL IS LITERALLY A MILLION TIMES LARGER.