I don’t usually pay attention/care about WAR in regards to pitchers but I was looking at my relievers and trying to understand why Sean Doolittle has such a high WAR compared to Watson but I’m guessing it has to do with FIP as mtkafka mentioned.
A great reliever is inherently considerably less valuable until you don’t have one, then you realize how important they are. The Yankees aren’t winning titles without Rivera. The Mariners last year are a 75-80 win team if you replace Diaz with a “replacement level” closer last year.
With how many close games that team won and Diaz locked down for them, there is no way you can convince me if you pulled him out and stuck a mid level reliever in his spot they are only winning 3 less games, I don’t care what the bWAR says.
Fair enough, but what about someone like Kevin Brown? I don’t have the stats open, but I’d wager he had several seasons with a WAR higher than the best single-season of 100% HOF vote-getter Rivera, even though Brown’s never getting into the Hall of Fame himself. I’d lean toward Brown, even without knowing the WAR, simply because I think a starting pitcher is just that much more valuable.
This is all academic of course, but this is essentially the way WAR looks at it and explains the discrepancy you are seeing between your reliever’s WAR and your starter’s WAR.
Similarly, this is why a shortstop with lesser hitting stats can have a higher WAR than a HR-heavy DH, even without adjusting for defense added. SS is the more valuable position.
I was comparing my closer to one of my setup guys.
I’m glad I brought this up because you guys have gotten my to spend more time on baseball reference than I have actually doing my work and searching through b-ref is so much more fun!
If you haven’t already, take a look at all the definitions of the advanced analytics as well. It has really given me good insight into things like FIP, ERA+ and OPS+ which I’ve found really useful in evaluating my players.
WAR is not the right metric to look at how a player actually impacts the games they played in. WPA (Win Probability Added) is trying to capture how a player actually played in the games based on game situations.
WAR is trying to measure something closer to talent outside of context (for the most part). For instance if you hit 100 home runs during the year and every single one of them was a solo home run with your team up or down 5+ runs your WPA would be low but your WAR would be high. You didn’t really help your team win or lose that year, but holy hell can you hit.
Relievers are given some credit for the leverage of when they pitched in WAR, but it is purposefully muted because otherwise pitcher’s usage roles as chosen by their managers would have a bigger impact than their actual performance and so WAR wouldn’t be as useful.
Ha ha, you’re right. Disregard everything I said I guess. I think OOTPB uses FanGraphs’ WAR formula which uses FIP as opposed to Baseball Reference’s which uses runs allowed, so that would be the reason assuming a similar number of innings pitched.
Edit: If you want to waste more time nerding out about baseball stats instead of working, here’s an article I like about comparing the different WAR calculations using Pedro’s 1999 and 2000 seasons:
Teetering on the edge of relegation, I made a bunch of upgrades over the ASB. Started out by buying a pack and pulling Machado - unfortunate, but pretty good value considering I needed a 3B - and buying Lance Berkman outright to shore up the OF. Shuffled some players around and finally said goodbye to Matty Alou. Even with the 80 contact rating he was batting around .275… makes me wonder how viable small ball is when you get to the higher levels and face elite pitching day in and day out.
My gold team has had a bad year so far. They had a great May, going 19-9, but other than that it has been pretty crappy. Diamond team fighing for a wildcard spot at the moment.
The Ultimates were relegated back to bronze last year so I completely revamped the outfield to end up with O’Doul, Maddox, Barfield, and Cuyler (Cuyler is currently the DH but might take over LF since I think he would end up being better then O’Doul after some training). Hopefully that incarnation can get me back into silver while I earn some points to revamp the infield!
Don’t sell your team short KWhit, you are in silver not bronze.
Apparently I shouldn’t have talked about Watson earlier. Since mentioning how awesome he was he has blown a save and gotten a loss in his last 3 appearances. Still listed as “hot” though. My team has also had a rough time the last 10 games and my 10 game division lead has been cut to 4.
In April it looked like they were going to year that division up. Hopefully they will jave another good run for you. I’m content to sit here in Diamond. It would be nice to win the series, but i cant imagine how painful perfect must be.
Al Rosen leads the league w/ 85 RBIs! Smoke that in your pipe WAR boys… thats 3.4. Now watch him get 0 for the rest of the season! And Jason Heyward hit so well that I decided to bench him again… just because I’m an idiot for hitting auto roster.
