Trying to Make Peace with WAR

There’s been rich discussion in the baseball community about the ethics of the analytical revolution over the past several decades, accentuated and explored by the book/movie Moneyball.  Whether you agree with the philosophies of the statistic or not, Wins Above Replacement (or WAR) is the best publicly available assessment of a player’s total value.  On the contrary, in my opinion, runs batted in and pitcher wins are the more “established” and traditional statistics used to value players.

I looked at all qualified player-seasons from the Statcast era (2015-2019) and curated two scatter plots - one for pitchers and one for hitters.  To be fair to leadoff hitters, I’ve averaged runs scored and runs batted in. I compared the totals to fWAR, as shown below:

*Please note that this excludes all negative-WAR seasons

There is actually a strong correlation here!  The above chart demonstrates that sabermetricians and traditionalists really don’t have much to disagree on.  The r-squared value effectively states that 55% of run and RBI totals come from some contextual environment such as what runners are on base.  So we can be certain that about half of traditional stat totals come from how good a player actually is.

I’d argue that this is enough to the point where the two opposing factions of invested fans shouldn’t squabble over which stat is better - they say some similar things.  Though I much prefer WAR because it includes defense, baserunning, and is context-neutral, both measures are adequate ways to evaluate hitters offensively.

But what about pitchers?

*Please note that this excludes all negative-WAR seasons

Due to sample bias (only qualified seasons were included), the extreme winning percentages that would actually lower this correlation even more are excluded.  With that in mind, the correlation between pitcher wins and WAR is already a weak one. Jacob deGrom exemplified the discrepancy last year, when he won the NL Cy Young award^ with a 10-9 record but had a sample-leading 9.0 fWAR.

^I would argue that the media coverage of this discrepancy furthered the campaign for his victory

It’s hard for me to defend wins in this case as I did with RBI earlier.  They are so team and offense-dependent to become virtually meaningless. The correlation value gathered from the scatter plot above says that only 18% of a pitcher’s skill and on-field production has actually directly led to his win-loss record.

So, to recap: I believe it’s fair that the analytically-minded community takes issue with the pitcher Win stat due to its remarkably low correlation to performance, but people should calm the argument concerning runs and their batted in statistics because there isn’t as much to fret over.

Make peace, not war.  

But please, use WAR.

May your pennants fly forever.

-Ryan

Edwin Diaz is K-Rod 2.0

With their Edwin Diaz trade looking worse and worse by the day, the Mets seemingly have not learned their lesson from Francisco Rodriguez and the eerie parallels concerning the two careers.

The Rodriguez and Diaz problems are very similar. Two young (24 for Diaz, 25 for Rodriguez) closers from the AL West went to the Mets. Both closers were chasing the single season saves record, which Rodriguez managed to get and hold with 62 saves. Both closers, who had shown flashes of dominance before, were viewed to have finally put it together during the season.

After their stellar 20_8 seasons (2008 for Rodriguez, 2018 for Diaz), they went to the Mets. The Mets signed Rodriguez in free agency and traded for Diaz (also, that Robinson Canó guy) at the same time. High expectations were placed on the newly-New York closers.  To put it politely, the expectations were not met.

Although Rodriguez managed to make the All-Star Game in 2009, his total performance for the year was not pretty. The 3.71 ERA looks satisfactory on the surface, but the RA/9 of 4.50 with a slightly better defense in a pitchers park resulted in his bWAR being a measly 0.1. He also walked Mariano Rivera with the bases.  Big oof there.

So far in 2019, Diaz has posted an ERA around 5, with his most notable meltdown being blowing a 3-1 lead against the Phillies. He gave up 5 runs in one third of an inning, losing the game. Editor's Note: This wonderful game was also pretty bad. His deal has looked worse by the day, but it should have been clear from the beginning that these deals do not work out.

May your pennants last forever.

-Prentiss

The Next Man to Hit .247

Khris Davis is famous for hitting 0.247, as he’s done it four straight seasons.  He’s a power-hitting DH playing for the Oakland Athletics and led Major League Baseball with 48 home runs last year.

A quick note: while Davis’ batting average has held steady over the aforementioned seasons, the major league average has actually gone down.  That means Davis has technically been improving his batting average!

A player has burst onto the scene in 2019 who has a very similar offensive profile to Khrush.  I’ve collected some statistics (some basic and some not) and laid them out for you below:

Clearly, our mystery player and Davis share numerous power and plate discipline traits.  Their xwOBAs on contact are both extraordinary compared to the MLB average. They’re both relatively slow but have power to all fields, which they utilize by hitting the ball to center field often.  But while they make amazing contact on pitches thrown to them, the two sluggers have trouble making contact in the first place (see their strikeout percentages).

If you pay attention to baseball news, figuring out our mystery player’s identity shouldn’t be too difficult.  For everyone else: our man is Mets rookie first baseman Pete Alonso.

While the 24 year old is not currently hitting 0.247, that future looks bright.  We’ll see how it goes!

May your pennants fly forever.

-Ryan