Top 10 Paid Players in 2022 vs. WAR

[mrreality68]

Hi Everyone

I saw this article and was wondering what people here on the forum thought about it
It grades the Top 10 paid players in 2022 using WAR (basically Dividing the Salary by the WAR produced) and then graded it on how much Salary/WAR it produced

https://wealthofgeeks.com/mlb-salaries/

[cgjackson222]

$/WAR is an interesting concept.

It's amazing that paying $9M on average to get a single win above replacement gets an A grade.

Having 3 Mets in the top 10 shows how much their current owner is willing to pay to win. Of course, the value of deGrom and Scherzer should skyrocket if they can perform well in the post-season. Note that Pete Alonso makes comparatively next to nothing at only $7.4M in 2022, but is eligible for arbitration in 2023.

[BobC]

Originally Posted by cgjackson222

$/WAR is an interesting concept.

It's amazing that paying $9M on average to get a single win above replacement gets an A grade.

Having 3 Mets in the top 10 shows how much their current owner is willing to pay to win. Of course, the value of deGrom and Scherzer should skyrocket if they can perform well in the post-season. Note that Pete Alonso makes comparatively next to nothing at only $7.4M in 2022, but is eligible for arbitration in 2023.

Hmmmm? Maybe they should take the player's salary, deduct the average salary of all players in the league from it, and then divide that result by the player's WAR to better determine the cost of a win above replacement for that particular player. Average players can make significant salaries as well. According to at least one site, the average MLB salary for 2022 is $4.41M.

So for Max Scherzer, based on the info in the linked article above, his cost per each win above replacement should, I would think, be more like:

($43.3M - $4.41M) / 3.4 WAR = $11.438M Per WAR

Not the $12.7M per that article.

And it may even be more appropriate and meaningful to deduct the median MLB player's salary, as opposed to the average MLB player's salary, in this formula. Highly paid players, like Scherzer, Lindos, Trout, and so on, skew that average MLB player salary amount much higher than the true median salary would be. But I'm not sure there is any quick or easy way to determine the true median MLB player's salary for 2022, so I just proposed using the average salary instead.

And as Charles noted, paying upwards of $9M-$10M for each single WAR, and yet still getting an "A" grade for a player getting paid that much for each single WAR, makes no sense and is downright stupid if you ask me. Take Pete Alonso, whom Charles also mentioned in his post. His 2022 salary is $7.4M, and he has a 3.2 WAR so far for 2022. So his cost for each win above replacement, using my slightly revised formula, would be something like: ($7.4M - $4.41M) / 3.2 WAR = $934K Per each WAR

Now that sounds like someone who would be more deserving of an "A" grade to me for their cost per each WAR. It seems to me that the correct way to determine the grade of a particular player in regard to their salary cost for each WAR would be to figure that cost per each WAR for every player in the majors first. And then if you follow the old-fashioned measurement standards for determining grades, the players in the lowest 10% of salary costs per each WAR would get an "A" grade, those in the next 10% lowest would get "B"s, "C"s for the next 10% lowest, and so on. Without actually running all the numbers for every MLB player, it would seem to me that every one of the 10 highest paid MLB players in 2022, per that article that Jeffery linked to, would all probably end up being deserving of a lot worse grades than that article gave some of them credit for. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if not a one of them even deserved a "C" grade, and I would expect more than a few to deserve getting "F"s.

In theory, shouldn't a totally average MLB player theoretically end up with a 0.0 WAR for a season? Also, if WAR is supposed to measure the additional wins a player generates/creates for his team over the average replacement player in MLB, for that to be a truly representative measurement for the overall league, shouldn't that mean that if you took all the positive and negative WAR measures for every player in the majors at any single point in time and added them all up, they would always end up totaling 0.0? If not, then the WAR measurement is not truly being made against the average player in the majors after all, and is actually based on some other average replacement player measure that is not truly indicative of the then current average player in the majors. I do not really follow, and never tried to completely understand, most of these advanced statistics that many people treat as the gospel. So I am truly curious to learn if what I'm asking about the WAR measure is correct or not.

In looking up how player's advanced statistics are affected by even a single play during a game, I came across this very interesting site and example.

https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/...-play-find-out

The one single, major thing I took out of reading this article/example on how a single baseball play can affect player's statistics is that the whole concept and methodology seems bat-sh#t crazy!!!! The author kept mentioning how different players did or did not get deserved or undeserved positive or negative credit from the play in question. In the summary, the author ended up attributing 1.75 positive runs to four players, and 1.65 negative runs to six players. Should that not equal out to 0.0 if they are all netted? It further gives no positive or negative credit to any of the coaches, who very obviously have a direct and meaningful impact on this play on how it turned out, and ends up giving no credit or blame in some cases to the players involved. For example, if a manager orders his pitcher to intentionally walk an opposing batter, doesn't it still count against a pitcher's WHIP and other pitching stats, even though he really had nothing to do with?

I understand this article is the opinion of the author who wrote it, but if what he talks about and describes is any way representative of how many of these advanced statistics, such as WAR, are truly measured and determined, I'm even less impressed with them now and find them deserving of even less credit than many others give to them. The potential omissions and errors and misplaced credit/blame, as described in just this one play alone, is incredible. And again this is in just one.....single.......play! Extend that to the all the plays, in all the games, over an entire season, and the possibility of cumulative errors and misplaced credit/blame to me seems astounding. Or are the data scientists and statisticians going to try telling me that over the course of an entire season they expect all these potential errors/omissions and misplaced credit and blame to go the other way just as often and basically even out for all these MLB players involved so that they virtually all end up where there should have.....or is that the BS they want/hope you'll believe?????