Most overrated baseball stats????
 

Many stats that we grew up with have later been found to be fairly bad at describing a player's value. Which stat do YOU think is overrated in this day and age?

Hits? avg? wins? saves? RBI's maybe? I will run a two week poll and hopefully we can have a lively (yet friendly) discussion!

my vote goes to pitcher wins because so much of it is out of their hands.

Pitcher A can go 8 give up zero runs and leave with a 1-0 lead, the closer comes in, blows the save and a walk-ff homer gives them the vultured win! (not to mention how much wins are contingent on offense)

The sacrifice fly. Why should a fly ball that scores a run not count as an official AB when a run scoring ground ball does? Saves/blown saves are overrated as well because of how the deck is stacked against middle relievers.

You could have 30-40 saves and an ERA of 4.00 or 5.00. That says a lot.

I voted wins, but for those who think WAR is a stat id say war is most overrated


http://metsmerizedonline.com/2014/01...hen-drew.html/

this is a good point. sac bunt isn't an at bat, sac fly isn't, yet a ground ball that does the same thing is. IMO, it is bad for the hitter to give up an out for a base except when it is very late in the game. I think they should all count towards plate appearances and AB's myself. (In a similar fashion the idea that "you can't assume the double play" is also flawed, it's not like the games are played with blindfolds on, official scorers have lots of tools available to tell whether or not the double play could be assumed. )

I'd love to see a stat for relievers that tracks inherited runners allowed to score.

I think, and don't quote me now, that Baseball prospectus tracks this. Fangraphs may too but I have never looked.

One a sacred bunt, the hitter is deliberately giving himself up to advance the runner. On a sacred fly, the batter is trying for a hit, but is not penalized for making an out if the runner scores. In my opinion, the hitter shouldn't be penalized for the sacred bunt, but should for the hit.

I agree that war is the most overrated stat. It is random, fwar and bwar are calculated differently and the formula for bwar was completely changed a couple years ago. For comparing players at different positions, it is completely worthless.

no it isn't, it's the single best thing we have to compare across position and generation. It isn't perfect, but if perfection is your requirement for a good stat 99% of all baseball stats are worthless.

It's a formula, even if you aren't a fan of the defensive part of it (and I can see the argument for that) every single player is run through the same formula so the ratios are at least close. (and that's the purpose of WAR, it's there to give a quick thumbnail number to compare. It's not like there is a major difference between a 5WAR season and a 4.8 WAR season, they are pretty much even)

Now some people may USE WAR in a wrong manner, but the number itself does exactly what it's designed to do. It's still far better than something like batting avg which tells us pretty much nothing.

Bert Blyleven has a WAR of 95.3, Johnny Bench has a WAR of 75.0. If you really think Blyleven was worth 20 more wins, then we are going to have to agree to disagree. I see some value in it comparing pitchers to pitchers and catchers to catchers, but it is completely worthless to compare a pitcher to a catcher in my opinion .

Now the pitcher argument is a different one. The creators of WAR admit that it may undervalue ground ball specialists a bit (and overvalue K's) Not to mention that catcher is still the hardest position to measure defensively. But it is improving with the new pitch framing data.

BUT, if you look at Blyleven and Bench in particular, Bench played in 2132 games over 16 years (or 133 a year avg) and his 12 years of top production were 69.7 WAR (fWAR) whereas Blyleven has 685 starts over 22 years for his fWAR. So he had 6 more years to earn wins over bench (and ,unlike catchers, he mostly made all of his starts where Bench missed 30 games a year on avg due to being a catcher)

One thing to remember is that WAR is a cumulative statistic.If you put up 8 7 WAR seasons for 56 then play 6 more years and only earn 12 total, your career WAR of 68 will end up less than a guy who played 20 years and averaged 3.5 WAR per season. The former player was the better player at their peaks, but they ended up having similar value over their careers.

wow, after a few days it's a dead heat between Wins and Saves! I thought Batting Avg might win the day, but I guess it's a little too ingrained in our minds .

I voted for saves, because all the closer has to do is pitch one inning with his team ahead, the bases empty, and the other team's big guns all pulled for pinch hitters. Back in the day, when closers had to come in with the bases loaded and get out of that jam, then pitch the next couple innings as well, then maybe, but not today.

WAR is the best we've got for what it does. It provides a (mostly) context-neutral way of comparing how many extra wins you should expect a player to have produced were he added to a random team. The values it assigns to events (singles, stolen bases, etc.) are based on the linear weight values of those events: basically, how many runs these events have historically generated, on average. (I don't know how far back the current weights go; Tango used, IIRC, five years when calculating wOBA in his book.)

You can quibble with parts of it. My biggest gripe is that it weights pitcher performance by the leverage index of the situation - basically it gives more weight to performance in close and late games than to things that pitchers do in the first inning. Consequently, IMHO, it overrates relief pitchers. And you can (and lots of people do) complain about how it handles defensive statistics (especially since it uses different measures of defense for early players than for more recent ones). But these are quibbles, not objections to the WAR framework.

fWAR and bWAR are different stats which measure (slightly) different things. To object to WAR as such because there are two versions is like objecting to batting average because on-base percentage measures a lot of the same things, i.e., it's a criticism that doesn't make a lot of sense. (Although batting average is objectionable on other grounds.)

As with any statistic, the important thing is to not misuse it. That Barry Larkin was worth 6.1 WAR in 1991 (which is very good, all-star quality play) doesn't mean that the Orioles should have traded for him, since the Orioles already had a pretty good SS themselves. So that would be a way of misusing it.

The problematic stats, like saves and pitcher wins, are problematic because either there are very few situations in which they're useful, or because they're so consistently misused. There's a time and a place for citing wins. For example, if you've managed to win 300 games, you're going to be a pretty good pitcher. Not because wins are a good way of measuring pitcher quality (they're not), but because bad pitchers don't stick around long enough to win 300 games. So if you didn't know anything else about Early Wynn, pointing out that he won 300 games is a good way of pointing out that he was a really good pitcher. But they're not useful for much beyond that. (Because a pitcher's team mates make such a big difference to whether or not he's going to win any particular game.)

I picked wins, even over saves. If a pitcher comes in to close a game out, they can only earn a save if the other team is within a couple of runs, or get into a position to tie while the reliever is still on the mound. A pitcher coming in with a six run lead in the ninth won't get a save unless they completely implode, yet still close the game out.

A win is dependent on too many things. A starter can throw 8 innings of ball, surrender a lone run, and get a no decision if they get no run support (as The Big Bang Theory might refer to it, "The Clayton Kershaw conundrum"). Yet another starter throwing seven innings could give up six runs, and still get the win if his team scored ten runs in support. Even though the first pitcher clearly outperforms the second, the second would get the win. That's just ridiculous, in my opinion.

just to get back to the war argument

heres a link to the all time war stats:

http://www.baseball-reference.com/le...R_career.shtml

according to WAR:

1 - Rickey Henderson (who was great) - is better than Mickey Mantle

2 - Phil Niekro - better than pedro martinez? nolan ryan? bob gibson?

3 - Carl Yastrzemski was better than Ken griffey jr???

i can go on and on but i just took a few from the top 70 on the list there.

Its a flawed stat, if you even call it a stat, as there are 2 Different WARS made by 2 different places both calculated differently

+1 Steve.

I guess I'm just too old school. I look at the basics, and can usually tell if a player is/was good or not.

No need to micromanage stats.

WAR is a framework that can be developed in many different ways. Baseball-Reference and Fangraphs have the two that are best-known (bWAR and fWAR, respectively). If you want to object to it you can do so in two ways: you can object to the framework as such, or to a specific implementation of it.

If you are going to object to the framework as such you need to argue that there isn't a way to do what it's trying to do, namely, determine how many more wins a player would produce for a random team, beyond what a scrub from AAA could produce. I wouldn't recommend this kind of objection.

On the other hand, if you are concerned with specific implementations, the thing to do is to figure out what it is that B-R or Fangraphs (or whomever) does wrong.

Consider this. From 2010-2015 on average a team scored 0.481 runs from the start of an inning. If the lead off hitter singles, on average they scored 0.859 runs. (Data from Fangraphs.) So the expected value of a zero-out single is 0.859-0.481 runs. (=0.378 runs) You do a similar calculation for one outs and two outs, runner on first, runner on second, etc., and every possible combination of those. Take the average, and you have the 2010-2015 "linear weight value" of a single. These values are the building-blocks of WAR. So Pete Rose gets credit for (3215 * linear weight value of a single) when calculating his WAR. (Although obviously you don't use 2010-2015 data for Rose.) So if you want to criticize a particular implementation of WAR you can argue that it's got the linear weights wrong - maybe something beyond the event (single, in this case), number of outs, and position of base runners, matters to how many wins a player would generate above a AAA scrub.

Or, Baseball-Reference assumes that a team of replacement players would have a .294 winning percentage (= about 47 wins over a 162 game season). You could argue that this is too high or too low. Replacement level players are the kind of guys who play in AAA, but sometimes get called up to the big leagues, but then get sent back down again. Not the top prospects in AAA, but the guys who are just a bit too good for the minor leagues but not quite good enough for the majors. You could criticize setting replacement level at .294 if you could show that these guys actually play at a level above that. Maybe if you took all of the last-guys-on-the-bench and made a team out of them they would win more than 47 games.

That's all fair game, although of course you need to have a reason for thinking that they've got something wrong. I happen to think that they do: whether a run is scored in the first inning or the ninth inning doesn't matter to the outcome of a game, but when calculating WAR for pitchers, we weight the ninth inning run more heavily (all else being equal) than the first inning run. That's something that we do when calculating WAR, and a reason to think that we shouldn't do it. So, if you think that there's something wrong with WAR: what's wrong with it? Answering this question will require digging through the formulas used to calculate it, but that's what's required to pose a serious objection to it. (And they're pretty interesting anyway.)

Last thing, on player comparisons:

Henderson and Mantle. Rickey had about 3400 more plate appearances than Mantle - a much longer career. That's what accounts for the difference. Their WAR totals are almost identical. If they had basically the same WAR, but Rickey's career was much longer, it means that Mantle was a much more talented player. WAR is a counting stat, so it's saying that Rickey produced more wins (above a AAA/25th man player) than Mantle did over the course of his career. But, for each game that they played, Mantle did more to help his team win than Rickey did.

Basically the same thing is going on with Yaz and Griffey. Yaz had more than 14000 plate appearances. About 3000 more than Griffey. That's, like, four extra seasons of full-time play. (Remember, Griffey got hurt a LOT.) Yaz has a lead of about 13 WAR over Griffey. 13/4=3.25. A player who produces 3 WAR in a season is above average, but not, like, a star. Since Yaz played the equivalent of four more seasons than Griffey, as long as you think that Yaz could produce at a level that's above average but not really a star, the difference between Yaz and Griffey is reasonable.

Niekro. Same deal. The man pitched 5400 innings. If you are any good at all and pitch 5400 innings you are going to win a lot of games for your teams. Gibson pitched only about 70% of the innings that Niekro did. But he has more than 90% of Niekro's WAR. What it's saying is that Gibson was a better pitcher than Niekro, but Niekro won more games for his teams because he pitched so many more innings. Ditto with Martinez. Ryan is a different story. He pitched almost exactly the same number of innings as Niekro. Now, Niekro really was slightly better at preventing runs from scoring (once we account for the parks that the two guys played in). And remember that, while Ryan struck out lots of guys, he also walked everybody and their brother. That makes a difference.

Ok just one more example:

Tris speaker better than A Rod?


Speaker - 10,195 ab, 117 hr, 1531 rbi, 345 ba, 428 obp, 500 slg

A rod - 10,556 ab, 696 hr, 2086 rbi, 295 ba, 380 obp, 550 slg

See, I think you are misunderstanding the stat here. "better?" Not necessarily, you have to put it in context. Rickey had more WAR than Mickey mostly because of career longevity. (but also because of defense and baserunning, which are important) Rickey wasn't as good of a hitter as the Mick, but he might have been a more complete player over his entire career.

Yaz and Neikro both had very long careers and neither were hampered by injuries the way Griffey was...etc


Remember, WAR is a cumulative stat, so good players with long careers will have more WAR than better players with shorter careers often. That doesn't mean they were "better" just good for longer.

Yes, Speaker was "better" than A-rod!

Speaker wRC+ career= 157, fWAR 130.6

Arod wRC+ career= 141 fWAR 113.0

It's not some huge margin, they both played around 20 years so it's less than a win a season avg, but Speaker was the better hitter. (his .428 career OBP being the difference)

I will honestly say I do not understand WAR. I will say stats can be used to make any case you want. The baseball-reference page linked to earlier shows Ted Williams at 14. Anything that does not show Mr Williams as the best ever is flawed IMHO.

EDIT: To add I think saves is the most over rated stat.

WAR is cumulative, so Ted is hurt by losing nearly 5 prime seasons to military service. If he had played those years, he'd be in the top two or 3 with Ruth and Cobb.

Here is a link to fangraphs where they explain how they formulate their version of WAR and all the stats that are included :

http://www.fangraphs.com/library/misc/war/


ETA: older players may not be getting the full credit (or discredit) for their defense as the stats available back then are not nearly as good as the newer, more accurate one's, so take that into consideration as well.

So, what bravos said, and:

WAR measures all aspects of a player's game, not just hitting. Ted was a god of a hitter, but an indifferent to poor fielder. Lots of the guys above him on the WAR list were good fielders, which means that Ted may have been a better hitter than they were, even if he wasn't as good all around.

FWIW, Ted is second all-time in wOBA. It's a very different stat than WAR, but if you want an answer to the question "who was the greatest hitter of all time", it's better to look at wOBA than at WAR. wOBA only measures offense, and it's a rate stat, so your wOBA won't go up just because you played a long time. (In both of these respects it is different than WAR.) The only batter in front of Ted in wOBA is Ruth. And while I'm open to the suggestion that Ted was the greatest pure hitter of all time, that it's actually Babe Ruth is a pretty reasonable position to take.

A good argument can be made for both, and I don't think anyone would kick either off their all time team!! I prefer Ted as a hitter because he faced tougher pitching and that .482 career OBP can't be ignored. But really, it's the Hope Diamond or the Star of India , either way you are doing just fine.

Actually it is his .345 BA compared to .295 for AROD. They both walked about the same rate.

Other. Strikeouts. Pitchers strikeouts mean nothing, outs regardless of how they are gotten are important. I'd take a groundout pitcher over a fly ball pitcher or strike out pitcher any day. 1 pitch 1 out is better than 3 pitches for an out.

Batting average is overrated. :)
Can vastly overstate worth of guys who hit high but not for power and/or who don't get on base via walks, and the opposite.

Disagree. Nobody moves up on a strikeout, runners advance all the time on groundouts and of course can score on a sac fly. The flip side I guess is that strikeouts don't result in double plays but I would bet that runners advancing outweighs that. There is a reason the great strikeout pitchers are almost always great pitchers.

I agree Pete. Give me a great arm any day on the mound.

That said, great pitching will always put a team in a position to win a game. Pitching is what controls the game.

Great pitching can win on any team, however bad pitching will never win regardless of the team the pitcher is on.

this times a million!

a K is the best result a pitcher can generate in and of himself, any other out is contingent on BABIP and the quality of his defense.

I couldn't disagree more. Walks often don't advance runners and rarely score runners. The goal of the game is to score runners not get on base. I agree that power is important, but average is also very important.

OBP is the most misused stat. If you are arguing for a lead off guy like Tim Raines, I think it is a good metric. However, throwing it out for Ted Williams, to me that is a huge negative. Williams career with RISP BA .333 OBP .518, almost a 200 point gap. As the "best player" on his team, his job is to drive in runs, not get on base. Maybe I am being harsh, but maybe if Williams had sacrificed for his team by expanding his strike zone instead of enhancing his personal stats, he would have more than ZERO World Series rings.

Ted Williams's job was to create runs whether he scored them, drove them in or arvanced a runner who eventually scored.

Or............

Some of that OBP is intentional walks, some of it essentially undeclared intentional walks where the pitcher throws a bunch of poor pitches and takes a chance on the umpire rather than the hitter. Some of it is probably also walks either leading off or with the bases empty which are genuinely just as good as a hit.

If he'd expanded his strike zone and swung at a lot of bad pitches, a few things would have happened. He might have a few more hits, but would also hit into a few more doubleplays, fielders choices etc. Whether we like it or not, a players reputation has some effect on the strike calling, if a player is known to swing at nearly anything he doesn't get that little benefit of the doubt on a close pitch. Someone with a good eye and discipline often does.
So still fewer walks.

And with all that, perhaps he doesn't even get a chance at a WS.

As far as I know there's no stat that looks at things more broadly. Most try to isolate performance, but nothing in the game happens in a vacuum.

Williams faced "better" pitching than Ruth. But I'd have to ask if that pitching was better on its own, or was better because it didn't have to pitch against a better group of hitters. (Just read an article about how the Pats play in a weak AFC east. Perhaps, or are the teams weak because they have to play the pats twice a year? Just like one point during the early 2000s when the AL east was called weak, but the teams got to play the Yankees and Red Sox more than other teams. )

Steve B

WAR is a counting stat. It is the number of wins above the "replacement player" you contribute in a season. WAR is incorrectly used as a rate stat: Al Kaline has a career WAR of 92.5 (meaning he single handedly generated 92.5 extra wins for his team), Wade Boggs has a career WAR of 91.1. Some people would claim Boggs contributed less than Kaline, however Boggs was able to generate 91.1 WAR with 856 fewer plate appearances. I would venture to guess Wade Boggs would have been able to generate 1.4 WAR with an extra856 plate appearances (more than one full season).

Here are the WAR/100PA leaders (at least 8,000 PA) (obviously offensive only):
Babe Ruth: 1.535
Mike Trout: 1.343 (added for reference :D )
Rogers Hornsby: 1.340
Barry Bonds: 1.288
Mike Schmidt: 1.275
Ted Williams: 1.259
Willie Mays: 1.250
Lou Gehrig: 1.163
Ty Cobb: 1.155
Honus Wagner: 1.115
Tris Speaker: 1.115
Mickey Mantle: 1.107
Eddie Collins: 1.029
Hank Aaron: 1.023
Stan Musial: 1.007
Jimmie Foxx: 1.007
Albert Pujols: .965
Alex Rodriguez: .964
Eddie Mathews: .954
Roberto Clemente: .925
Joe Morgan: .885
Wade Boggs: .848
Rickey Henderson: .830
Cap Anson: .828
Al Kaline: .798
Adrian Beltre: .790
Cal Ripken Jr.: .741
Carl Yastrzemski: .687

Additionally, WAR cannot be used to compare players over multiple eras. There is no stat that does this.

An example:
In 1920, when Babe Ruth played, there were 18.25 million white men between the age of 20-44 and 208 pitchers in the league; so Babe Ruth faced (on average) the best pitcher in a pool of 87,786 people.

In 2010, when Alex Rodriguez played, there were approximately 88.62 million men between the age of 20-44 between the US, Japan, DR, Puerto Rico and Venezuela. There were 635 pitchers in the league; so Alex Rodriguez faced (on average) the best pitcher in a pool of 139,558 people.

If we use 2010 as the point of reference (to compare older players to the players of today) then every stat, including WAR would need to be adjusted 62.9%. So Babe Ruth's 11.9 WAR for 1920, would be adjusted to 7.5 in 2010, which would be tied for 6th with Albert Pujols.

Edited to add: Wins is the most overrated stat. No one really pays attention to saves, the all time career saves leader has never been inducted into the Hall of Fame while holding the title. So, I don't think anyone over rates it.

Batting avg is seriously flawed. It only tells us hits per at bat. It doesn't tell us the type of hits, it doesn't tell us how many times they were walked or hit by a pitch, it doesn't tell us much of anything.

OBP has been PROVEN to relate directly to wins more than any other single stat. The object of a batter is to not make an out and generate bases. A single and a walk are worth nearly the same as the majority of plate appearances take place with nobody on base. Stuff like RISP is worthless because there is no skill of "clutch" it's just confirmation bias. Good hitters tend to hit good and bad hitters tend to hit bad (and not every RISP situation has the same amount of leverage).

Seriously, go look from year to year at RISP numbers for players, they vary wildly. A .300 avg hitter might have a RISP of one year of .360 then the next of .240 then .430 .....etc Generally the larger the sample size the more it will move toward the mean of their career numbers in all situations, but no evidence exists to show that it is a repeatable skill.

The job of Ted Williams was to hit the ball hard. That's it. He was there to get on base, (home plate if that was possible with one swing) and not make outs. He has no control over any baserunners that may or may not have gotten on in front of him,(which is why RBI's is such a silly stat for an individual) All he can do is get on base and hit for power. These are the things he can control.


Would you really rather have Ben Revere, who in his best years hit .300 with a .335 OBP and .340 slugging, over Jim Thome ,who in his best years hit .270 with a .402 OBP and .580 slugging?

defense and base running aside, a team of Thomes blows a team of Reveres out of the water. They get on base more, and they hit for more power these are the two fundamental virtues of a quality hitter. average? it is irrelevant. It's major use is as a describing stat for HOW player accomplished their OBP (along with BB%)

Straw man argument, nobody has ever claimed a walk is as good as a hit, but it is a hell of a lot better than an out and BA just doesn't capture it. I stand by my opinion that BA tends to overstate (or understate) the worth of a lot of players. I would take Joe Morgan over Rod Carew for example despite a much lower BA, and so would almost everyone who has made rankings of players.

The Red Sox needed pitching to have a shot at winning the World Series, and Tom Yawkey needed to integrate the team earlier than he did. During Williams's career, the three years that they came the closest to winning the pennant without actually winning it were 1948, 1949 and 1950. In 1948, the only two pitchers of note were rookie Mel Parnell, and talented but erratic Ellis Kinder. The rest of the pitching staff was kids and old men. That staff wasn't going to make it past Spahn, Sain, Bickford and Voiselle. The next year, Kinder and Parnell both had breakout seasons, but they would have had to carry the team against Robinson, Campanella, Snider, Hodges, Furillo, and Reese. Then in 1950, Williams smashed his elbow in the All Star game and played in only 89 games. That year, Boston had only one pitcher with an ERA under 4.00 (Parnell, 3.61).

Apart from those three years, the Red Sox finished at least 10 games out every year. Maybe Williams could have gotten them a tad closer, but he couldn't have made up 10+ games in one season.

That is about as speculative as one can get. Not to mention that it is never good hitting to swing at bad pitches. All those walks undoubtedly helped his team a great deal.

Bill James in his 2003 book ran a computer model that, if I recall the details, put Babe Ruth from 1927 on one of the KC Royals teams, then put a guy who just drew a walk every at bat, and the team with the guy who walked did better.

Pitching victories are the most overrated stat by far. King Felix had 13 wins a couple years back an a 2.23 era while last year Colby Lewis had 17 wins with a 4.46 era. Wins are dependent on so many things (quality of their offense, opposing pitcher, bullpen, defense, weather, etc).

Yup.

Normally, I'd vote for pitcher wins, but since it's, to me, common sense, that it is vastly overrated, I voted for RBIs, and I'm quite surprised I'm the only one who has said so, to this point.

RBI are entirely dependent on who hits in front of you, so it's a meaningless stat to use to compare hitters. There are other stats that tell better which slugger is better than RBI.

Completely disagree. Pitching controls the game. Great pitching will put their team in a position to win every time. Bad pitching, regardless of the team, will never put their team in a position to win.

Sure, other factors come into play, but it all comes down to the ability of the one on the mound.

Pitching wins
 

A lot of folks pick Pitching wins as overrated. Nolan Ryan played on a sub-.500 team most of his career - especially with the Angels in the 1970's. How many more wins would he have had if he played on the Orioles like Palmer, the A's like Catfish, or on the Big Red Machine? His wins totals would be a heckuva lot better, way way better!

You can use WAR to compare players between eras. Now, it won't tell you how Babe Ruth would do in today's game. You'd need a time machine to answer that question. But given what it took to win games in Ruth's time, it'll tell you how many victories above a replacement player he added to his teams. And given what it took to win games in today's game, it'll tell you how many wins above replacement ARod contributed to his teams, and those two figures can be compared.

And it's meaningful to compare them. Wins have value in the context in which they're produced - in particular, in the particular seasons in which they are produced. So WAR can help you figure out how much value Ruth produced for his teams, and how much value ARod produced for his. (N.B.: WAR doesn't actually measure value, but it can help with figuring it out.) Even if it's the case that if you put Ruth in a time machine he would only put up 7.5 WAR seasons in today's game, he still generated more value for his teams than ARod did for his.

And yeah, Trout is really really good.

I agree with this to an extent. The one issue just comes down to defensive production and our ability to quantify it has improved a ton over the last 10 years.

The more back in time you go the less reliable defensive numbers are, so we might not have a very accurate picture of the value of some of these old timers.

That being said, WAR is still a great "thimbnail" number to use to compare players. It's not perfect, but few things are. It does a well enough job for casual comparison.

WAR/plate appearance
 

I like Mike Trout, but it is very very very hard for me to believe that on a per plate appearance basis he is at this point the second best hitter of all time or anywhere close. What is driving his WAR to be so high, he has some nice counting numbers but they don't seem particularly overwhelming? Maybe a small part of it is that he hasn't yet obviously had the usual end of career decline, but that doesn't seem enough to explain it.

"Maybe a small part of it is that he hasn't yet obviously had the usual end of career decline,"

That's a lot of it. It also helps that Trout is good at everything. He's a great hitter, a great base runner, and, well, an average-ish fielder.

Trout has been in the big league for four full seasons.

Year All-time WAR rank (position players only)
2012 22nd
2013 100th
2014 292nd
2015 87th
2016 212th (so far)

If he keeps up his current pace his 2016 season will be worth 9.8 WAR, tied with Ty Cobb (1909), Nap Lajoie (1910), Ron Santo (1967), Larry Walker 1997), and George Sisler (1920), for 63rd best position player season of all time. That's really, really impressive.

This will be fun. Some hall of famers and where their best season ranks all-time among position players:

Ruth 1
Yastrzemski 3
Hornsby 5
Gehrig 7
Ripken 11 (tie)
Wagner 11 (tie)
Cobb 14 (tie)
Mantle 14 (tie)
Mays 16
Musial 18
Morgan 19
Williams 21

That's all of the hall of fame position players who have had a season better than Trout's best. The only non-HOF player with a season better than Trout is Bonds. Let's keep the list going a bit (and add non-HOF players).

Collins 30
Foxx 30
Yount 30
Boudreau 37
ARod 37
Sosa 41
Banks 44
Rosen 48
Speaker 48
Petrocelli 52
Harper 56
Henderson 56

Trout's best season is better than any season Jimmie Foxx, or anybody else on this list, ever put up. Let's skip down a few spots.

Carew 68
Griffey 68
Pujols 68
J. Robinson 68
Schmidt 68
Jackson 76
Beltre 82

If Trout keeps up his current pace for the rest of the year he'll have two seasons worth more WAR than these guys.

Aaron 87
Biggio 87
Brett 87
Turner 87

As it stands he's already got two seasons better than any season these guys put together. It'll be three if keeps up his present pace for the rest of the year.

Baker 100
Heilmann 100
Snider 100
Cash 107
Frisch 107
Giambi 107
Rolen 107
Vaughn 107

He's already got three seasons as good or better than these guys' best. It'll be four if he keeps up his present pace. And remember after this season he'll only have five full years in the big leagues.

And that one season from Trout that's not turning up on these lists? That's the year that he won the MVP award.

He hasn't had his decline phase yet, and that will pull his rates down. But Trout is really super historically good. He is often compared to Mantle, but by WAR Trout leads Mantle in age 20, 21, and 22. They were basically tied at age 23. It's not until Mantle's age 24 season that he posted a WAR more than marginally higher than Trout will at the same age (this is Trout's age 24 season).

Well, first off, his WAR says he is the 2nd best OVERALL PLAYER of all time, not just hitter. His elite baserunning and above avg defense combine with his elite bat to make him such a great player. Just hitting alone (using wRC+) he is 7th all time. But, as you said, much of this is because he hasn't hit his decline phase yet. If he stayed capable enough to play until say age 38-40, his overall wRC+ and other batting metrics would be expected to decline. (I'm guessing into the high teens all time, which is still damn good)

OPS is better. OBP is better than BA but OPS is better than both. The correlation between team Runs Scored and BA is 0.82. For OBP it is 0.88 and 0.95 for OPS (The Sabermetric Revolution by Baumer and Zimbalist).

On another point, which has already been made, there is no doubt that OPS, WRC+ and WAR are vastly better stats than the old standards of BA, HR, RBI etc. The new stats are more complicated to explain easily and thus rejected by some but they are just plain better because they are directly based on run scoring value and winning.

I understand Trout is a phenomenal player. But when I compare players side by side, and I see such an enormous difference in something like oWAR, I don't get it.

Compare Mike Trout and Ryan Braun...just their offense, this season.

oWAR (offensive WAR)

Mike Trout 7.8
Ryan Braun 3.5

Ok, Braun is a right fielder. Trout's a center fielder. Obviously, Trout is worth more putting up the numbers he is as a center fielder, a premium position. But is he worth more than double Braun's season with the bat? 4.3 more wins?

Here are their numbers:

Trout .314 AVG, 541 PAs, 27 2B, 3 3B, 24 HR, 21 SB, 4 CS (84%), 99 BB, 109 K, slash line of .431/.551/.981. 244 TB, 170 OPS +
Braun .318 AVG, 449 PAs, 21 2B, 2 3B, 24 HR, 14 SB, 3 CS (82%), 38 BB, 74 K, slash line of .379/.557/.935. 226 TB, 145 OPS +

Their SLG is comparable; Braun is ahead by 6 points. The main difference is Trout walks more, so his OBP is 52 points higher. But he also strikes out more (25% vs 18%).

Trout should have a higher oWAR, absolutely. But show me where he's worth double what Ryan Braun is at the plate? That makes absolutely no sense to me. Braun came into the night 4th in the National League in batting, seventh in SLG, and 5th in OPS.

Trout has a career .960 OPS right now. At the same point in his career, Braun had a .943 OPS.

Compare Trout's 2013 season, where he had a 10.0 oWAR, to Ryan Braun's 2011 MVP season:

Trout: .323 AVG, 39 2B, 9 3B, 27 HR, 33 SB, 7 CS (82.5%), 110 BB, 136 K, slash line of .432/.557/.988. 328 TB, 179 OPS +.
Braun: .332 AVG, 38 2B, 6 3B, 33 HR, 33 SB, 6 CS (84.6%), 58 BB, 93 K, slash line of .397/.597/.994. 336 TB, 166 OPS +.

Braun's oWAR in 2011? 7.4. Again, Trout has a higher OBP (35 points), but Braun's SLG is 40 points higher, and his OPS is 6 points higher. They have the same number of stolen bases (Braun with a slightly better percentage). Since this doesn't account for defense, show me where Mike Trout, as an offensive player, was a better offensive performer....by 35%?? Again, he's providing offense as a center fielder, where Braun is a left fielder in 2011. But Trout's contribution as a center fielder is 33% more valuable? Celoknob referenced that OPS is more predictive of wins added than other metrics like OBP alone. Braun had a higher OPS in his MVP season than Trout did in 2013, yet, after positional adjustments, Trout's a 35% more valuable offensive performer? I do think there should be bonuses given to center fielders, catchers, second basemen and shortstops. But the idea that, left fielders, right fielders, first basemen and third basemen should then also be penalized for the positions they play seems incongruous to me. You've already rewarded a guy playing a premium position for the offense they provide. Why, then, penalize a player for filling one of the other positions?

all numbers from Fangraphs- (btw, most of Braun's time has been in LF this year)

2016 Mike Trout has a slash line of .432/.548/ .980 a wOBA of .413 and a wRC+ of 167 (best in MLB) his base running is an elite 8.0 and his defense a -0.4 (but will still add value due to positional adjustment as he plays CF)


2016 Braun has a slash of .377/.551/.928, a wOBA of .388 and a wRC+ of 139, his base running is a pedestrian 0.8 and his defense -7.3 at a position that does not have value added.

OPS is valuable, but it's not as good of a gauge as wRC+ or wOBA as it values OBP and SLG equally (and OBP is nearly twice as valuable as slugging is).

Remember, players all go through the same formula, the only change is based on defense, just by playing CF Trout gets a boost, by playing it well enough not to lose his positional adjustment the boost is larger. Being an elite baserunner adds value too. When you combine this with 28 pts of wRC+ you end up with one player being worth 7.1 fWAR and the other 3.0 fWAR.


to clarify, much of the difference comes from defense. Of 12 qualified LF'ers Braun is 8th in defense (of the 20 with at least 500 inn at LF this seasons, he is 13th) Of the 29 CF players Trout is 18th in defense (which makes them both in that avgish range at their position) But the difference is CF get's a defensive weighting boost because it is much harder to play. Trout gains 1 win just from that even with his -0.4 DEF rating.

If you removed defense and baserunning, it would pretty much be Trout with around 5.5 WAR and Braun with around 3.8ish- 4 WAR (which now appears much more reasonable considering Trout's fairly large OBP edge)

Centerfield is harder???

I guess watching so many games in Fenway has skewed my perception of fields being harder or easier. Center there is pretty easy, there's only a couple odd spots and not many balls get hit there, plus it's pretty small. Right isn't horrible for odd corners, but when it goes bad...... I've seen a couple outfielders chase what should be singles around the curve until it's a triple. Left must be hellish for a fielder as it's somewhat short, and there's a load of weird places for the ball to hit even after some fixing of the wall.

What makes center harder in a normal park? The size?

Steve B

Too much Saber metrics. Trout is a fine player, but until the Angels get arms they are not going to win like they should.

Point well made Bill. Baseball's a team sport, and each position has value.

Jason said his numbers showing Trout second were offensive only. In any event call me stubborn but I just cannot believe Trout legitimately ranks anywhere near second by any measure.

There are no offensive numbers that show Trout 2nd all time. IDK where he got that from, but right now his wOBA is top10 wRC+ is top 10...etc WAR he's not close because of the length of his career. BUT, when you consider he is in his prime right now and yet to decline, it really isn't right to even put him in the discussion of "all time" players need to start declining before we can really get a glimpse of A- what their peak was and B- how long their career lasts. Some guys have a steep decline, others a long shallow one.

edit to add: Trout has had the 2nd best start to his career all time, but that doesn't mean he will end that way, using WAR ratio to games played or PA's says 2nd, but.... the guy is like 25, let's wait until he's 35 before making these claims as truths

yes, the range required to cover in CF is generally between 20 and 30% greater than either corner spot thus it requires a much greater range and ability to play at even a league avg level.

Here's a link to fangraphs and how they weigh positional adjustments:

http://www.fangraphs.com/library/mis...al-adjustment/



tldr:
C+12.5 runs
1b -12.5 runs
2b +2.5 runs
SS +7.5 runs
3b +2.5 runs
LF -7.5 runs
CF +2.5 runs
RF -7.5 runs
DH -17.5 runs

Well, as of right now it's true, but it's obviously a little skewed since Trout only has 3,427 PAs compared to Babe Ruth's 10,623.

Like I said before, WAR is a counting stat just like Home Runs or RBI. So using WAR to compare which players are "better" can only be used when the length of time is similar. Mike Trout's average plate appearance brought as much value as every TWO plate appearances by Carl Yastrzemski (if you believe in WAR). This isn't even including external adjustments for time period.

Trout is great, but Babe Ruth player at an even more dominant level on average through his entire career. Pretty amazing.

absolutely. Though, we must put a little * on WAR before the advent of UZR and DRS, range factor and total zone stats just aren't very good and thus it's pretty well agreed that the defensive value of players before the 90's is harder to determine (and the more you go back, the harder it gets).

But WAR, isn't meant to be perfect, it's there to be a handy number of comparison. Think of it as the difference between looking something up on google maps and buying a geographical survey map. The latter is the peripheral stats that give you the more accurate picture (but requires deeper digging and effort) and the former is the convenience of WAR.

Agree with the bolded part completely. I see that Roberto Clemente's defense in right was worth only 12.1 wins over 17 seasons, and I laugh myself silly. Then I look at somebody like Andruw Jones, who was a fine center fielder, no doubt. But you'll never convince me that, for his career, his defensive contribution was twice as good as Clemente's. Jones had 24.1 dWAR to Clemente's 12.1. The argument has always been "Clemente made 140 errors in 17 seasons". How many of those errors came on balls that no other right fielder in baseball could have even gotten to? If you get a glove on the ball, but don't catch it, the official scorer is going to give the fielder an error. The point being that any other fielder in right is going to let the ball drop in for a double. Clemente's range in right was unrivaled, and his gun might be the best the game has ever seen. Of course, he's going to have more errors, because he's going to also attempt to throw out more runners than the average outfielder. When you're throwing the ball from the warning track in right field all the way to third base, some balls are going to skip away because the third baseman can't handle it, or it hits the runner.

Please. I've watched a ton of footage from Clemente's defense over the years. The man was a god in the outfield, and some stupid metric trying to convince us that his defense didn't even net 1 win in 162 games a season is utter bullcrap.

An OF's arm has been historically overrated in defensive value. If Clemente had played CF then he may have rivaled Jones in dWAR. Errors cost bases and I doubt Clemente's OF assists overcome the bases lost to errors.

playing Cf gives you more value because it's a more difficult position. Andruw is not only the best fielding CF'er of all time, but it's not even close and Clemente had a great arm, but his range wasn't as good as old timey memory may make us believe. Confirmation bias skews things (which is why we have stats) (and man alive quit using baseball reference, it's old, antiquated and behind the times)

Clemente was a great OF'er, but by playing RF he is always going to be worth less than an equally great fielder who plays CF because of the range required.

oh, and Fangraphs has him worth 1+ win a year for his fielding :-)


edited to add: errors are not included in metrics, they are based on plays made relative to avg, in zone and out of zone as well as arm, distance covered...etc and yelling at math because it disagrees with your opinion is not really very scientific, it's the reason we needed metrics, confirmation bias skews things far too much for things like fielding% or errors made to have much value

Don't listen to Nick about B-R, it's a very useful site. Philosophically divergent from Fangraphs on a few issues, but that's all. bWAR (the one on baseball-reference) and fWAR (the one on fangraphs) are useful for different things and in different ways (pretty much as with any two stats).

We know that fielding is the roughest part of the WAR formulae (and the hardest thing to measure in any case). Nick is right that it gets less accurate the further back in time that you go. The folks who put the various WARs together decided to use the best defensive measurements available for each season. Since our measurements improve over time, this means that the numbers that go into the WAR formula for a player in 2016 aren't quite the same as those that go in for someone who played in 1966. They could have used the same measurements all the way through, but at the cost of making evaluations of modern players less accurate.

This means that we know that there are some errors in our evaluations of older players, we just don't know who is being affected by the error, nor precisely how significant the error is. People in 1966 just weren't recording enough data for us to be able to tell these things. Clemente may have been better than dWAR gives him credit for, but there's no way to tell, and there's REALLY no way to tell how much better.

I'm just giving him guff about BR dating back to that Jim Kaat argument. :p

It is useful, I just don't think much of their version of WAR.

you bring up a good point about older (and even present day) defensive numbers, they could equally overestimate as underestimate defensive value, people tend to lean towards their perception of a player, but that's usually not a good idea.

overrated???
 

"tonight's attendance is..."

yeah, I KNOW it's PAID attendance, but when the announcers are trumpeting a "full-house" or "standing room only" crowd and it's obvious there's sh!tloads of empty seats, my reply is always "WTF???"

JMO, of course - whether or not the above is actually considered a 'stat' or not, I gotta laugh..

DS

I don't entirely agree.

An outfielders throwing ability - at least for the ones with really good arms - leads into the sort of thing that isn't covered by stats. (I don't think, there might be something very recent)
The players with really good arms, -Ichiro, Dwight Evans, probably Clemente, although I haven't watched much video of him. At least those two after a fairly short time didn't get as many outfield assists, but did have a fair number of times when a player might have tried for a double or triple but decided against trying. You can see it happen watching the game, but there's not many easy ways to put a number to something that didn't happen. Especially if why it didn't happen is open to interpretation. Would the player have run against a different outfielder say Johnny Damon? Or was the extra base not taken because it wasn't likely against anyone?

Other players have more outfield assists and they're either ones with above average arms or quick releases. Manny Ramirez had a lot of OF assists, and while I never heard it discussed, watching a lot of games I began to think it was because he had this lazy looking approach to a routine single that encouraged people to try for second more often. Same thing for wall singles, meanders to the ball, looks like he's not paying much attention, then a quick catch and throw to second.

Again, hard to put numbers to, aside from the assists.

Errors today totally baffle me. Shortstop drops a fairly easily reached ball, and sometimes, maybe even usually it's scored a hit. Maybe the guys have better range so it would have been a nearly unreachable ball 30 years ago, but a drop on a ball in your own range should be an error.

Steve B

As I recall in his discussion of Clemente, Bill James takes on the value of the great outfield arm.

modern metrics don't use OF assists alone as a measure of arm, they take into account extra bases taken by base runners (or lack thereof) . But, in the grand scheme of things, just like first base scoops, OF arms just don't make that great of an impact over the course of a season or a career. The difference between an avg arm and a great one isn't large enough to make a huge difference.


ETA: on one play, sure the difference can be huge, but if a great arm prevents say 20 extra bases during a season, that only adds up to maybe 3 or 4 runs and that's not even half a WAR.

Are you actually comparing Andruw Jones to Roberto Clemente?? Holy s****. Also, you need to get off this WAR shit. Look at the players and not these bullshit statistics. You are also the one the said Ed Reulbach was not even close to a HOFer. His record was 182-106 with an ERA of 2.24....What the Hell is his WAR?

This Nick Barnes guy is too much. Andruw Jones or Clemente? Hmmmmm, let me think...Andruw Jones was a joke as a hitter...To even hold him in the same breath as Clemente is beyond ridiculous, and I grew up in Atlanta as a Braves fan...And by the way, Clemente had the best arm I have ever seen....Vlad Guerrero is a close second

Andruw Jones isn't nearly the player that Clemente was (and this is also what WAR says, Clemente leads Jones 94 to 62, so it's not even close). Clemente was a much better hitter (and had a longer career, even given, you know). Clemente did a much better job getting on base, even though he played in an offensive environment that was friendlier to pitchers than Jones did.

However, according to the data that we have, Andruw Jones was the greatest defensive outfielder of all time. He's 20th all-time in the defensive component of WAR (behind Brooks and a bunch of short stops, basically). Clemente is 160th in the defensive component of WAR.

Basically, the defensive component of WAR looks at every defensive thing that a player did on the field, asks how likely other players would have been to make the same play, and looks at, historically, what has happened if the play wouldn't have been made. So if player A makes a play that a run-of-the-mill fielder would have made only 80% of the time, and if a ball hit to this part of the ball park has historically led to 0.7 runs scoring, player A gets credit for (0.2 * 0.7) = 0.14 runs saved. And then you do this for each defensive play that he made, and add them all up. There are limitations to the defensive part of WAR (which I mentioned in a previous post in this thread). We now have very finely grained defensive data: we know exactly where each ball was hit, how hard it was hit, etc. We use that data when calculating modern players' WAR. We use less fine-grained data when calculating older players' WAR (because they didn't keep track of this information back then). There is, consequently, more room for error in older players' fielding records. Clemente may have been better than the data indicates - we just don't have any evidence that he was. And no, subjective impressions from watching him play don't count as evidence. Lots of people who saw Jeter play thought that he was a great defensive player, even though we have very detailed records of the plays that he made, and they were not, in fact, very impressive. He just looked impressive making mostly routine plays.

We've got lots of really bright people working really hard to figure out how to measure baseball performance. Let's help them. If you think that there's something wrong with WAR (and I do, as noted up-thread), let's figure out what's wrong with it, and how to fix it, so that it can become more accurate.

times change, more information becomes available, either you learn to evolve or you fade away.

I don't see how cursing at me is improving your argument.....

Andruw Jones is the greatest outfielder defensively of all time and it isn't even close, I can present all the information to back up my claim (and none of it revolves around what I claim to have seen but rather with the scientific way: using statistics and data)


A jones- total zone runs 243

Clemente- 205

A-Jones- baseball references d-war (which I don't like particularly) 24.1

Clemente- 12.1


fangraphs DEF ranking (a conglomerate of several stats)

A-Jones - 281.3

Clemente- 84.4


Clemente was a much better hitter (hence his 80+ fWAR vs AJ's 67.1) but Andruw was a better fielder not only because of his range, and skill but also because he played the much more difficult position of CF for most of his career.

sorry, I just happen to know and understand more about baseball than you do. You are stuck in flat earth land. I have moved into the 21st century.

I hate to be like this, but your attitude, cursing and hand waving really leave me no choice. It's time to grow up, evolve with the times or GTFO the way.