Two Fascinating Facts from MLB this season:

[bravos4evr]

Originally Posted by bnorth

To me the first one with Pujols just shows how silly WAR really is. He has 23 HR and 100RBI you have to seriously make up stuff to consider him the worst player in baseball.

it's because you don't understand WAR.

WAR is a cumulative stat, Pujols is the worst player among all players with enough PA's to qualify for the batting title, and has been worth -1.7 fWAR.

His wRC+ (weighted runs created, the most accurate of all hitting stats) is 80 (20% BELOW avg of 100)

his baserunning is woeful -5.4 which dings his WAR

his gets dinged for being a DH on defense because he makes no defensive contribution.

sure you can cherry pick homers and RBI's and ignore everything else but his slash line of .244/.290/.391 OPS of .681 for a DH is pretty terrible, in fact of the 17 players to get 300 or more plate appearances at DH Pujols is in the bottom 3 in wRC+, OPS , isolated power, SLG, OBP and nearly everything else EXCEPT homers (9th) and RBI's (3rd)

RBI's are a team stat as the player has no control over the OBP ability of the hitters in front of him.


He's been pretty darn awful this year .

[bnorth]

Originally Posted by bravos4evr

it's because you don't understand WAR.

WAR is a cumulative stat, Pujols is the worst player among all players with enough PA's to qualify for the batting title, and has been worth -1.7 fWAR.

His wRC+ (weighted runs created, the most accurate of all hitting stats) is 80 (20% BELOW avg of 100)

his baserunning is woeful -5.4 which dings his WAR

his gets dinged for being a DH on defense because he makes no defensive contribution.

sure you can cherry pick homers and RBI's and ignore everything else but his slash line of .244/.290/.391 OPS of .681 for a DH is pretty terrible, in fact of the 17 players to get 300 or more plate appearances at DH Pujols is in the bottom 3 in wRC+, OPS , isolated power, SLG, OBP and nearly everything else EXCEPT homers (9th) and RBI's (3rd)

RBI's are a team stat as the player has no control over the OBP ability of the hitters in front of him.


He's been pretty darn awful this year .

I 100% agree with 2 things. I do not understand WAR and compared to his peak Pujols is having a bad year.

[bravos4evr]

Originally Posted by bnorth

I 100% agree with 2 things. I do not understand WAR and compared to his peak Pujols is having a bad year.

it's easy to learn, just go to the fangraphs.com page and go read their glossary it explains these stats in detail.


they are just statistics, like all others, not perfect (mostly because defense is so hard to quantify but it's getting better every year) of course, but no stat is perfect, they are better than the old baseball card stats tho.