Return of the Revenge of the 3WAR

“Business business business, numbers.”

Every so often I like to pull up the three different publicly-available Wins Above Replacement (WAR) metrics to see how they compare. Fangraphs, Baseball Prospectus, and Baseball Reference all measure WAR differently. Taking the time to see how they differ can be an instructive exercise as taking an average of the three for each player might [citation need] offer a more accurate assessment of how much value they contributed to a team.

On the field, at least. Intangibles are strange forbidden fruits.

I’ve called it 3WAR in the past. Other writers have also done versions of this exercise and so I don’t pretend that it is particularly new or groundbreaking, but physically sitting and cataloguing data forces me to contend with them and think it through. This is part of what I learned doing the Around the Corner prospect podcast with Brian. If I sat and typed it all out every couple of weeks then I ended up having a much better grip of how players were performing, what their baseline was, and what kind of trends tended to crop up in their game.

It’s neat. It wasn’t something I expected to discover in the course of podcasting, but there it is.

And there it is. I have listed them in order of FanGraphs WAR (fWAR) because that’s how I started to do it and I’m too lazy to reorder the columns. You will notice that Plate Appearances (PA) and Innings Pitched (IP) are listed for the relevant category of ballplayer. Yes, Austin Hedges appears in both lists.

This allows us to also do a quick-and-dirty analysis of how effective each player was at generating value per Plate Appearance or Innings Pitched. It is always worth keeping in mind how much someone played when reviewing their stats.

A couple of interesting finds: the three formulae that calculate WAR for pitchers cannot agree on Emmanuel Clase and Hunter Gaddis. The numbers suggest that while both managed to limit the number of runs scored against them this season they might not have deserved to dodge danger as often as they did. Regardless, Clase leads the pack on a per-inning value basis outside of Shane Bieber and his two magnificent starts.

Carlos Carrasco and Gavin Williams may feel a little heartened to know that their performances may not have been as grim as statlines indicated. The same goes for Will Brennan and Austin Hedges who seem to receive a nice boost from Baseball Prospectus’s evaluation of their defense.

Nothing in this year’s numbers seem particularly shocking or revelatory. Except, maybe, how weird the pitching situation in Cleveland became. Only two starters pitched more than 150 innings: Tanner Bibee and Ben Lively. Six pitchers made at least sixteen starts, two more (Matthew Boyd and Joey Cantillo) made eight, and fourteen total made at least one start depending on how you want to count openers.

That’s all for now, folks. Thank you again for stopping by to read this article and may the rest of your day be free and easy.