WAR, What is it Good For?

The statistics chosen leave a lot to be desired. The current system assumes that a hitter can only be valuable if he has a high OBP and hits many home runs, and that a pitcher must accumulate a lot of wins and strikeouts, and have a good ERA. The study of analyzing baseball statistics – sabermetrics and the associated sabermetricians who analyze the data – has been developing more progressive metrics every year as an on-going process to develop correct notions in the art of properly critiquing baseball. (Halverson & Halverson, 2008) Tango et al. have developed a metric called Fielding-Independent ERA (FIP) that takes team defense, the stadium’s park design and a constant for the league into account along with the pitcher’s ERA to determine how many earned runs are purely the pitcher’s faults. When discussing pitchers in different leagues and on different teams, it is no longer acceptable to use their ERA – as that measurement has been deemed obsolete by the improved FIP. As an anecdote, the 2009 American League Cy Young winner, Zack Greinke, was quoted after winning the award: “That’s pretty much how I pitch, to try to keep my FIP as low as possible.” (New York Times, 11/18/2009) By correcting for the number of innings pitched, it will be possible to show a more complete picture of value for pitchers. Hitters have a similar stat called Weighted Runs Created (wRC) that involves using a player’s OBP to show many runs that player produced with his bat. By breaking down traditional measurements and developing them into more sophisticated metrics, it is possible to bridge the gap between conservative and progressive thought in Major League Baseball and bring change to the currently antiquated free agency system.
The league may still argue that the statistics currently used are actually proper ways of analyzing players and may reject the proposed system of using more complicated sabermetrics such as FIP and wRC to determine the production of each player. However, there is another equation that is more widely discussed in mainstream sports coverage media than the lesser known FIP and wRC. That equation is known as Wins Above Replacement, or WAR. (Hakes & Turner 2009) WAR is a metric developed by Baseball Prospectus that essentially computes the number of runs a player creates with his bat and saves with his glove, and then determines how many wins that player is worth to his team above a replacement-level player (a replacement player is set to zero wins). Among the potential free agents, there are 26 Type A's, 52 Type B's, and 102 unranked. Table #2 shows the WAR values for the top twenty-six of the three types of free agents (A, B, unclassified) available this offseason.

Table 2.

Free Agent Class Average Wins Above Replacement (WAR)
Type A (top quintile) 4.6
Type B (top half of second quintile) 4.9
Type B (bottom half of 2nd quintile) 1.5
Unclassified (bottom 60%) 2.9


The ubiquitous nature of the WAR values depicts the ineffectiveness of the current MLB free agent system to determine the true value of players. To have such a system that ranks players based on obsolete, archaic and irrelevant stats shows how disorganized MLB leadership is. More than this, these facts show how the MLBPA is actively (though not intentionally) preventing its players from obtaining the contracts that they deserve.