With all I've been hearing about Mike Trout's contract situation lately, along with the cost of a win, I wanted to know exactly how good of a barometer WAR is when translating to team success. Would replacing a replacement level player with Mike Trout, a 10 WAR player, turn a middling 80 win team into a 90 win contender? A 90 win contender into a 100 win juggernaut? Hell, for all the talent on the Angels, are they really a 68 win team without Mike Trout?
If a win is worth $5M, is Mike Trout worth $50M a season? And was Shane Victorino's (6.2 WAR) 2013 regular season worth $31M? And is Shane Victorino really only one win less valuable than Miguel Cabrera (7.2 WAR)?
And who is this replacement player? How bad is a team of 25 replacement players?
Using last season as a barometer, a "replacement team" winds up with a record of approximately 47-115.
I wanted to see if I could come up with a Pythag W-L-esque measurement of how a team's WAR correlates with their final results, so I did the following:
- Calculated each team's total WAR by adding the WAR of all position players (including offensive and defensive considerations) and the WAR of all pitchers.
- Determined that an average team gains about 20 wins from it's offense and roughly 13.7 wins from it's pitching. A replacement team should win 47.4 games... these three figures add up to 81 wins, a .500 team.
- Using pythag W-L records for all 30 teams, again the replacement team came out to 47.5 wins.
- The range replacement teams, using 1 team sample sizes, was 39.5 to 55.6. Using pythag W-L records, the range was 42.4 to 59.6 (St. Louis, seemed to be an outlier). Without St. Louis, the high end of the range dropped to 52.6
- Theoretically, adding a team's total WAR to 47.5 should produce a number in line with their actual and pythag win totals.
In the chart below:
Off.WAR - Total WAR generated by offensive and defensive plays (including those by pitchers).
Pit.WAR - Total WAR generated by pitching
Team WAR - Off. WAR + Pit. WAR
W - Actual 2013 Wins
W-WAR: Wins minus Team WAR (replacement team based only on the team in question, sample size of 1)
P - Pythag Wins
P - WAR: Pythag Wins minus Team WAR (pythag replacement team based only on the team in question, sample size of 1)
WAR + 47.5: How many wins a team should have produced based on their Team WAR
And below, the standings based on what a team "should have" won, based on WAR. Also included their actual and pythag W-L records:
For the most part, it remains true to what the standings actually were, but there are a few interesting things.
- The Yankees should have been a last place team.
- St. Louis under-performed their Pythag by four games, but over-performed their WAR by eight games. By WAR alone, they should have been the second wild card.
- Detroit under-perfomed significantly, while Cleveland over-performed modestly. The AL Central was close, but shouldn't have been.
- San Francisco had the worst pitching in baseball, based on WAR.
- The offense and defense combination put out by the Red Sox blew every other team away. The next closest team was the Dodgers, and they were 9.5 WAR behind.
- Overall, Detroit was the only team close to Boston in total WAR, but largely for different reasons. The Red Sox were very offense heavy, while the Tigers were more balanced, although heavier in pitching.
- Two of the three worst teams in baseball had pitching that was well above average, but their offense was absolutely putrid.
*WAR values are taken from baseball-reference.com - and again, when I say "Off. WAR", it's actually a combination of offensive and defensive WAR. Sorry if that is misleading.
If a win is worth $5M, is Mike Trout worth $50M a season? And was Shane Victorino's (6.2 WAR) 2013 regular season worth $31M? And is Shane Victorino really only one win less valuable than Miguel Cabrera (7.2 WAR)?
And who is this replacement player? How bad is a team of 25 replacement players?
Using last season as a barometer, a "replacement team" winds up with a record of approximately 47-115.
I wanted to see if I could come up with a Pythag W-L-esque measurement of how a team's WAR correlates with their final results, so I did the following:
- Calculated each team's total WAR by adding the WAR of all position players (including offensive and defensive considerations) and the WAR of all pitchers.
- Determined that an average team gains about 20 wins from it's offense and roughly 13.7 wins from it's pitching. A replacement team should win 47.4 games... these three figures add up to 81 wins, a .500 team.
- Using pythag W-L records for all 30 teams, again the replacement team came out to 47.5 wins.
- The range replacement teams, using 1 team sample sizes, was 39.5 to 55.6. Using pythag W-L records, the range was 42.4 to 59.6 (St. Louis, seemed to be an outlier). Without St. Louis, the high end of the range dropped to 52.6
- Theoretically, adding a team's total WAR to 47.5 should produce a number in line with their actual and pythag win totals.
In the chart below:
Off.WAR - Total WAR generated by offensive and defensive plays (including those by pitchers).
Pit.WAR - Total WAR generated by pitching
Team WAR - Off. WAR + Pit. WAR
W - Actual 2013 Wins
W-WAR: Wins minus Team WAR (replacement team based only on the team in question, sample size of 1)
P - Pythag Wins
P - WAR: Pythag Wins minus Team WAR (pythag replacement team based only on the team in question, sample size of 1)
WAR + 47.5: How many wins a team should have produced based on their Team WAR
And below, the standings based on what a team "should have" won, based on WAR. Also included their actual and pythag W-L records:
For the most part, it remains true to what the standings actually were, but there are a few interesting things.
- The Yankees should have been a last place team.
- St. Louis under-performed their Pythag by four games, but over-performed their WAR by eight games. By WAR alone, they should have been the second wild card.
- Detroit under-perfomed significantly, while Cleveland over-performed modestly. The AL Central was close, but shouldn't have been.
- San Francisco had the worst pitching in baseball, based on WAR.
- The offense and defense combination put out by the Red Sox blew every other team away. The next closest team was the Dodgers, and they were 9.5 WAR behind.
- Overall, Detroit was the only team close to Boston in total WAR, but largely for different reasons. The Red Sox were very offense heavy, while the Tigers were more balanced, although heavier in pitching.
- Two of the three worst teams in baseball had pitching that was well above average, but their offense was absolutely putrid.
*WAR values are taken from baseball-reference.com - and again, when I say "Off. WAR", it's actually a combination of offensive and defensive WAR. Sorry if that is misleading.