Tuesday, February 11, 2025

WAR, What Is It Good for: Crossing the Yaz Chasm

With Spring Training coming soon, I thought I would touch on a topic that will occupy the minds of some Giants fans:  Mike Yastrzemski.

A frequent complaint that I saw all through the 2024 season was complaints about playing, and even rostering, Mike Yastrzemski.  Many today still think little of him and his accomplishments as a Giants player.  In this post, I thought I would discuss what I know about WAR's foundations, and what that means about players like Yaz who produce 1.5-2.5 WAR per season.

ogc thoughts

WAR is a concept that is being used to understand and measure the value of a player, using runs and wins as metrics for understanding each player's value, where generally 9-10 additional runs equals a win, depending on the run environment for that season (i.e. how the ball plays, especially if the MLB juiced or deadened the ball).

WAR:  What Is It?

First, let's go over what WAR is.  This is probably as authoritative as it comes from the MLB, and was likely written or approved by Tom Tango, who has been a major influence in the creation of the metric and who is working for the MLB in an advisory capacity at this time. It is a pretty barebones description.  

Here are the two major publicly available calculations and their definitions, Fangraphs and Baseball-Reference  (or FG and BR) and they have their nuances but have worked together to align their methodology (general framework and, in particular, the replacement level, .294 winning percentage) to be more similar, while still using their own metrics and methods, once you get into the details.  

I'm no expert in WAR, so apologies if I'm off somewhere (and please let me know), but I will attempt to do a layperson explanation for those who are still lost, in hopes of illuminating what WAR is trying to do, and others can skip to the section on Yaz.

Here goes nothing!  

Replacement Level

Let's start with what WAR means:  Wins Above Replacement Level.  

So that begs the question: What exactly does replacement level mean?

Well, it's hard to explain, but one way I think most fans would understand is this: there's a saying in baseball, that a team will win at least 54 games and lose at least 54 games, and thus it is the other 54 games that determines how a team's season will go.  So, one could say that a team of replacement level players would win 54 games (which is a winning percentage of .333), and every player above replacement level would add to the team total.

WAR stands for Wins Above Replacement level, and each methodology has their logic for what replacement level they want to represent. With the idea being that a replacement level player is worth 0 WAR, and a team of replacement level players will add 0 WAR to the base winning percentage that the methodology uses.  Also, the idea is to make 2.0 WAR be what an average player would produce.

In the above saying, one could use the 54 wins as the replacement level, which is a winning percentage of 54/162 = .333, which would be the expected winning percentage of a team rostered with all replacement level players (which one could say are the AAAA, or Quad-A players, that are good enough to get into the majors but not enough to stick), all of whom add 0 WAR to the team.  

As you may recall from above, FG and BR agreed to use .294 winning percentage (which works out to roughly 48 wins). I am guessing, but since the FG WAR website above states that "There are currently 1,000 WAR per season based on a replacement level of a .294 winning percentage. Of those 1,000, 570 WAR are allocated to position players and 430 WAR are allocated to pitchers," my guess is that they wanted to have 1,000 WAR (or Wins) to allocate to hitters and pitchers, and they have split that 57% position players (since they hit and provide some defense, and thus provide more than 50%) and 43% pitchers.  

Average Player:  Not!

Now, why does this methodology use replacement level as a concept?  One could have used averages instead of replacement level, as the methodology for measuring a player's worth.  However, when using an average level methodology, an average player does not add to a team's winning season, as average usually is considered zero in systems measuring worth by average (an average player would not change the average win for a team, in this scenario).  

Moreover, this would measure most (over 50%) of the players as being worth 0 wins or negative wins.  So you can see how players would not support a measurement system like this one.  And the thing is, an average baseball player is still very valuable in baseball, they are better than more than half the major league players when you consider playing time as part of the value of a player capable of being average over a full MLB season.  

Let's look at some stats on this.

In the 2024 season, there were 651 position players with at least 1 PA.  Only 133 of them (20.4%) had 2.0 fWAR or higher (170 or 26.1% are 1.5+ fWAR, as many consider the range of 1.5-2.5 WAR to be average).  It was worse for pitchers, where many had pitched in relief.  Only 76 out of 840 (9.0%) had 2.0 fWAR or higher (114 or 13.5% had 1.5+ fWAR).  Being average puts players in the upper 20-25% (for position players) and 10-15% (for pitchers) among their brethren.  So there is a lot of value out of being a player who can produce enough and play enough games to actually produce 2.0 fWAR, which is what is calibrated for what an average player would produce in a full season.

Thus, an average player, as defined by WAR methodology, is actually a good (if not very good)  player in the grand scheme of baseball.

Yaz isn't Great, But He's Not Disposable as Many Think

Yaz had 1.6 fWAR in 2024, ranking 163rd out of 651 position players.  With 30 teams, that would place him just outside of the Top 5 position players (top 150; 150th had 1.8 fWAR).  So he's a roughly average player, as shown by his 1.6 fWAR, as well as being roughly 6th best on an average roster, out of 13 position players on a roster.  So, he's not great, but as shown here, even average level players are a lot better than most of the other players (in this case, he has more fWAR than 488 position players).  

And there are some nuances I would like to point out. WAR as a methodology is still in its infancy.  In particular, measuring a player's defensive value is still very nascent.  Another is that while Fangraphs tries to remove luck out of fWAR, and have the value represent what the player would have done in a neutral and luck free situation (context, league, park), Baseball-Reference tries to measure what that player actually produced in a season, acknowledging that there are assumptions that goes into creating that neutral and luck free scenario, which might not capture what he actually produced. 

They also use different defensive measurements, with BR using DRS (Defensive Runs Saved, which was developed by Sports Info Solutions) and FG using OOA (Outs Above Average, which was developed by MLBLAM, which publishes the Baseball Savant data, and a huge difference is it includes catcher’s framing defensive value, which BR does not).

You can see the differences for Yaz.  Yastrzemski has 14.3 bWAR vs. 11.3 fWAR.  By season:

  • 2019:  2.6 bWAR vs. 2.5 fWAR
  • 2020:  2.5 bWAR vs. 1.9 fWAR
  • 2021:  2.7 bWAR vs. 2.3 fWAR
  • 2022:  2.0 bWAR vs. 1.5 fWAR
  • 2023:  2.4 bWAR vs. 1.6 fWAR
  • 2024:  2.1 bWAR vs. 1.6 fWAR

I would note here that 2020 was not a full season, so this represents 5.37 seasons, which works out to 2.66 bWAR and 2.10 fWAR per season on average.  So, based on 2.0 being average, Yaz has been a slightly above (2.10) to above (2.66) average position baseball player during his six seasons with the Giants.  

Best Ability is Availability

And over the period of 2019-2024, Yaz's 11.3 fWAR is 78th out of 1,778 players.  He’s produced more WAR than over 95% of players during those six seasons. Though that is overstating his production, because better players ended or started their careers in the middle of that stretch, but ended with less total, it is still indicative of his standing among all MLB ballplayers. He might get injured regularly, but he played enough to produce plenty of wins. 

He's not disposable at all, more like indispensible.  To see it from another perspective, from my study of draft picks, I defined a good player as one who has produced 18.0+ bWAR over their career, which is 6 seasons of 3.0 WAR (the player was above average before becoming a free agent) or 9 seasons of 2.0 WAR (capturing an average, ie good, player, who has a long period of playing). And looking at the players just above vs just below, that seemed like a good threshold. 

And Yaz is at 14.3 bWAR, only two average seasons away from reaching that standard.  He has been a very useful player (which I've defined as players from 9.0 bWAR to 17.9 bWAR) thus far. And he has been consistently good so far, and Bill James used to project players by 1.5 times their last season, so he'll probably be close, as that adds 3.2 bWAR, getting him to 17.5 bWAR.

Yaz is a Useful Player For Any Team 

He’s not exciting, and he has flaws, but fans forget that useful players like him are indispensable for any team trying to be competitive.  Replacement level is roughly 48 wins, thus a team needs to have enough players who can contribute 33 wins to get to 81 wins, and 42 wins to get to 90 wins, which should be enough to either win your division or win a wild card spot.  That’s quite a hill to climb, and as we saw above, there’s only 170 players with at least 1.5 fWAR, which works out to an average of about 6 average or above position players on each team.  

Let’s say you have an average team. With 9 starting position players and 5 starting pitchers, plus a closer, and at 2 WAR for each of them, that’s 30 wins, which means you need another 3 wins from bench players and relief pitchers for an average team to reach .500, or to get that from a couple of good player who produces 3.5 WAR per season.  To get another 9 wins, you need to get to 5-6 good players, along with average elsewhere, to get to 90 wins. 

See how high a mountain it is to climb from replacement level to just .500? You need every starter to provide average WAR. Thus having a Yaz in the lineup means you have one less starting position to worry about when you are trying to be playoff competitive.


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