Suggestions for Career WAR Graphical Baselines

by Sky Kalkman on May 8, 2009 10:54 AM EDT

An astute reader (Nuss) asked for a little more context in the career wins above replacement graphs we post on this site. It's easy to compare the players on the graph to each other, but it might also be nice to compare them to the player pool as a whole. Does their career belong in the Hall of Fame discussion? Is a player an all-time great at his position? Did he follow the career path of a typical five-time All-Star or merely a league-average player? Those are all questions I think we could try to answer from one graph.

I have two ideas to add some context to the WAR graphs:

Add a few career trajectories in the background of the graph (or just with subtler colors) that show a variety of talent levels. These trajectories would be included on all graphs we post, in order to provide a consistent baseline. It would be nice if these trajectories were somewhat smooth or at least somewhat typical of a certain type of player.
Add and label a few horizontal lines for various levels of performance. For example, my personal scale of choice goes something like: 0 WAR is replacement level, 2 WAR is average, 4 WAR is borderline All-Star, 6 WAR is best among position, 8 WAR is strong MVP candidate, and 10 WAR is deserving of a book (or at least an e-book).

What do you think? What's the best way to add context? I'm leaning towards option one, as option two still needs some knowledge of how many seasons other players put up at each performance level. Feel free to toss out some suggestions of player careers to serve as baselines.

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Baselines

RE: 1 – This might not be a bad idea to use the trajectory of an average HOFer for each position. It wouldn’t be too hard, just time consuming, to compile all the number to run the averages WAR for each season (1,2,3 etc). Another option could be to compile the same numbers and find the min. for each season to compare a player to the current lowest standards. I wouldn’t want to add too many lines to clutter the plot.

RE: 2 – I think most of us can just keep this in mind when looking at the plots, but it wouldn’t hurt to have it on there I guess.

So, I guess I would prefer #1, but wouldn’t use a specific player as the baseline. There is already enough (justifiable) bashing of the borderliners that most posts would just end up bashing the players (and voters) more.

by JBrew on May 8, 2009 11:31 AM EDT reply actions

We could pick players that don't have divisive tendencies as the baselines.

Use players that everyone agrees on their career value. After all, we tend to show players for which everyone doesn’t agree in these graphs.

Beyond the Boxscore // Calling BJ Upton lazy is lazy.

by Sky Kalkman on May 8, 2009 2:02 PM EDT up reply actions

Average HOF since '55

(Note: Does anyone know how to change the location of the zero axis on editgrid?)

I set the cutoff for players starting after 1950. Therefore Aaron, Banks, Kaline, Killebrew, Mantle, Mathews, and Mays are included in the average but are missing some of their early seasons. The 25+ is all Rickey, all the time.

The MAX line is set by Mantle (1-3), Mays (4-11), Aaron (12-19) and Rickey (20+).

The MIN line is set primarily by Mazeroski (1-8, 10-12, 15), Rice (9, 13, 16) and Banks (13-15, 17) with several others at the end.

Data can be found here.

by JBrew on May 8, 2009 4:10 PM EDT up reply actions 2 recs

That's really cool and not an approach I would have thought of.

Beyond the Boxscore // Calling BJ Upton lazy is lazy.

by Sky Kalkman on May 8, 2009 4:27 PM EDT up reply actions

Its what I had in mind in my comment above,

just decided to do it myself since I had time.

The average line is for all intents and purposes linear and could be estimated as = 8 -.4x

by JBrew on May 8, 2009 4:42 PM EDT up reply actions

Did you grab the data by hand?

And if someone’s motivated, how about looking at 25th and 75th percentiles, or other relevant percentiles?

Beyond the Boxscore // Calling BJ Upton lazy is lazy.

by Sky Kalkman on May 8, 2009 4:31 PM EDT up reply actions

by erik on May 8, 2009 6:15 PM EDT up reply actions

Paste Special

A sabermetrician best friend.

by Jeff Zimmerman on May 8, 2009 6:20 PM EDT up reply actions

I like number 1

For the top line line use Byleven(sp?) or Raines and for the bottom line use Jim Rice or Jack Morris. Should continue to point out who should or shouldn’t be in the HOF.

by Jeff Zimmerman on May 8, 2009 11:55 AM EDT reply actions