A Glimpse into Pitcher WAR

by jmaciel on Jan 5, 2011 12:10 AM EST

Since this is so timely (we find out the results at 2 PM ET!), I'm going to jump in while the rest of you are hopefully sleeping and bump this to the front page. Awesome work here by jmaciel! — Adam

Happy New Year!

There has been a lot of hubbub by Adam Darowski here on Hall of Fame Wins Above Replacement, and how to better get an idea of peak value and career value for people who weight them differently. You can see his work here and here (it is awesome and interactive). Personally I believe a lot in the power of the eye and what it sees when it takes a look. Design a graphic using your brain, and let your eyes soak it in and let your gut come to a conclusion about the data.

While I love Adam's graphs, I don't know if "Weighted WAR" is the way to go -- it is quite arbitrary, and doesn't really measure peak performance as much as it measures performance over a certain level. A player who has an incredible 10 WAR season at age 22 and a 10 WAR season at age 32 will look like they have the same peak (8 WAR above MVP) as a player who has 7 WAR from 10 straight seasons. So I thought to myself, "How can we make that distinction?"

I diddled with a lot of data, and I came up with this:

(Click for a larger version)

The graph includes all the players in the top 50 for career pitching WAR, as well as any player in either the Hall of Fame or the Hall of Merit. Let your eyes come to your own conclusions, but here is what I noticed:

Early careers were a lot shorter than they were later on
The best pitchers jump right out -- Young, Nichols, Johnson
Pitchers in the modern era are starting their careers a lot later, and ending them earlier than they did in the Expansion Era

If you have any suggestions, improvements, etc., let me know. I will be doing a version for batters on FanGraphs in the near future. References:

Data collected from Baseball Reference via Baseball Projection
Raw Data in a Google Spreadsheet

Created using Excel for initial formatting, and Adobe Illustrator for prettying up. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial License.

Originally posted at my blog Henkakyuu

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Gosh, this is nice.

Reminds me a lot of the great work over at Flip Flop Fly Ball. Really allows you to visualize peak quite well.

That’s the key difference between this and wWAR though. With this visual, you need to look at it as a whole and come up with who you think had the best peak. wWAR is a calculation that attempts to RANK players according to this, so it needs to be more mathematical than visual. It’s part of a larger project that I’m quite excited about.

But different ways to look at things are always great to see, and this one really does it well.

Great work!

On Twitter: @baseballtwit

by adarowski on Jan 5, 2011 7:06 AM EST reply actions

It's a variant on a Heat Map

I am perfectly happy with different purposes for each graph, but what makes me less than satisfied by wWAR is the method. Take Charley Radbourn’s 1910 season. He had 19.8 bWAR. When we use your formula, that’s 19.8 + 16.8 + 13.8 = 50.4 wWAR. That is almost as much as Al Leither (51.8 wWAR) had over his entire career. While I think that this is an extreme case, the idea that a player with a 12 WAR season (12 + 9 + 6 = 27 wWAR) should count as much as 3 seasons of 6 WAR doesn’t sit well with me. 3 MVP seasons vs. a monster season? Are we in any way near sure that they are as valuable or should be?

I know that my graph makes you make your own judgments, and that there is no rank. That is intentional. I think that we have an idea in our mind about what makes a great player. And I think that with a chart that shows how players match up, we have a good chance of using our eyes to pick out players we think meet the mark, without having to rank them. The fact that I can see the greatest pitchers jump out from that chart makes me happy, and the fact that it makes me ponder how many more people would have called Pedro the second coming of Koufax if he had ended his career at the age of 30.

Now I just need to learn how to make it in JQuery!

My Work: Henkakyuu

by jmaciel on Jan 5, 2011 9:04 AM EST up reply actions

I think the problem is the 19 rWAR.

I mean, it’s a totally different game now. Accounting for era, however you want to do it, needs to be a separate issue — maybe an adjustment you apply before an adjustment like wWAR.

The 12 WAR vs 6 WAR question is a good one. Am I more impressed by 12/0/0 WAR or 6/6/6 WAR? I’d probably lean 6/6/6, but it’s actually kind of close. Ignoring our doubt whether the 12 WAR seasons was “for real” (huge fielding number, for example), that’s absolutely monstrous. How many of those seasons have there ever been? Oone answer: 20 non-pitcher seasons > 11.5 rWAR, ignoring possible mid-season team-switches. On the other hand, there have been 1400 > 5.5 rWAR.

Is one out of 20 or three out of 1400 more impressive? I’d lean the former, but it’s at least somewhat personal preference.

(Small quibble: people have won MVP’s with 6 WAR — heck, with 2 WAR — but the best few players in a league usually have at least 8 WAR.)

Beyond the Box Score | Facebook | @Sky_Kalkman

by Sky Kalkman on Jan 5, 2011 9:23 AM EST up reply actions

Tango talks about it a lot on his blog

But more in the context of valuing — are you willing to pay more for a 12 WAR and a 0 WAR player than for two 6 WAR players?

For the Hall of Fame though, I think the problem is that we want to look at so many things at once, and summing it up in a number is going to gloss over a lot of the information we care about. I’m not sure that it could be summed up as a single rank without running into trouble without Tango suggests doing (give categories and let each voter assign their own weights and judge each player based on those weights). And if we do it that way, we’re just back to eyeballing the results until they “feel” right.

This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t try, or that it’s a lost cause, I just like to show the data in a way that may make people understand the data better and help them make a more informed choice.

(Ideally, I’d add a border or a glow around each season that got a major award like a Cy Young Award or an MVP award, and maybe for good postseason performance or all-star game selection, but I just got too lazy trying to gather all that data myself)

My Work: Henkakyuu

by jmaciel on Jan 5, 2011 9:57 AM EST up reply actions

See!

This just shows how much of a travesty it is that Jim McCormick and Tony Mullane are not in the Hall of Fame. Sigh…19th century players get no respect.

by Chris St. John on Jan 5, 2011 8:59 AM EST reply actions

The thing about the 19th century players...

…is that a lot of them also have batting that you have to take into account. And I haven’t done that at all. I would also be a little bit more cautious about judging their true worth since replacement level gets a lot trickier going back that far (especially with pitchers).

My Work: Henkakyuu

by jmaciel on Jan 5, 2011 9:59 AM EST up reply actions