Like the Edwin Starr song brought back to life by Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker in Rush Hour – What is WAR good for? Why do many baseball statisticians hold this number as the holy grail when comparing baseball players. It may not be a statistic that yields the best prediction for fantasy baseball purposes – but the question remains, What is WAR?
Wins Above Replacement (WAR) is a summarization of a baseball player’s total contribution to their team in one statistic. WAR translates replacement value and shows the importance of one player in terms of wins for a specific player. Basically, it answers how many wins that player contributed to his team’s win total above and beyond what they would have gotten from a “replacement” player or someone they could have picked up off the wire for pennies on the dollar. WAR basically accumulates specifics from other advanced stats: like FIP, UZR and wOBA – all of which basically expressing a player’s contributions to the team in terms of runs prevented or runs added. After calculating the run measures, a positional adjustment is added in to account for the relative importance of different positions and a league adjustment to account for the relative strength of the American League — which has a higher run expectancy thanks to the DH, higher salaries and currently a greater concentration of talent.
For a position player, you then add their wRAA, UZR, positional adjustment, and replacement adjustment to get their Runs Above Replacement. Then you scale all those contributions to be expressed in terms of total team wins. The usual scale is that 10 runs is equal to one team win. So WAR is equal to RAR divided by 10.
Pretty confusing stuff right?!? All in all – it’s vital in comparing a player who is all smoke and mirrors to a guy who grinds it out day after day, truly helping a team accumulate wins throughout the season. Below is a chart that will blow your mind, which was provided via baseball-reference.com – As a basis of comparison: 0 – Replacement Level, 1-2 – Bench Player, 3-4 – Starter, 5-6 – All-Star, 7-8 MVP Status, 9-Beyond – Legendary … And Yes – Mike Trout had a legendary type season in 2012.