Hey, where have I been?
Oddly, I mentioned it on my personal blog, but I didn’t mention it here—I’m now writing for Beyond the Box Score!
For quite a while now, Beyond the Box Score has been my favorite baseball blog. They’ve always had a good mix of future projection and historical analysis. I like to focus on historical analysis, so that’s mostly what I’ll be doing. As expected, I’ll be writing quite a bit about Wins Above Replacement (WAR), Wins Above Excellence (WAE), and Wins Above MVP Level (WAM).
Wait, what’s that last one? (more…)
Last time, I introduced a list of catchers with 30+ career WAR and promised future analysis. Today I want to talk about two methods to analyze them that goes beyond WAR—WAR per 600 plate appearances and my new toy, Wins Above Excellence. (more…)
In addition to Wins Above Replacement (WAR), I’ve started using Wins Above Excellence (WAE) to help analyze career value. So far, I’ve applied WAE to Non-Hall of Fame third baseman. But you know I couldn’t go long without applying it to relief pitchers!
When Sean Smith introduced WAE, he added up any WAR above 3.0. In my third base analysis, I did 3.0, 4.0, and 6.0 to get a sense of both “excellence” and “awesomeness”. Relievers simply don’t pile up high-WAR seasons like hitters, so I’ve included columns for 2.0, 3.0, and 4.0. It is pretty rare for a reliever to pick up over 4.0 WAR in a season (unless you’re Mariano Rivera). (more…)
I do love reading articles about the biggest Hall of Fame snubs. Joe Posnanski recently wrote a “Snubs” article featuring players in the Hall of Merit who aren’t in the Hall of Fame. Wait, what’s the Hall of Merit? The Hall of Merit is curated by Baseball Think Factory. The description:
What is the Baseball Hall of Merit? A pantheon conceived of by our founder and commissioner Joe Dimino as an alternative to the Baseball Hall of Fame located in Cooperstown. Our purpose is to identify the best players in baseball history and thereby identify the omissions and errors that can be found in the other venerable institution.
Like catchers and relief pitchers, I’ve thought a lot about why third basemen trail behind others in terms of Hall of Fame population. Posnanski’s article actually mentions how third base is the one position that has the most Hall of Merit members not in the “real” Hall of Fame. What gives?
Armed with Wins Above Replacement and Wins Above Excellence as my tools, let’s take a look! (more…)
I think I’ve made it clear that I love Wins Above Replacement (WAR). I do have a couple of issues with it, though. One issue is that, like other counting stats, WAR makes it hard to distinguish between the truly elite players and the “compilers” (guys who hang around forever and accumulate impressive career totals through consistently solid—but not exceptional—seasons).
Don’t get me wrong—I have a strong affection for “compilers”. I believe many of them do belong in the Hall of Fame. Longevity is a wonderful thing. But let’s look at Harold Baines. He accumulated 37.0 WAR in his career—not a Hall of Fame number per se, but still a very good total. Baines played for 22 seasons and was solid for most of them. But he had no distinguishable peak and built that total despite never reaching 4.0 WAR in a single season. Albert Belle, on the other hand, accumulated 37.1 career WAR. He had five seasons that cleared 4.0 and would be considered a demonstration of excellence—7.4, 6.6, 6.0, 4.9, and 4.7 WAR. Belle, of course, didn’t last nearly as long as Baines, retiring after 12 seasons. Baines and Belle provided similar value over their career, but Baines did it with sustained performance and Belle did it with a shorter peak of excellence many players can’t reach. Of course, on the other hand Belle couldn’t stay on the field like Baines could. (more…)