BaseballTwit: Blog posts and Twitter tweets about baseball stats and history by Adam Darowski (more)
In 2010, Alex Rodrguez will leapfrog Cap Anson to become the 20th-ranked position player all time in Wins Above Replacement. He will also be the 20th position player to reach 100 WAR.
Comparatively, just six pitchers have reached 100 WAR (and among those, only Roger Clemens and Tom Seaver were active after 1930.
Here is a list of the active WAR leaders (sifted from Sean Smith’s WAR database). How many future Hall of Famers do you see? (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…)
One of many observations I’ve made while perusing Sean Smith’s WAR data at BaseballProjection.com is that catchers don’t rank all that high. Below is the table of catchers with 30 or more career WAR, along with their WAR rank among all hitters in history, start/end years, and whether or not they’re in the Hall of Fame or Hall of Merit. (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…)