Wins above replacement (WAR) is the wild wild west of unstandardized baseball stats. With the 2014 MLB playoffs about a month away, I’ve started looking at some surprises in the season’s WAR rankings.
I ran some standard calculations in Ben Baumer’s openWAR package, and among the surprises were the names on the list of “replacement players.” In WAR calculations, replacement players are those designated as standard MLB players, the run-of-the-mill guys who may be up and down from the minors. Here are a few from 2014 using openWAR’s runs above average (RAA). If you want to see the full list you can download it here.
Note: As a sanity check I cross-referenced these results with Fangraphs and Baseball Reference’s fWAR and rWAR rankings.
5. Derek Jeter
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RAA Offense: -11.74
RAA Fielding: -6.38
RAA Base running: -.05
WAR: 0.20
I hope I don’t get any hate mail from Yankees fans here but the numbers don’t lie. While Jeter has had an amazing career, 2014 just wasn’t one of those years. As of September 8, Jeter was hitting a line of .260/.308/.311 and a barley serviceable .976 fielding percentage, making Mr. Jeter about the same level as a guy the Yanks just called up from AAA. Now that he’s overtaken Honus Wagner in the all-time hits category, maybe he can retire gracefully.
4. Adam Dunn
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RAA Offense: 3.27
RAA Fielding: 1.45
RAA Base running: -4.91
WAR: 2.21
Dunn has never hit for over a .300 batting average in his career but his power numbers are usually through the roof. It’s not odd for Dunn to turn in a SLG of .500+ and wOBA near .400. This year however, Dunn has a .394 SLG and .314 wOBA, with the usually horrible BA; his defense and base running don’t do him many favors either.
3. Torii Hunter
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RAA Offense: -5.94
RAA Fielding: -2.50
RAA Base running: -1.26
WAR: 1.20
Hunter batting average has enjoyed playing for the high-octane Detroit Tigers offense in the past two season. As of September 9 his batting line looked pretty good, .279/.315/.432. Apparently after 14 MLB seasons, Hunter has lost a step in both fielding and base running, dragging his overall WAR rating down to replacement level.
2. David Ortiz
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RAA Offense: 23.96
RAA Fielding: -0.15
RAA Base running: -5.14
WAR: 4.61
I’ve already talked about Jeter so I figured I’d throw one of the Red Socks on the list. Ortiz is a little surprising just because his offence is usually dominant. In the stats above you can see his runs above average (offense) is still very high and his SLG is, as of today, still above .500, but like Hunter and Dunn, Ortiz’s fielding and base running let him down. Note his WAR rating is still a 4.61, which moves farther away from a true replacement player.
1. Jason Werth
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RAA Offense: 29.95
RAA Fielding: -0.54
RAA Base running: 4.91
WAR: 5.30
Werth was the biggest surprise for me. He’s not the best player in the league but he’s always been fairly consistent with the bat and on the base pads. Note, his WAR rating is 5.3, which is pretty borderline as a replacement player but he still makes the list with a batting line of .285/.380/.450 and a fielding percentage of .978. Also an interesting note, Werth’s runs above average (offense) is a tick higher than Ortiz’s.
Where the x-axis represents playing time, the y-axis represents offensive runs above average. The pink dots are replacement level players and the blue are MLB level players. All of our players here are in that pink range.
You can generate this graph in openWAR with a simple command:
plot(dataframe)
