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WAR and how it relates(or doesn't) to the MVP case for Judge and Altuve

Discussion in 'Houston Astros' started by elrond, Nov 30, 2017.

  1. elrond

    elrond Member

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    Seems like Bill James recently wrote an article about WAR, and how even though it stand for wins above replacement, it doesn't really account for wins. Instead it is really about 'runs above replacement', and predicting possible future performance, rather than reflecting this past year performance.

    The way this relates to Judge/Altuve is that from a statistical perspective the Yankees and Astros had around the same overall WAR, but the Astros ended up with 10 more wins. The question then becomes whether or not these additional 10 wins should impact WAR or not (it currently does not). The argument from Bill James and some others is that Altuve was clearly the more valuable player due to his team having a lot more wins than the Yankees, and also performing much better in high leverage situations.

    Anyways, I found the following articles quite interesting regarding this topic, and am always happy to see any articles further affirming Altuve's status as best in baseball.

    Joe Posnanski's take:



    Bill James original article:
    https://www.billjamesonline.com/judge_and_altuve/
     
    #1 elrond, Nov 30, 2017
    don grahamleone likes this.
  2. Joe Joe

    Joe Joe Go Stros!
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    Bill James wants WAR tied to wins like win shares. WPA is probably something closer to what he wants than WAR, but WPA doesn't take into replacement value or how to split value between the pitcher and the defense. WAR tries to determine what a players value was towards winning without regard to his teammates performance. WAR just isn't the stat he wants.

    It would seem easy to create a team-specific WAR as all you have to do is use a team-specific run to win conversion rate instead of the league run to win conversion rate. The math would work out to be team specific-WAR for a player = WAR*(team wins-[48*games played/162])/team combined WAR.
     
    #2 Joe Joe, Nov 30, 2017
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