How the heck did Tommy Edman earn 6.2 bWAR?

[An Old Friend]

There is more nuance to the game of baseball than can be calculated by these sabermetrics stats. The top bWAR on the 1982 Cardinals:

Keith Hernandez (1B): 6.5

That's a world series championship team. Which of those players is not better than Edman in 2025?

1982 K. Hernandez
94 RBI's
.299 .397 .413 .810
Gold Glove (G.O.A.T. defensively at 1st base!)
MVP voting #17
4.6 bWAR

2022 T. Edman
57 RBI
32 SB's
.265 .324 .400 .725
6.2 bWAR

ON NO PLANET was 2022 T. Edman a superior player to 1982 K. Hernandez yet he's got +1.6 more bWAR?

Exactly.

I'm an f/bWAR fan, have been since they were first introduced.

But sometimes you just have to say..."H E L L NO"!

It’s Wins Above Replacement.

There were 26 teams in 1982
There are 30 teams today… 130 more players in the league. More dilution means the replacement level player today isn’t as strong as the replacement level players 4 decades ago comparatively

But go on with your rants.

I'd add - since the word "subjective" has been discussed elsewhere in this thread - getting yourself tied to the idea that someone (Hernanadez) is "the G.O.A.T" defensively and, therefore, many other things cannot possibly be true is highly subjective reasoning. That's not to say he wasn't an exceptional defensive 1B, but it leads to a conceptual overvaluing of how valuable his defense probably was.

To another example - enough people who should have known better awarded Derek Jeter 5 Gold Gloves even though he had a positive UZR/150 and DRS in only one (2009) of his 13 seasons.

It’s funny that some of these people are so dismissive of the value of Heyward or Edman’s defense, but nostalgia allows them to extol the value of the defense from the players of yesteryear

[mattmitchl44]

Literally all those other stats have flaws too...

Really? Over the course of a full season, what flaw is there in BA? Give me 5 guys on the same team who hit .290+ over 150 games in a season and you'll have a good team. It's a factual stat, that has no debate.

Likewise ERA. If your team ERA is in the low 3s, youre going to win more than you lose. How is it flawed?

WAR on the other hand? Let's imagine how many wins this player results in vs if he didnt play. How is that even quantified without knowing what the "replacement " player did?

Seriously? Batting average treats all hits as equal. A single counts the same as a home run in batting average. A .290 pure singles hitter is no where near as valuable as a well rounded slugger (like vintage Pujols) who hits .290.

ERA is literally EARNED run average. A run being deemed earned is completely subjective on the official scoring on errors. Plus, a pitcher with a better defense behind them will be default have a lower ERA than a pitcher on another team with a (bleep) defense (all else being equal).

You arguing ERA isn't flawed is mind blogging.

Batting Avg>>>>hits/ab’s. Very simple equation. You now exactly how often a players hits the ball safely.
WAR>>>Start with fantasy AAA player baseline>>>>adjust for position>>>>adjust for Park>>>>compare against all other at position>>>gives you a 2 digit number with decimal>>>
So by viewing that number how do you know if the player has Power, hits for avg, great on D, runs bases well??? It doesn’t tell you anything. You need to go back to the basic stats for any detail

1. Hits/ABs - where hits are subjectively determined by the official scorer on whether the fielder should have converted into an out or not.
2. Everything you said about WAR was correct. However, it doesn't make the point you think you're making. WAR is like any other stat. It should be used in conjunction with other stats. Just like BA, OBP, SB, Errors, etc. by themselves in a vacuum doesn't tell you the whole story on a player.

Yes it's meant to take everything and boil it down to one number of value. And it does a reasonably good job. If you want to argue it overrates defense, that's fine. I agree with you. But overall, it pretty accurately reflects/differentiates who is replacement level (< 1), solid regular (1.5-3), all star level (4-5), and superstar (6+). Which is it's goal.

Yeah you can find some oddball outliers like a Tommy Edman or Jason Heyward every now and then. But it's not coincidence that the year end WAR leaders also dominate the MVP and CY leaderboards.

How many player hits are determined by the official scorer over the course of the season. And those that are fall under MLB rules
Point out the MLB rule to determine Fantasy AAA player used as the baseline……MLB rule for positional adjustment….etc
And as I’ve stated many times in this thread you need to look at the standard stats anyway to figure out what the WAR# represents…..so why not just begin there?

You can begin, end, or stop off in the middle wherever you want - no one is arguing against looking at more reliable information. But WAR values are part of that reliable information, along with all of the stats you prefer.

I've noted before - WAR is a GM-level statistic, a useful summary of how many more "wins" a player might bring if acquired, and therefore how much money the GM might want to offer to spend on that player.

But WAR isn't going to tell a manager how to use a particular player - what position they should play, where they should hit in the order, etc. The manager has to look at other information to decide that.

Do you think that number correlates to actual WINS? Bob Gibson in ‘68 had 13 SHO, now I don’t know anything more vital and specifically related to a SP and the game than the Pitcher throwing a SHO that would determine the WIN for his team. And he achieved a 11.2WAR. He was 22-9 1.12 ERA for the year.
In those 13 games there was no way the other could win because they didn’t score specifically because of him……

Pujols
‘09
.327, .443, .658, .1.101 , 189OPS+, 47HR, 135RBI, 374TB
9.7WAR
Is there anyone here who thinks AP playing 160games was only responsible for not even 10wins?

Pujols led MLB with that bWAR in 2009. Is that a problem?

“For instance, if a team has 80 wins, substituting a 5.0 WAR player for a replacement-level player theoretically brings the team to 85 wins,
as explained by Baseball Reference”

Does anyone think that with AP stats in his MVP year playing 160g that the difference if the Cards were an 80win team playing a slug “Replacement Player” vs Albert Pujols was only 89-90wins? Accounting for his 9.7WAR. This at it’s core is a ridiculous estimation and is exactly what WAR is declaring.

Anyone want to rationalize this?

What needs to be rationalized? 10 wins is a huge number. It is just about as big a number as you'll see. Barry Bonds had a 12.7 fWAR one year, Ruth had a 14.7 fWAR in 1923 - not sure if there has ever been a higher season. Ohtani might be able to go higher because he's a unicorn.

But anything over ~10 is really, really rare and 9.7 is well representative of Pujols' season. As great as Pujols' season was, he only took like ~1/9th of the teams PAs, threw 0 IP, and only fielded a small fraction of the balls on defense - so it's hard to affect the season outcome by more than ~10 wins.

The only way to "prove" what you are asking is to throw it in a simulation (like OOTP Baseball or something) and replace Pujols with a replacement level player and see how many games the team wins in over many simulations.