Archive for the 'WAR' Category

The Dominican Republic has given us many great ballplayers over the years, far more than you might expect from a nation of its size. In fact, the tiny coastal town of San Pedro de Macorís alone has produced more MLB players per capita than any other municipality in the world. Baseball is so deeply ingrained in the culture of the D.R. that Pedro Gonzalez once said, "Every boy grows up with a bat and a ball—it’s the first present a male baby gets in his crib."

So, as a tribute to the fine baseball being played by its natives, here is the all-time Dominican all-star team according to Wins Above Replacement:

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2011 Wins Above Replacement data is now live on the site and will be updated daily throughout the season. This includes the league pages, player pages, team pages, and Play Index, among other locations.

In the very early going, here are your 2011 WAR leaders:

Position Players

Pitchers

Here's a cool link from Adam Darowski:

Hall of wWAR: The Hall of Fame Re-Populated by Peak-Weighted WAR

It is exactly what it sounds like -- he took our Wins Above Replacement stat, peak-adjusted it by combining regular WAR with "Wins Above Excellence" & "Wins Above MVP", and then repopulated the Hall of Fame using that weighted metric. Here were the members of his Hall:

Reader mail of the day: fielding WAR for DH?  THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

I'm a busy guy, so I don't always read all of the blogs out there that you might think I do.  

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As Andy noted yesterday, King Felix won the AL Cy Young after also leading the AL in Wins Above Replacement. I was wondering how often pitchers have pulled off this double feat of winning the CYA and the WAR crown in the same season, so I called up our year-by-year WAR leaders and cross-referenced that list with the Cy Young winners file at Baseball-Databank.org. Here were the results:

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Here's an interesting question sent to us by B-R reader Phil:

"I've been a Mets fan since 1967, when, as the youngest kid in my neighborhood, I needed something to differentiate myself from the older kids who grew up Yankees fans at the tail end of the dynasty. In 1969, God performed his last certified Miracle. As I've learned more about baseball over the last 40 years, I've come to wonder: did the Mets 1969 pitching staff have the best 'potential' of any staff? By that I mean, did they have the most wins left in them?"

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Last week I posted about how often the team with the best Game 1 starter by WAR wins the Division Series (only 55%, as it turns out), and with the League Championship Series coming up on us quickly, I wanted to do a variation of that study for best-of-seven series.

In the wake of the Phillies' sweep of Cincinnati, many are saying their top 3 pitchers (Roy Halladay, Roy Oswalt, Cole Hamels) are all they really need to overwhelm an opponent, even in a 7-game series. How does that triumvirate stack up to other Top 3s since the strike? Combined, Halladay (6.9 WAR), Oswalt (5.1), & Hamels (4.7) posted 16.7 Wins Above Replacement during the 2010 season, a total that ranks 6th among LCS participants since 1995:

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Tacking on to Andy's playoff thoughts from earlier today...

Familiarity Breeds Contempt

The 2010 Yankees-Twins ALDS represents just the 8th time in the WS era (1903-2010) that the same two teams faced each other in a postseason series 4 times in 8 seasons... The Dodgers & Yankees played each other in 4 world series from 1946-53, 48-55, and five times (!!!) from 1949-56. The Yankees and Royals faced off in 4 series from 1973-80, and the Braves & Astros had two different 8-year stretches with 4 playoff showdowns in the late nineties/early 2000s (1997-04 and 1998-05). The Red Sox and Angels capped off a 4-series-in-8-years stretch last season, and now the Yankees and Twins have joined that group with ALDS faceoffs in 2003, 2004, 2009, and 2010.

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It's a move you see all too often in today's cost-conscious baseball world: in order to delay his arbitration timetable and keep him under team control longer, the Giants held star prospect Buster Posey down in the minors at the beginning of the season. Normally this wouldn't be a big deal, and in fact many teams would have done the same thing if given the chance. But in the case of Posey, the Giants' choice has probably made the NL West closer than it should have been, and could ultimately cost them the playoffs if San Diego is able to overcome San Francisco's slim half-game lead in the division.

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Joe Posnanski's great post on Wins Above Replacement brought to the forefront for me an idea I've been kicking around now for a few months.
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