All Out WAR. WAR Stats.

First off, I would like to congratulate Sean Manaea and the Oakland A's for their no-no against the best offensive team in the league. Any time a pitcher can throw a no-hitter, it is an impressive feat and great news for the league in terms of popularity. However, before I dive into the real purpose of this article (talking about WAR stats), I need to vent just a bit about last night's game.

As a Red Sox fan, of course I did not want to see the team get no-hit, but I understand and accept it. What I DO NOT understand and accept is who was pitching for us, Chris Sale. Let me explain, I love Chris Sale, but for some reason, unknown to mankind, the Boston Red Sox can barely produce ANY offense whenever Sale pitches. Granted, it has been better this year, but this issue has gone back to last year, and I even wrote about it HERE! Even this year, we were on an absolute tear when it came to putting the bat on the ball recently, but yet, we couldn't get one hit last night. I am just hoping all our batters are just in awe in watching the Stickman pitch, and temporarily forgets how to hit.

ANYWAYS. WAR stats, what are they? WAR stands for wins above replacement and basically how many wins Player X will help account for over his replacement from AAA or another player coming off the bench. For example, in 2017 the league leader in WAR was Jose Altuve with 8.3, Mookie Betts was 9th with 6.4. So if you would have replaced Betts with another player, you would lost around 6 more games according to these stats. There ya go Mookie!!!!!

WAR is calculated by the following:

WAR = (Batting Runs + Base Running Runs +Fielding Runs + Positional Adjustment + League Adjustment +Replacement Runs) / (Runs Per Win)

From https://www.fangraphs.com/library/misc/war/

So as you can see, it is pretty complex to calculate but does a pretty good job at looking at the overall value of the player. There are also defensive WAR stats, that looks at just the fielding and defensive value of a player, something I was most interested in. But why?

Jackie Bradley Jr. is well known for his defensive wizardry in the outfield, but can struggle at the plate. The question always remain, is it worth keeping him? As a JBJ fanatic, I always said, "Yes!" , citing his great defensive skills. But I never crunched the numbers to see if that was actually true. My goal was to set out and determine JBJ's actually defensive value or WAR. As a reference, the 2017 league leader in defensive WAR was Andrelton Simmons at 4.17, second was Tucker Barnhart at 2.82.

photo cred: CBS Boston

This is JBJ's WAR stats broken down:

As a reminder, these stats include all the stud players in our league currently, not just outfielders. However, you can see that JBJ's defensive WAR is pretty consistent and ranks him pretty high, but when he is not swinging the bat well, his overall value takes a significant dive. This is was something I was not expecting. Again, I had always thought his defensive skills would out-weigh his lack of bat. One interesting stat I had found was on ESPN labeled "RGP or superlative defensive plays", basically meaning high quality defensive plays. JBJ led all of the majors in 2017 with a value of 6.0 (unsure of exact calculation) and the next closest, was 4.0 by none other than Mookie Betts. My guess was this stat is calculated by the number of "How did he do that?!?!" kind of plays. Boy, I sure would love to be involved in calculating those.

Either way, not everything should be based off numbers, and even after I "crunched" these numbers on JBJ, my mindset is not changed. I believe he is worth keeping and placing in centerfield on a daily basis. Those Top-10 plays we see from him regularly can do so much more than just save runs. I am talking about team motivation, crowd engagement, etc. JBJ will never be a monster at the plate, but as long as he bats .250 and makes amazing defensive plays, I am going keep rocking my JBJ jersey.

Stay Laced.

*all stats from Baseball Reference and ESPN

#JBJ #baseball #MookieBetts #Baseball #MLB #ChrisSale #WARStats