There is value in being average, in life and in baseball, too. In fact, when it comes to baseball there is a lot of value in it.
Think of it like this. A .500 team in sports is exactly average. You add up the wins and losses for any league, and that's what you have -- a .500 league. That's what we mean when we refer to a sports league as a zero-sum environment. Every point produced is a point given up; a win for one team is a loss for another.
Because of that fundamental aspect of binary competition, it makes sense that in order to put performance in context, we would use average as a baseline. Everything that a player produces that is better than that of an average player should, all things being equal, contribute to winning.
Despite that, the emergent metric of the sabermetric age does not use average as a baseline for comparison. Everyone seems to agree that expressing player performance in terms of wins is the way to go. Wins are, after all, the bottom line. However, we don't usually do so by comparing the wins a player contributes to that of an average player. WAR, whichever version you prefer, does not stand for "wins above average." It stands for "wins above replacement."
There are good reasons for this. Over at Baseball Reference, they've long maintained an explainer for their version of WAR, including a primer on the concept of replacement level. Here's a quote: "When computing the value of a major league player, average is a poor baseline for comparison." The word to zero in on from that snippet is "value."
In the most recent edition of the Baseball Research Journal, longtime baseball researcher Campbell Gibson published an essay called "WAA vs. WAR" dealing with this issue and advocating for good-old average. It's a pretty weedsy argument difficult to encapsulate here, but Gibson writes, "[WAR] seriously distorts the evaluation of player performance in [MLB] by systematically understating the value of players with relatively short careers and overstating the value of players with relatively long careers."
Jumping back to where we came in: Average has a lot of value. Baseball teams reward average players handsomely because they aren't that easy to find. While average as a statistical baseline is a straightforward concept, it doesn't do that great of a job of describing the talent pool. Last season, there were 567 batters who accumulated at least 50 plate appearances. Just 209 of them (36.8%) had an OPS+ of at least 100. An OPS+ of 100 is exactly league average, yet nearly two-thirds of baseball's hitters couldn't get there. This is the disconnect for which the use of replacement level strives to account.
Nevertheless, we've made a collective mistake by mostly setting aside average as a prism through which to see the game. Mostly this is because not everything is about determining a player's value, i.e., determining his worth in a theoretical marketplace. You have to be able to do that, of course, especially if you're actually running a team. But for those of us who just want to tell stories or understand who the best players in baseball are, sometimes you just want a good way to assess what actually happened. And for clarity of communication, there are few things more easy to grasp than the concept of average, even if you hate math.
Using WAR and WAA in tandem seems like the way to go, especially when you're doing historical analysis, which is where the distinction becomes more crucial. That's because there is a nether region between above-replacement and average that doesn't exactly describe greatness. In other words, you can be a below-average player and remain in the lineup for a long time, especially if you remain better than replacement level.
Let's use the career of Ernie Banks as an example. Through 1961, his age-30 season, Banks was off to one of greatest starts to a career in baseball history. He was hitting .290/.353/.552 and had already hit 298 home runs. He had won two MVP awards, a Gold Glove, and because two All-Star Games were played each season for a period of years, he'd actually been selected for 11 such games over his first nine years (or really, eight since his 1953 debut was just a cup of coffee).
In terms of WAR, Banks was at 54.8 through 1961, ranking 27th all time among hitters through their first nine seasons even now. By WAA, the story wasn't a whole lot different. He was 35.1 wins better than average, ranking 29th. After 1961, Banks was moved off the shortstop position and his numbers began a slow decline. His OPS+ over the rest of his career was 106, meaning that he was a better-than-average hitter. But of course he was by then a first baseman and that OPS+ is nothing special for a regular first baseman.
From 1962 until he retired, Banks produced another 12.7 WAR but his WAA was minus-6.5. In other words, Banks was no longer producing winning numbers, but he was still better than the typical schlub the Cubs might have called up from the minors or summoned out of the ether. Gibson refers to these seasons -- when a player was better than replacement but below average -- as producing "showing up" wins under the WAR umbrella.
There are lots of reasons why clubs might employ a "showing up" player. He has name recognition and can draw in fans. He might be a crucial clubhouse leader or helpful in instructing younger players. If he's not an essential part of a team's production, his below-average production still has value because, again, average isn't that easy to find. So while he's not contributing the same win impact, he's not necessarily obsolete.
When you're looking at the career of a player and trying to split hairs about who ranks where, and who ought to go to Cooperstown, it's important to understand the true shape of a player's performance. The use of WAA, or any manifestation of a measure compared to league average, helps to do this. In fact, it can be argued that using WAA in conjunction with WAR does a better job of describing a player's career impact than trying to balance career value and peak value.
Here's one cherry-picked example from Gibson's essay to illustrate this latter point. He has side-by-side tables showing the top 65 hitters of all time by WAR against the top 65 by WAA. Here are a few hitters whose careers stand out much more through the prism of WAA: Mike Trout (99th in WAR, 37th in WAA -- he hasn't had a chance yet for "showing up" seasons); Jackie Robinson (114th in WAR, 62nd in WAA); Joe DiMaggio (42nd in WAR, 30th in WAA); Ted Williams (11th in WAR, sixth in WAA), Joe Jackson (110th in WAR, 56th in WAA) and Larry Walker (56th in WAR, 39th in WAA).
Larry Walker! See, there is a reason why we bring this up now. At press time, Walker looks like he might finally squeeze in over the 75% threshold and earn enshrinement to the Hall of Fame. Those who wring their hands over his relatively short career can take solace in his performance against average. Because the missing playing time might simply have been "showing up" time.
There is another hitter on the ballot who has gained some momentum this year, but isn't going to get to 75%. As his case evolves, let's consider Scott Rolen with today's thoughts in mind. Rolen's career was somewhat clipped by injury problems over his career. He played in at least 150 games just five times and qualified for the batting title in just 10 of his 17 seasons.
Following his 37-game debut season, Rolen was safely better than replacement level in each of his 16 subsequent seasons and reached a career total of 70.2 WAR. On Jay Jaffe's JAWS leaderboard, that total ranks 10th all time among career third basemen and is a couple of wins better than the average current Hall of Famer at the position. Among all players, Rolen ranks 67th in WAR.
But the durability of Rolen's excellence is even better expressed by WAA. He produced wins at an above-average level in 15 of his 17 seasons. In all but two of his seasons, healthy or not, Rolen wasn't merely "showing up" but was directly contributing to his team's ability to separate itself from the .500 mark. His career total of 44.1 WAA ranks 46th all time.
Gibson didn't get into how using WAA might affect the all-time pitching leaderboard, so we ran those numbers. Again, it gives an extra dimension in understanding the impact of a few players who might be otherwise underrated.
One of those players is Sandy Koufax. Well, Koufax isn't really underrated -- there are more than a few people who rate him among the all-time elite and understandably so. He ranks 89th all time in WAR at Baseball Reference, a less-than-overwhelming statement that can easily be dismissed due to the shortness of his career. But that's the thing -- there are only 69 pitchers currently in the Hall of Fame. If someone were willing to shuffle the membership to include just the top 69 in WAR, Koufax wouldn't make it. But he would by WAA, where he ranks 63rd. It doesn't tell the full story of his greatness, but it does move the needle toward a more representative ranking. The same thing happens for Pedro Martinez, who jumps from 17th in WAR to 10th in WAA.
We'll leave this off by returning one more time to the current ballot. Curt Schilling is tracking around 80% in the Hall voting at press time, with more than 60% of the votes unaccounted for. This will be a close race; the past few years, those ballots not made public tended to be hard on Schilling, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and other players who have been denied for non-baseball reasons. That's allowed, of course, though it does seem curious that so many ballots marked by indignation are sent from the shadows. Anyway, it will be close as to whether Schilling clears the 75% barrier.
If this were strictly a numbers thing, WAA could serve as Schilling's closing argument. His career wasn't exceptionally long for a Hall of Fame starter, at least in terms of innings and starts. He got in 20 seasons but reached 30 starts just seven times. His 3,261 innings would rank 52nd among Hall of Famers, just behind Dennis Eckersley, who of course spent many years as a reliever. Schilling won 216 games and his 80.5 career WAR ranks 26th all time. Those are Hall of Fame numbers, largely the same as those that got Mike Mussina inducted last year.
WAA arguably elevates Schilling to no-brainer status. He produced wins at an above-average clip in 16 of his 20 seasons and was less than one win below average in the other four. His career total of 53.9 WAA ranks 12th among pitchers. Ever. He's ahead of greats like Bob Gibson, Steve Carlton and Fergie Jenkins. If Schilling does get announced as a new Hall of Famer when the balloting results are revealed Tuesday, his career will have warranted the honor. He was far from average.
Three little things
1. I recently came across a treasure trove of classic radio baseball broadcasts that now exist in the public domain and can be enjoyed free of charge. If you miss having games to take in as much as I do by the time mid-January arrives, you might get a kick out of these. They are full-game broadcasts and since quite a few are just regular-season contests, you probably don't know what actually happened in the game without looking it up. So you can follow it like a live game, albeit one with a lot more static.
I started at the top by listening to the 1934 All-Star Game at the Polo Grounds. I was familiar with that game -- it's the one where Giants pitcher Carl Hubbell struck out five straight Hall of Famers -- but it was still a gas to listen to. For one thing, it's the only known surviving broadcast of a game in which Babe Ruth played. There was one moment when Ruth was on first base with Lou Gehrig at the plate. The broadcaster -- Tom Manning -- said at one point something like, "Gehrig waits for the pitch. Babe Ruth leads off of first base ..." and it didn't even sound real. But it was. Those guys actually played.
I also listened to an Opening Day game from 1957 when the Brooklyn Dodgers played the Phillies at Connie Mack Stadium, with Don Newcombe facing Robin Roberts. It was a great listen but, let me tell you, those dudes liked their cigarettes way too much.
2. Bill James created an interesting system for measuring how close players came to reaching the potential they displayed early in their career. (It's at his website, but you have to subscribe.) The system also serves as a measure for lost potential, with one avatar for that aspect being Joe DiMaggio, who lost years to military service, battled injuries and retired before his career went into steep decline. We got enough DiMaggio to know how great he was, but we didn't get the full DiMaggio. James wrote, "He is missing a lot of his potential career, but he HAS enough of a career for us to see what the full shape and potential of his career would have been."
Reading that, a thought occured to me: DiMaggio was to baseball what Michael Jordan was to basketball -- a transcendent star/celebrity, coveted pitch man for the ad world, and someone who, as great as they were, left us wishing there had been even more. Crazy?
3. After this week's string of debacles in the baseball world, there is at least a bit of good news. We're now less than a month from pitchers and catchers reporting. It won't make us forget the scandals, but it will at least remind us why we care so much in the first place. It can't get here soon enough.