Abstract
Baseball has increasingly turned to analytics in order to evaluate players and teams within the league. The latest statistic to become popular is Wins-Above-Replacement, abbreviated WAR. WAR takes into account all factors of a player’s contribution to a team, including pitching, batting, base-running, and fielding, and combines them to produce a single number which approximates how many games the team has won by utilizing this player as compared to a replacement-level or minor league level player at the same position. The WAR statistic has become widely used as a way to compare players, even players playing different positions or in different time periods. However, current versions of WAR all have one serious drawback: there is no publicly available, standardized formula or process to calculate it. Instead, separate organizations have formulated their own versions of the statistic using proprietary data, rendering the statistic both difficult to understand and difficult to replicate. In this project we create a standardized WAR statistic that accurately indicates the value of a player using only publicly available data, and show that our new WAR statistic strongly correlates with WAR statistics which use proprietary data. This approach has the potential to create a standard WAR formula that an average baseball fan can use and understand in the future as they evaluate a baseball player’s value. We call it SHU-WAR.
Recommended Citation
Hendela, Karl
(2020)
"Sabermetric Analysis: Wins-Above-Replacement,"
Locus: The Seton Hall Journal of Undergraduate Research: Vol. 3, Article 7.
Available at:
https://scholarship.shu.edu/locus/vol3/iss1/7