FanPost

Fun with WAR


The more I read about and understand WAR, the more interested I am in breaking it down a bit into a per game basis. We know that Kurt Suzuki's WAR is 1.5, but he did miss some time. So what is his WAR/game? Over a full season of 130 games, it's 1.82. I don't have the time or desire to do this for everyone in the bigs, especially because perhaps there is a better way of breaking down WAR so that it takes time missed into account. Perhaps there's already another stat for that. So I just did it for the A's starting rotation and starting lineup. Keep in mind that the starting lineup I'm using is the current lineup.

All WAR and games played numbers come from www.fangraphs.com.

So here we go...

I guess it's not surprising that Brett Anderson, Gio Gonzalez, and Dallas Braden have the three best WAR/game on the team. It's also not surprising that Daric Barton and Coco Crisp have the best WAR/game of the hitters. I'm not smart enough to know if you can use WAR/game to compare hitters to pitchers, but it seems reasonable given that WAR itself is supposed to make them comparable.


Now extrapolating these numbers over a full season (let's say 150 games) would give Crisp a WAR of 5.685, which is damn good. If only he could stay healthy. Anderson would come in with a WAR of 4.7495 in 35 starts, which isn't elite, but is good. Gio's would be 4.


I just wanted to mess around with the numbers, and I thought I'd share what I found.

What does everyone think?

UPDATE: After the WAR/game number I added in what each player's WAR would be if extrapolated over the course of a full season. I used 150 games for position players and 35 starts for pitchers.