WAR, or Wins Above Replacement, is a statistic that has emerged over the last ten years to help place a statistical value on players' contributions to their team. It is formulated by a formula that is both complicated and adjusted to differentiate positions from each other. Making matters worse, baseball-reference and fangraphs use slightly different formulas to calculate their individual WAR statistics. I use all Fangraph numbers here. It would take up too much space to explain it, here is how it is calculated: http://www.fangraphs.com/library/index.php/misc/war/ Here they explain in great detail how they calculate their WAR statistic and how baseball-reference's WAR is slightly different.
Now that we all understand WAR, or at least get that it's adjusted and such, we can dive into how it has worked with the White Sox over time. I'm not an expert at understanding Notice the chart above. It ranks the WAR(P) of the players involved in the Podsednik/Lee deal. You can see that Carlos Lee gave the Brewers a much higher WAR value than Scott Podsednik gave the White Sox. However, we should look at the external factors that made this trade valuable for the White Sox.
First of all, the Sox got the leadoff hitter that allowed us to play small ball, the way Ozzie envisioned. He stole 50 bases and scored 80 runs that year while hitting .290, which are not great but were definitely enough to help the Sox win 99 games and a World Series title. He hit some major home runs in the post season as well. We all remember that the reason Carlos Lee was traded was his lack of effort after he had given up on playing for Ozzie Guillen. He would have had no value for us anyways.
When looking at WAR, you can see that it really determines a club's all-time best players with remarkable accuracy. It's not perfect, but if you take the Top 10 WAR from each team, it should give you a fair list of that team's greatest players. Lets look at the White Sox' Top 10 WAR players of all time. These values are strictly their White Sox WAR and not their career WAR including time with other clubs.
1)Frank Thomas - 70.6
2)Luke Appling - 69.3
3)Eddie Collins - 66.0
4)Nellie Fox - 42.7
5)Minnie Miñoso - 42.7
6)Robin Ventura - 38.8
7)Fielder Jones - 35.1
8)George Davis - 33.4
9)Luis Aparicio - 31.5
10)Carlton Fisk - 29.6
And the next two on the list are:
11)Joe Jackson - 28.4
12)Paul Konerko - 27.8
As you can see, this statistic of value has pretty much nailed the twelve greatest players in White Sox history who at least had long enough careers. That is the one thing about WAR, it's accumulative, so you have to play for a long time to get a high WAR.
This is why Joe Jackson(who played from 1915-1920) for the Sox, didn't have a high WAR, even though he is definitely one of the top Sox ever. Most people though, including myself, would tell you Jackson actually had his best years for Cleveland. His career WAR was 67.0, pretty low compared to other greatest players ever, so we know this statistic is not perfect. The person with the highest career WAR ever is Babe Ruth, who posted a 177.7 WAR.
Most will say Frank Thomas is our best player and there he is at #1 in WAR. Luke Appling was a great player but probably accumulated WAR over his 20 years of White Sox service to be this high on the list. You can see that Konerko has almost snuck into the top 10 now. His WAR last year was a very nice 4.2.
Similarly, WAR can definitely be used to judge pitchers. The top ten White Sox pitcher career WAR are:
1)Ted Lyons - 58.8
2)Red Faber - 55.2
3)Ed Walsh - 55.0
4)Billy Pierce - 50.3
5)Wilbur Wood - 44.9
6)Eddie Cicotte - 43.1
7)Mark Buehrle - 39.2
8)Doc White - 29.9
9)Thornton Lee - 28.0
10)Tommy John - 22.5
We can see that the WAR are lower because we simply did not have pitchers for the same length of career that we have had top players. This list is pretty well the best pitchers we have had with the exception of a few, but again those guys just weren't on the Sox longer than four or five years.
So what is WAR good for? It's good for getting a list of best players over a career but shouldn't be used to determine the value of players against each other unless those players played in a similar career length of years since it is accumulative. It can be used to judge two players from the same year against each other pretty well, and that is what this stat is best available to give us IMO. That's what I use it for anyways.
There has been a battle between VORP and WAR over the last few years. I like WAR because it takes into account a far more accurate value placed on the player's defense in the argument. IMO, defense should always be a part of an argument when discussing players' values to their ball clubs, as well as their value against each other. So check out WAR, it's a good stat. Fangraphs is a good place to get a player's WAR statistics. Just make sure to use it in the right context.
As you can see, this statistic of value has pretty much nailed the twelve greatest players in White Sox history who at least had long enough careers. That is the one thing about WAR, it's accumulative, so you have to play for a long time to get a high WAR.
This is why Joe Jackson(who played from 1915-1920) for the Sox, didn't have a high WAR, even though he is definitely one of the top Sox ever. Most people though, including myself, would tell you Jackson actually had his best years for Cleveland. His career WAR was 67.0, pretty low compared to other greatest players ever, so we know this statistic is not perfect. The person with the highest career WAR ever is Babe Ruth, who posted a 177.7 WAR.
Most will say Frank Thomas is our best player and there he is at #1 in WAR. Luke Appling was a great player but probably accumulated WAR over his 20 years of White Sox service to be this high on the list. You can see that Konerko has almost snuck into the top 10 now. His WAR last year was a very nice 4.2.
Similarly, WAR can definitely be used to judge pitchers. The top ten White Sox pitcher career WAR are:
1)Ted Lyons - 58.8
2)Red Faber - 55.2
3)Ed Walsh - 55.0
4)Billy Pierce - 50.3
5)Wilbur Wood - 44.9
6)Eddie Cicotte - 43.1
7)Mark Buehrle - 39.2
8)Doc White - 29.9
9)Thornton Lee - 28.0
10)Tommy John - 22.5
We can see that the WAR are lower because we simply did not have pitchers for the same length of career that we have had top players. This list is pretty well the best pitchers we have had with the exception of a few, but again those guys just weren't on the Sox longer than four or five years.
So what is WAR good for? It's good for getting a list of best players over a career but shouldn't be used to determine the value of players against each other unless those players played in a similar career length of years since it is accumulative. It can be used to judge two players from the same year against each other pretty well, and that is what this stat is best available to give us IMO. That's what I use it for anyways.
There has been a battle between VORP and WAR over the last few years. I like WAR because it takes into account a far more accurate value placed on the player's defense in the argument. IMO, defense should always be a part of an argument when discussing players' values to their ball clubs, as well as their value against each other. So check out WAR, it's a good stat. Fangraphs is a good place to get a player's WAR statistics. Just make sure to use it in the right context.
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