Historical WAR & WAR Graphs

Full historical WAR for all position players has been added to the site! It’s available in the career leaderboards and on the individual player pages currently and will work its way to some other sections of the site pretty soon. We’ll do full WAR for pitchers eventually, but right now that’s still only 2002 onward.

The other new feature are the WAR graphs where you can compare up to 4 players at a time in various ways:

Just a quick note that these two graphs in particular were inspired by work done over at Beyond the Box Score.

Some additional notes about our historical WAR:

– We’re using the best fielding metric publicly available at the time, so for anything 2002 onward, we’re using Mitchel Lichtman’s UZR and anything pre-2002, we’re using Sean Smith’s Total Zone. Total Zone prior to 2010 is also available in the fielding section of the site which has replaced Range Factors.

– The batting component is based on wRAA (based off wOBA / linear weights) and uses 5 year regressed park factors going all the way back to 1871.

– Positional adjustments prior to 2000 are based off Sean Smith’s positional adjustments by decade. 2000 onward are based on Tangotiger’s positional adjustments.

– Replacement levels are adjusted slightly by season. They’re all right around 20 runs with the exception of a few years and a couple leagues.

– The run to win converter is also adjusted by season, but it’s generally going to be right around 10.

If you want to know more about how WAR is calculated for position players, read the 7 part series.