But FIP is production too: strikeouts, walks and home runs allowed.  It’s a subset of ERA and it’s more constant, or more predictable, than ERA, but it’s still production.

#5 is my personal favorite.  I think the salary figures on Fangraphs are good guidelines, but that’s all they are.  They’re the beginning of a good discussion about what a team should pay a player, not the end.

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I don’t mean to get snippy, but this was a completely unsupported statement.  tRA has been shown to be barely better than FIP.  Neither PRAA or tRA WAR on stat corner adjust relievers for leverage to my knowledge.  They don’t have dynamic run converters for starting pitchers as far as I know either.  Also, none of the pitcher WAR include defense for pitchers, which is going to be pretty minimal, and you can always look up a pitcher’s WAR on offense (which we do calculate) and add it to their defense.

What exactly is there not to “trust” about pitcher WAR on FanGraphs again?  We have a really long series about how WAR is calculated exactly for pitchers.  If you don’t like FIP used in a WAR calculation, then you shouldn’t like tRA either.  All in all they’re pretty comparable and if you’re not going to trust one of them, you may as well not trust any of the others either because their methods of calculation are generally similar.

Thank you ever so much for point number 5.  Beyond the obvious that the Yankees will pay more for one WAR than the Pirates, there is so much more to the economics.  A decent shortstop or a middle of the rotation starter is worth much more to the Twins who may see it as the one piece they are missing than it is to the Royals who need so much more to even be worth noticing.  It makes sense for the Twins to overpay for that, but not the Royals.

Dave, thanks for commenting.

The entire way that we’re thinking about adjusting relievers for leverage might be flawed. The purpose is to find out the value of the pitcher, isolated from the context in which he pitches. The two best ways to do this are to either not account for leverage or to assign every single pitcher a “deserved” leverage index, including starters, based on the optimal average LI he should pitch in, independent of his actual LI. StatCorner doesn’t account for leverage, which I’m fine with, and PRC does pretty much what you need by adjusting the pitcher’s run environment. 

I don’t see why you’d say that defense is pretty minimal for pitchers. I’d guess a good fielding pitcher is worth five runs a year and a bad one worth negative five. It all adds up.

I might be wrong about StatCorner’s WAR. I’ve never seen them write up their methodology to it, but I’ve been under the assumption they use the regressed version of tRA, and not tRA. If my assumption is false, I stand corrected.

I understand you guys calculate a pitcher’s WAR on offense, and I should have mentioned that it’s available on FanGraphs. This was an indictment on people who cite WAR for pitchers without including offense, not on FanGraphs, which does have the data available.

Jeremy, thanks for clarifying.

Starting pitchers on FanGraphs are not leverage adjusted on FanGraphs, because except for some strange cases, they’re all going to have an average leverage of 1 anyway.  So there’s really nothing to complain about here, they are completely context neutral.

Relief pitchers use a regressed gmLI leverage adjustment.  So it only accounts for the situations they were used in.  I see what you’re saying about optimal average LI, but WAR, like you said is not really predictive (with FIP maybe a little more so), so I’d say adjusting for leverage in the situation they actually pitched in does make sense.  For what it’s worth, the adjustment is not huge.  I think at most we’re applying a 1.5 LI adjustment once it’s regressed, because you’re not going to find any gmLI a whole lot greater than 2.  Or, on the other side, nothing more than really .75.  This could certainly slightly devalue relievers who are good but not optimally used.

On the defense.  These guys are really only out there for 200 innings.  I agree with the -5 to +5 range, but this still makes up a relatively small part of a pitcher’s value.  It’s not like position players where how a player plays defense is going to drastically change his perceived value.

I’m not sure I see how the regressed version of tRA vs the non regressed version of tRA really changes the comparison to FIP they’re both going to be similar.  I think the regressed version of tRA is going to water down the home run impact a little more than FIP will, but I may be wrong about that.  We also use FIP in the WAR calculations because it completely takes out the defense, which then makes adding numbers up across entire teams work nicer so we’re not double counting defense somewhere.

Even in that Nolasco case, we say he’s at 4.2, statcorner say he’s at 3.5.  If you just take it on runs (leave out the dynamic win conversion) we think he’s at just about 3.6.  Better pitchers in FanGraphs WAR will be even better because of the dynamic run to win converter because the way they inherently lower the run environment.  You can always just look at the runs and divide by 10-ish if you want to see what things would look like without it.

Statcorner calculates WAR using the straight park adjusted tRA.  The regressed tRA is “just for show”.

I agree that PRC is probably the best, mainly because it uses a dynamic run estimator I believe.

The regressed version of tRA tries to account for everything the pitcher controls, and dismiss everything he can’t control.

Regressed tRA just regresses tRA to league average based off of the sample size.  So a 6.00 tRA will be around a 5.2 tRA*, or something.

“My point is that all pitchers are from the same group of players. They (starters and relievers) shouldn’t be treated differently. I’m not smart enough to come up with the correct metric, but I’d imagine the replacement level (or whatever you want to call it) would be fluid, based on the expected outs per outing, and the deserved leverage index would be fluid, based on the expected outs per outing as well as the pitcher’s run environment.”

Well, back to the original point, which is your complaint about leverage not being applied properly or on a sliding scale, if you’re making the same argument about replacement level in general, then it seems like we both agree there should be leverage adjustment for relievers, but you’re just skeptical of the way it’s being applied in FanGraphs WAR?

At least we’re making some adjusting for leverage and relievers leverage wise and skill wise are used somewhat properly, so it’s not like the system we use is going to be really out of whack.  Sure some relievers may be docked ever so slightly because they’re in the setup role instead of the closer role, but I don’t think those differences are going to be material in the vast majority of cases.

I don’t see why wouldn’t treat relievers and starters different.  They’re two different roles, and then leverage is essentially applied to further define the role of the reliever.

I think all these systems have their merits and potential drawbacks, but I just thought it was particularly unfair of you to single out FanGraphs WAR for pitchers and say more or less, it’s untrustworthy.

Otherwise, I agree with everything you’re saying in the article.  Like all these stats, none are perfect or should be used in a vacuum, but I guess if you’re going to pick one, you could do a lot worse than WAR.

Not to be a noob, but what is BJOL? And where are the baserunning stats at B-Ref?

Firpo, Bill James Online, and if you go to a hitter’s page on Baseball Reference and scroll down, there’s a section with baserunning stats.

Thanks for writing this. A lot of this needed to be said. It drives me nuts to see people say “So-and-so was worth $13.6M last year” as if that is an etched-in-stone fact. That is really sloppy thinking.

Also, to Dave Appelman: I read and appreciate Fangraphs, but I didn’t interpret the main thrust of this article as anti-Fangraphs as much as I read it as a plea for people to think more critically about and be more careful with what they read there.