FanGraphs Feature Focus: WAR Graphs

Today’s Feature Focus covers WAR Graphs, a quite underutilized tool in my opinion. (We’re called FanGraphs after all, and this is a Graph that you can make, as a Fan.) The tool is accessed near the bottom of the Leaders menu, under WAR Tools:

That’ll send you to this landing page, a blank canvas for adding players:

After selecting players, you’ll be welcomed with three graphs: nth Best Season, Cumulative WAR by Age, and WAR by Age. The view defaults to showing all three, but you can toggle at the top:

Let’s dive into each graph.

For the sake of demonstration, I chose just three players to walk through the three generated graphs: Bobby Witt Jr., Cal Ripken Jr., and George Brett. You can choose as many players as you’d like, past and present, though the color-coding starts repeating itself with the ninth player, so for that plus overall readability, I wouldn’t recommend selecting more than eight. The tool also doesn’t combine hitter and pitcher WAR; Shohei Ohtani is shown as a hitter.

nth Best Season

This first graph rearranges all of a player’s seasons from best to worst, so naturally the lines will each trend downward as you look from left to right. The graph works really nicely for comparing careers of similar lengths — Ripken and Brett each played 21 years and each had 19 positive-WAR seasons — but it also helps to show that Witt’s best couple seasons line up quite favorably with the finest that Ripken and Brett had to offer. With fewer seasons of elite production (and fewer seasons overall, of course), Witt’s line will have a steeper slope, illustrating how much he has to accomplish to be in the ballpark of the long, elite careers of the two Hall of Famers.

Cumulative WAR by Age

As Jon Lovitz would say: That’s the ticket. (Yes, all my references are dated.) This is my favorite of the three graphs, especially when combining active and retired players as I’m doing here. This graph further hammers home that Witt’s career is nascent relative to the multi-decade staying power of Ripken and Brett, but by ordering chronologically by age rather than from best to worst, it’s clearer to see that up to this point in his career, Witt in fact compares quite favorably to Ripken and Brett, especially considering Witt’s age-26 season isn’t yet halfway complete. Hovering over a spot on the line allows for exact numerical comparison:

Despite debuting in his age-22 season, two years later than Ripken and Brett, Witt should pass Brett in WAR through their respective age-26 campaigns and be within shouting distance of Ripken.

WAR by Age

This is simply the disaggregated version of the prior graph, with each season shown independently rather than being added into everything the player had done in his career prior to that season. This graph is ideal for comparing best and worst seasons by age, as well as offering an idea of the trajectory of a player’s career. For example, it’s easy to suss out from this graph that Brett aged considerably more gracefully than Ripken, whose last four-win year was his age-32 season, while Brett had a couple more after that age. Witt’s graph looks strikingly similar to how Ripken’s career began, just shifted over a year in age.

If you’re a Member, all three graph types are exportable as a PNG or directly copyable into your clipboard for easy posting onto social media or into a text to a friend you’re trying to win an argument against, one of the most righteous uses of any FanGraphs tool. You can become a Member and access those perks here.