New Leaderboard: WAR for All Players
If you click on the Leaders tab here on FanGraphs, you’ll be taken to this page, which shows you the performance of position players in 2014. If you wanted to see who the best pitchers of the year have been, you have had to switch over to the pitcher’s tab, and there was no place on the site to see a list with pitchers and hitters in the same place. Until now.
Thanks to David Appelman, we have a new WAR leaderboard that shows the totals for both position players and pitchers in the same spot. Additionally, since WAR is a counting stat, there is no playing time minimum that needs to be met, so you’ll see Troy Tulowitzki still ranks 9th overall in WAR this season, though he won’t appear on the batting leaders page because he has not met the standards of qualification for the batting average title set out by MLB. This list is the best place to look if you want to see how someone stacks up against all players, not just position players or pitchers.
You can access this leaderboard at any time from the dropdown under the leaders tab. It is listed under WAR tools, and is called Combined WAR Leaderboard.
The leaderboard can be sorted by league, or by team, so if you want to see all of your team’s players in one list, you can do that from here. And this tool goes back through 1871, so you can also use this for prior years as well.
You’ll also notice a note in the upper right-hand corner of the page that is worth mentioning here; these listed WAR totals are only for the player’s primary responsibility, so it’s batting WAR for batters or pitching WAR for pitchers.
While some NL pitchers do accumulate real value at the plate, we thought it made more sense to have the numbers be consistent with what we show on the player pages and the leaderboards, rather than having this be the only place on FanGraphs where batting and pitching WAR are added together. And of course, AL pitchers are not given the opportunity to produce value at the plate, so it’s a little bit of apples-to-orange comparison. But we do list batting WAR for pitchers (and pitching WAR for position players) on their player pages and the leaderboards, so if you want to create a leaderboard that accounts for this, you can do that. That’s just not what this tool is for.
We hope you enjoy the new feature.
Dave is the Managing Editor of FanGraphs.
YES! THANK YOU
I clicked on Combined WAR Leader Boards and all I got was the same menu all by itself in the corner.
Don’t like the removal of players like Tulo from the batting leaders page.
It’s just set to qualified by default. You can always just set the PA/IP minimum to 0 and he will “reappear”.
I think this is part of a plot to convince voters that Felix, not Trout, should be AL MVP.
Glad about removing the qualifying criterion. Besides Tulo, another guy who was getting missed because of too few PAs is Mesoraco.
This is great! Any way we can get something similar for team WAR totals? Basically adding the “team batting stats” and “team pitching stats” pages together, to get a total WAR accumulated by each team. Maybe this already exists and I don’t know where to find it?
This is a comment for Neil, I guess, but what I would like to see is a way of displaying WAR for any time period during the season. I understand one can get batting data for any player for any period through the game log function, and can add players to a list, but none of the options lists WAR, and in any case, it would be nice to be able to do this instantly with all players. As it stands now, we can only get certain periods, like one week, two weeks, 30 days.
I agree with this one too…
Pitchers shouldn’t be eligible. They got their OWN leaderboard.
Blasphemy
the answer is perhaps obvious to some, but is there a way to see all time single season WARs in a list?
Hit “Split Seasons” on the career WAR leaderboard
Wow, MadBum can hit!
(Well, if you ignore the 10 to 1 K:BB ratio.
And the fact that he has only really shown the ability to hit this season so far)
It’s a win that you can’t erase. It happened, even though it probably won’t again.
Does this version of leaderboard include pitcher’s offense/fielding, especially for the NL?
If you go up and read you will see the answer is NO.
It would be nice to have an option whether to include pitcher offense. I personally feel the list makes more sense with a player’s entire contribution included. Why not just have a dropdown where you can choose?
Also, it would be nice to have an option whether to use player FIP WAR or RA/9 WAR for pitchers.
I agree with both of those thoughts.
Also, I don’t understand the reluctance to have ‘this be the only place on FanGraphs where batting and pitching WAR are added together.’ It seems to me that displaying full value of a pitcher in one place (at least) is better than not showing it in any place.
Cool! As a suggestion for the future, could you please add a feature where we can compare players between various dates, such as from July 25th through August 12th? I don’t know how taxing this would be on your servers (best uneducated guess is this would be a bit of a strain), but it’s merely a suggestion.
Thank you for all you guys do!
“And of course, AL pitchers are not given the opportunity to produce value at the plate, so it’s a little bit of apples-to-orange comparison.”
NL hitters are not given the chance to rest some while still batting as DH. AL hitters get more PAs due to the difference between DH and pitcher hitting. WAR doesn’t attempt to correct these structural differences.
WAR is league adjusted.
The league adjustment for WAR rewards hitters for being in the AL, and as far as I know, the league adjustment formula is not pulicly available. Unless you have information to prove otherwise, I doubt the AL gets value reduced due to the structural benefit of increased opportunity.
Awesome. My one suggestion would be to at least add to this the Off and Def columns for hitters and RA9-WAR for pitchers.
Also, just realized this due to the asterisk by pitchers with 1 or more batter WAR, why is there no fielding component in ordinary pitcher WAR? It appears there is no UZR for pitchers. Seems really odd.
Woah, was that filter that allows you to choose FIP-WAR, RA9-WAR, or 50/50 FIP/RA9 there this morning? Great addition. Is this the only place you can see the average of the two WARs or will that be added to player pages as well?