Pitcher Win Values Explained: Part One

by
January 12, 2009

Since we released the Win Values for hitters here on the site, one of the main questions was when we were going to add them for pitchers. The answer: today. If you go to a pitcher’s player page here on FanGraphs, you’ll see the newly added Value section down at the bottom.

For example, here’s Johan Santana’s Win Values for the past five years:

2004: +7.6 wins
2005: +7.2 wins
2006: +7.1 wins
2007: +3.4 wins
2008: +4.6 wins

During his stretch of dominance with the Twins, he was consistently amazing. He took a step back in his last year in Minnesota though, and while he rebounded somewhat this year, he hasn’t been the same elite guy that he was in his prime during the last two years. Still very good, certainly, as a +4.6 win pitcher is among the best in the game, but not quite the guy he was from 2004 to 2006.

Other fun pitchers to look at: Brad Lidge (+3 wins from a closer in ’08 – quite the addition for Philly), Barry Zito (the Giants should have seen this coming), and Ben Sheets (seriously, someone should give this guy some money).

So, now, for the obvious question – how on earth did we come up with these things?

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Starting tomorrow, we’ll do a week long series explaining the calculations behind pitcher win values and the questions that arose during the process. They’re far more complicated that hitter win values, honestly – there’s issues of run environments, leverage, and context that had to be accounted for, and in many cases, the decisions of how to handle these things aren’t cut and dried. So, over the next few days, we’ll dig into those issues and talk about how we arrived at the values we did, and what the positives and negatives of those decisions are.





 

Dave is the Managing Editor of FanGraphs.

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Jeff
16 years ago

It appears the dollar values may be incorrect for pitchers. Perhaps you didn’t account for inflation in the same way you did on position players..it looks like all the dollars for pitchers are in 2002 dollars. Or is there some other explanation why Sabathia and Chipper Jones would have the same Value Wins in 2008 (7.6), but dollar values of $19.7 and $34+ million, respectively?

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Dave CameronMember since 2018
16 years ago
Reply to  Jeff

Good catch – David will get that fixed shortly.

1
David AppelmanFanGraphs Staff
16 years ago
Reply to  Dave Cameron

Fixed!

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