Replacement Value
There’s a new section in the batting player pages which does the job of calculating a player’s runs over replacement and wins over replacement. Major thanks goes to Dave Cameron, Sean Smith, and Tangotiger for instructing me on the best way to do this.
Under each “Value” section you’ll find:
Batting – wRAA (Runs Above Average) with a park adjustment.
Fielding – The sum of a player’s UZR.
Replacement – The replacement level adjustment set at 20 Runs / 600 PA.
Positional – The positional adjustment set using Tangotiger’s values (see this link)
Value Runs – The sum of Batting, Fielding, Replacement, and Positional.
Value Wins – Value Runs converted to a wins scale.
Dollars – Value Wins converted to the following dollar scale:
2002 – $2.6m / win
2003 – $2.8m / win
2004 – $3.1m / win
2005 – $3.4m / win
2006 – $3.7m / win
2007 – $4.1m / win
2008 – $4.5m / win
This will all eventually be in the leaderboards and team pages, probably later this week.
David Appelman is the creator of FanGraphs.
Oh wow, Fangraphs keeps getting better and better. Thanks, David!
Awesome! Any hope of including some kind of rate-based calculation instead of just counting-based? Maybe a wins/150 or wins/600 plate appearances? The current valuation is awesome, but if a guy misses significant time from injuries or doesn’t start the season in the majors, it makes it a little harder to understand his value.
It’s pretty easy to take his Win Value, divide by his actual PA for that season, and then multiply by 600 in order to get your answer.
I know it is easy. But it is even easier if we can convince you all to do it for us:-) Plus, you already have UZR/150 and wOBA, which are defensive and offensive scaled stats. Might as well make a scaled version of value.
Of course, at this point you guys can kind of do whatever you want. This site is awesome and I don’t think you could drive us away if you tried.
Is “awesome” a strong enough word? Probably not, but it’ll have to do. Awesome!
Any chance of getting a line for the James and Marcel projections in this area? You could do a simple 3/2/1 projection for UZR value.
Projection stuff is still in the works, but that’s more or less the plan.
Wow, I knew there’d be a day when this would be posted online. We talk about WAR, $ value, etc. enough on the blogs that this is a big step. Now every player’s $ value can be calculated. Glad to see these changes finally being implemented and fangraphs has now become (along with THT) one of the two best sites on the net for baseball IMO. Only thing missing is baserunning but that’s not a big issue at all.
Also, to go from runs to wins, didn’t we determine that it was 11 runs per win in the AL and 10.5 in the NL? Or did you guys just use 10 runs per win and divide by 10? Either way it doesn’t really matter.
The wins to run conversion is done on a season/season basis, but not adjusted for AL/NL. Something I can look into doing, but it’s not going to make a big difference.
Wow! Great job on this guys, I’ve always wanted to be able to have quick access to wins and value and now I do. There’s a few more stats I’d like to see get used here, but as of right now this is my primary stat site on the web. Thanks!
Amazing! Just a quick question: these $ values tell us how much a player (i.e., Teixeira) was worth in that current season correct? I don’t think I could determine his true talent or projection or how much he is really worth (ie if people wanted to see if he’s worth $180) from the dollar values though right? I see you say projections are the plan, but i guess we could do our own for now and just weight the last couple of seasons differently.
Exactly, won’t make a big difference at all but j/w. What are you currently using? I’m just curious if it’s still at ~ 11 runs per win.
Awesome! It’s amazing how much more content has been added recently. Love it!
And a Merry Christmas to you too FanGraphs. I’m sure my family won’t mind I’m at the computer all day.
Christmas a day early. Wow!
Brent, to determine if Teix was worth the deal, you should do what Dave and I have done here: take his wRAA, weight the UZR for a projection, adjust for position, adjust for 20 runs per 600 PA above replacement, and then take the 2008 $/win rate and factor in 10% inflation.
We’re using around $5 mil/win, so if Teix is a +5 win player like I believe Dave showed, his FMV for 2009 is around $25 mil. With a discount for contract length/security, we’re looking at $22.5 mil for 8 yrs, which comes out to exactly $180 mil.
This is brilliant. I can’t wait to have this available for pitchers, too.
Spectacular!
+1 on the request for pitchers to get this info too. Otherwise, this is brilliant.
Shouldn’t there be a league adjustment in there somewhere?
Does this mean I can finally get rid of my crappy WAR spread sheet?
Seriously, this is awesome. Great work!
Oh okay, great. So wRAA is already weighted like 5/4/3/2 or something like that? Thanks.
Have I mentioned how much I love Fangraphs lately
This site is so badass.
wRAA for 2009 is actually on the player’s page under their projections for next season, so you don’t even need to do any manual weighting.
Wow! This is the best Christmas present I could have asked for! Thank you, FanGraphs!
And God bless us! Every one!
Where exactly does the $4.5m figure come from? How is it calculated?
Is there someplace that shows exactly how the numbers for “batting” “fielding” “replacement” and “positional” are calculated?
Batting is wRAA, which is (wOBA – lgwOBA) / wOBAScale * PA and then a park adjustment is added. You can red about all the details here: http://www.insidethebook.com/ee/index.php/site/comments/woba_year_by_year_calculations/
Fielding is UZR added up for each year.
Replacement is (20/600) * PA
Positional is (12.5/162 * G * (C/PG)) + (7.5/162 * G * (SS/PG)) + (2.5/162 * G * ((P2B+P3B+CF)/PG)) + (-7.5/162 * G * ((RF+LF)/PG)) + (-12.5/162 * G * (P1B/PG)) + (-22.5/162 * G * (DH/PG)) where PG is total games at all positions and each position is games at that particular position.
Are there plans to add Value Wins to the leader boards anytime soon?
Would there be a possibility of later adjusting past dollars to some sort of base year? That way it would be easier to compare players from past ages as far as contracts go.
How did you guys come up with the 20 runs per 600 PAs as a benchmark for replacement-level players, and how do you calculate annual salary based upon that figure? That is, I see you noted $4.8M per win in 2008, but I’m not sure I understand how you arrived at that value.
Good work guys!
When will pitchers be added with their calculated for value?
Absolutely wonderful. This essentially means that I can stop bothering with cooking up my home-brew versions of these stats! Which leaves me a lot more time to do other things–very exciting!
-justin
“Would there be a possibility of later adjusting past dollars to some sort of base year? ”
That is un-needed. Just take the Win Value and multiply by 4MM$ per win. That gives you the $ value for some base year, like 2006 or something.
That is, 5 win in 2008 or 5 wins in 1978 is 5 wins. There’s no need to convert to “constant” dollars.
I would also like to know where the $4.5M comes from exactly. How is it determined?
This is a tremendous addition to your site. Fangraphs is now the first site I go to for saber stats. My only request when you get around to adding new stuff again is that you add PA to your database. It would help in doing any additional calculations we want to make on our own.
Lee
Hi, I need a reliable + fair metric to measure prospect’s early career success in the big leagues. Currently we’re using “Career WAR thru age 24 season.” I’m wondering why the WAR values I get from fangraphs are different from those on baseball-reference.com? Also, any other suggestions for fair metrics that combine both rate and counting stats?