During the 2018-19 MLB offseason, Baseball Prospectus revamped the offensive component of its main player-performance metric, WARP. For some people, this resulted in a significant alteration in the way they thought about the then-more-recent performances of some of the game’s top players, chiefly Miguel Cabrera and Mike Trout and the divisive MVP races of 2012-13 between those two.
Now it’s FanGraphs’ turn to update its player-performance metric, WAR (a/k/a “fWAR”). Their tweaks don’t appear to be as methodologically fundamental as what BP did to WARP, but they did result in some slight– less than a win per season at the extremes– adjustments to players’ career fWAR numbers dating back to 2016. Among those who some people now will think are better players than they thought they were a few days ago (i.e., those whose fWAR numbers increased the most) are a batch of current and (mostly) former Detroit Tigers:
- J.D. Martinez: +2.9
- Tucker Barnhart: +2.0
- Gio Urshela: +1.3
- Austin Romine: +1.1
Avisail Garcia, meanwhile, was docked 1.4 fWAR, and Leonys Martin dropped 1.1 fWAR.
The full list of players seeing a shift of at least one win in their 2016-23 fWAR totals is here.
___________________________________________________________________
Previously
Baseball Notes: Offensive Discrimination
Baseball Notes: Current Issues Roundup
Baseball Notes: Baseball’s growth spurt, visualized
Baseball Notes: The WAR on Robbie Ray
Baseball Notes: Save Tonight
Baseball Notes: Current Issues Roundup
Baseball Notes: The In-Game Half Lives of Professional Pitchers
Baseball Notes: Rule Interpretation Unintentionally Shifts Power to Outfielders?
Baseball Notes: Lineup Protection
Baseball Notes: The Crux of the Statistical Biscuit
Baseball Notes: Looking Out for Number One
Baseball Notes: Preview
Related
Miguel Cabrera continues to shine in the DRC era
Miguel Cabrera further bolstered by sabermetric update
Trout vs. Cabrera, and Aging with DRC+ (via Baseball Prospectus)
Miguel Cabrera in the bWAR era
ALDLAND 