Forman: The relationship between WAR and team wins
From SABR member Sean Forman at Baseball-Reference.com on August 8, 2012:
This question came up on the SABR-L newsgroup for SABR members.
I’m almost reluctant to ask this seemingly obvious question, but I’m puzzled:
What does Wins Above Replacement Value mean in terms of team success? Or put another way, if a team consists of nothing but replacement players, or -0- value WAR players, how many games does that theoretical team win? Surely not -0- games. Nor 81.
Here was my reply:
We have a pretty exhaustive intro to the metric here.
http://www.baseball-reference.com/about/war_explained.shtml
A replacement level team is set on our site to win 52 games in the year, so there are about 30*162 * (.500-.320) = 875 wins above replacement available for the league as a whole.
Here is an example conversion of WAR to team wins.
Read the full article here: http://www.sports-reference.com/blog/2012/08/the-relationship-between-war-and-team-wins/
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Originally published: August 8, 2012. Last Updated: August 8, 2012.