Zimmerman: Re-examining WAR’s defensive spectrum
From SABR member Jeff Zimmerman at The Hardball Times on May 26, 2015:
Wins Above Replacement (WAR) attempts to measure all the aspects of a player’s total value. For position players, that encompasses hitting, fielding, base running and a positional adjustment. Today, I am going to look at the last aspect of the equation, positional adjustments, to see if the values need a little tweaking.
The reason for the investigation is based on the actions of major league teams. They don’t value—or don’t seem to value — players the same way as do the writing and researching public. It seems teams put more emphasis on the corner guys, while the public sees players up the middle as having more value. I had an idea that teams may know a little more than the general public and decided to dig into the values.
The values used for the position adjustments we use currently come from this thread at the old Inside The Book blog. In the end, the following values were agreed upon and are the ones used by our sister site, FanGraphs.
Read the full article here: http://www.hardballtimes.com/re-examining-wars-defensive-spectrum/
Originally published: May 30, 2015. Last Updated: May 30, 2015.