Who else gets confused by all the new stats?

wRC+ is supposed to be an all-in-one offensive stat — it stands for “weighted runs created,” I think — normalized for park factors. And it’s also scaled so that 100 is league average. So an average wRC+ is always exactly 100. If you go 0-for-everything your wRC+ is 100, but in general I think a wRC+ of 150 is supposed to be 50% better than average - which is ridiculously good.

Pujols’s career wRC+ is 167. In 1992 Barry Bonds’s wRC+ was 203; in 2002 it was 245.

Here’s the Fangraphs primer on it.

And it is essentially a way of separating regular slugging percentage from batting average, giving a clearer picture of power than SLG (FWIW, SLG=TB/AB, and the league average last year was around .400. Above .450 is very good and above .500 is outstanding, while .350 would be considered poor for most positions). You can think of ISO as “isolating” the effect of singles out of SLG. ISO it is calculated as TB/AB - H/AB. You can essentially fudge it by just taking SLG and subtracting AVG, with the only issue here being that you’re dealing with numbers already rounded to the thousandth (three decimal places), so you might be a thousandth or so off in your final result. The major league average in 2011 was roughly .145. Anything below .100 is sub-standard, and anything above .200 is outstanding.

For example, Lance Berkman slugged .547 in 2011 while Mark Teixiera slugged .494, yet their ISOs were identical at .246 because Berkman hit .301 while Texieria hit only .248. So essentially their rate of extra bases per AB was similar, but Berkman hit quite a few more singles, thus we conclude they had similar power even though Berkman did a much better job hitting for AVG.

On the other extreme, a slap singles hitter like Juan Pierre routinely posts ISOs below .075, which is a pretty large outlier amoung major leaguers.

ISO also tends to correlate very strongly with HR/FB, which is another less common measure of raw power for hitters. HR/FB is what it sounds like, its the rate of Fly Balls a hitter hits that turn into Home Runs. The major league average is typically around 9-10%, with 5% being poor and 14% being very good. HR/FB tends to be more stable in smaller sample sizes because it doesn’t include extra base hits on balls in play (doubles and triples), but at the same time, leaving doubles and triples out of the measurement entirely can mean it doesn’t accurately capture gap hitters, though this is less common than one might think intuitively. Also, HR/FB is essentially useless for minor leaguers, since there is no baseline definition for FB, so instead you may sometimes see HR/BIA used (BIA=Ball In Air), which thought a bit noisier thanks to the inclusion of line drives, is also a bit more objective in nature, since its much harder to mix up a ground ball from a non-ground ball. I’m not sure what the HR/BIA league averages tend to be, but educated guess would be around 6% for major leaguers.

Fangraphs WAR doesn’t use UZR150 in the calculations, just the actual UZR. UZR150 is the UZR rating normalized (expanded or contracted) to what a player’s UZR would be over a 150 game period. So, if the UZR is 25 or so and the player participated in 162 games, their UZR150 would be something like 22.5. If the UZR was 0.1 for 50 games, it’d be about 0.3 for UZR150.

But, again, fWAR just uses the actual UZR number, which is appropriate for the other stats, which are a reflection of play time. wRAA is based on wOBA but also games played.

I mean a great Catcher for example maybe say Buster Posey or Briann McCann is always going to be a tad/ smidge undervalued in WAR because catchers UZR is a bit oFF, and i think its clear.

Currently, there is no catcher based UZR at all. Catchers are actually graded based on a stat they call rSB. Here’s Dave Appelman to explain it:

http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/index.php/catcher-defense-in-war/

Posey did get a knock on him for UZR because he played first base a few times. You’ll note that McCann’s “fielding” line in the WAR section of his Fangraphs stat page is the exact same number as his rSB.

I also don’t care for the Fangraphs $ figures…. of saying so and so was worth 16 Million last season and so and so was worth 24 Million last season… To me, they’re taking that whole entire product and basing it on as if all 30 Teams had an even $100 Million payroll WHICH just simply isn’t true for teams like the Marlins, Rays, Athletics and others.

You’re misunderstanding the purpose behind that. The idea of providing dollar value doesn’t mean player X should get paid Y amount based on their WAR, it simply means that this is how many dollars worth of WAR they produced. It is a way to show how some players have produced either better or worse than their actual paycheck gave them. So if, say, Adrian Beltre is being paid $14 million a year, but puts up 5 WAR, he’s putting up the same value as what would cost a team $20 million normally. It is based on what teams pay, based on that year’s transactions, for every win above replacement. Thus, it fluctuates year in and year out as teams get more spendy or more frugal. Thus, the real purpose is more to show ‘excess’ value or loss based on the player vs. the league. It really doesn’t serve any other purpose and does not at all say that soandso should get paid what they produced in value.

“Also Fangraphs believed Fielders’ Value was almost $ 29 Million in 2009, and while that was his career year to date, i think its a bit luny.”

It was based on his WAR x what teams payed for 1 WAR’s worth of value. Fangraphs has nothing to do with that. The numbers are reflections of the league’s spending practices.

“and K per 9 , K per BB , BB per 9 and GB % , Hrs allowed for pitchers are a few i still like”

Starting to find out that K% (strikeouts as a percentage of batters faced) and BB% (same) is becoming more revealing as a measure of a player’s skill than K/9 or BB/9. But the difference is only noticeable for a few players.

Throwing out would-be basestealers is relatively easy to figure out, but the rest of a catcher’s defense is really hard to decipher. We can also calculate passed balls, though the league sometimes mislabeled a passed ball as a wild pitch and vice versa. Other intangible aspects, such as pitch framing, pitch calling, and whatnot are harder to figure out, but Mike Fast did a heck of a study on it (here: http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=15093) and progress is being made, so… maybe one day.

In the meantime, only thing we have to go on is the easy to empirically calculate stuff, so that’s what we do. Incidentally, catchers received one of the higher positional adjustments because of their importance, so they already benefit in WAR calculations that way. This is why a bad hitting catcher can still be worth a lot in WAR calculations and why the best hitting catchers get really high marks. Thus, maybe defensive calculations just aren’t necessary for a catcher. They’re important, we can just leave it at that.

UZR seems more unforgiving when it comes to defense, while it seems to overrate other guys incredibly high. What we’re finding out is that UZR’s biggest, and probably only, problem seems to lie with outfield defense. This is why guys like Gardner, Gutierrez, and others are posting ridiculously high UZRs. This isn’t completely whacked, since by just watching them you know that they’re really good at their jobs. The question is, though, is a CF that good at his job worth THAT MUCH MORE than a SS good at his job?

To expound, in 2011, according to Fangraphs, the highest UZR rating for a SS was 11.9 posted by Alexei Ramirez. Troy Tulowitzki was 7th on the list with his 7.3. So while you can say that Tulowitzki looks bad compared to DRS and TZ rating, compared to other SS, he’s right up there with the top of his peers. UZR isn’t saying he’s a bad defender at all, just that the numbers aren’t as gaudy as you’re going to get from some other metrics. One of the reasons that short stop defense is graded so highly against a bigger curve is the importance of the position. A good short stop, in conventional wisdom, has to be the best defender on the diamond. Thus, in theory, a really good short stop would make an amazing second or third baseman, and so on.

Meanwhile, the highest outfielder was Brett Gardner with a whopping 25.2 UZR rating, playing primarily in left field. The next highest OUTFIELDER is Ellsbury with 15.6 UZR playing primarily in center field. In fact, the next highest position player, PERIOD, behind Gardner is Dustin Pedroia at second base with a 17.9 WAR. I’m sure Gardner is good at his job, like I said above, but is he that good that he was worth over two-and-a-half wins with just his glove? Other defense metrics love him, too, so maybe there’s something to it. But that seems like a highly ridiculous number no matter how you slice it. And it certainly overrates a player who is, otherwise, a speed demon with a modest bat.

I think, inevitably what is going to happen is that MGL is going to redo the calculations to balance the outfield defense more in line with the infield defense. That might sound like punishing some players for their position, but there is something to be said for playing an “easier” spot on the diamond.