Tuesday, May 08, 2018
Personal Replacement Level
?I'm asking this question on twitter. The three responses will tell you the kind of fan you are.
?
If you are willing to trade your 6-0 player to get back a 6-4 player, what you are saying is that you like the idea of a full time player, and trying to fill in for your injured superstar would likely add no wins at all. In effect, your replacement is, at best, an 0-4 player. All you care about is wins, and you don't care about losses. Less than 20% of the fans leaned this way.
On the other end of the spectrum is that trading away your 6-0 player requires you get back and 8-2 player. Both these players are 3 wins above average. The first guy needed 6 games and the other guy needed 10 games. And in order to be equivalent, the 6-0 player has to be paired with a 2-2 player. In other words, value is determined relative to average, where average has no value. This would make sense if you had an easy supply of low cost average players, say a stacked farm system. Maybe 10% of the clubs can think like this... maybe 20%? Not much higher. Of fans who went this way, it was 35%.
In-between is where we find the remaining nearly 50% of the fans, equating a 6-0 player to a 7-3 player. In other words, pairing a 6-0 player with a readily available 1-3 player has the same impact as having your full time 7-3 player. That establishes a replacement level at 0.250 win%. That is 25% of 6+0 is 1.5, and so a 6-0 player is +4.5 wins above this baseline. And 25% of 7+3 is 2.5, and so a 7-3 player is +4.5 wins above this baseline.
And that's what WAR does: establishes the baseline point to turn a two-dimensional number, like 6-0 or 7-3, into a one-dimensional number, so that we can agree on how to compare them. We don't HAVE to agree on this baseline, which is why it's incumbent on everyone to specify their replacement level. Until the reader comes to the table with an explicit replacement level, we go with what we've established some 15 years ago: a 0.300 win% level.
And by the way, as of the time of the above poll, the weighted average of 6-4, 7-3, 8-2 is 7.2 wins and 2.8 losses. And to make that record equivalent to a 6-0 record means creating a baseline level of 1.2 wins and 2.8 losses. And 1.2 / (1.2 + 2.8) is ... 0.300!
In other words, hundreds of voters independently arrived at the commonly accepted replacement level.
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