No, I am not going to complain again about the league not letting me draft any free agents. I got one! Nestor Cortes, Jr., is going to be a diamond in the rough.
No, my complaint is against the Guardians of WAR. They seem to be letting their standards slip.
Back in 2013, Fangraphs and Baseball Reference reached a compromise and agreed to base their WAR stats on the same starting point. They agreed that a team of replacement players would, by definition, be expected to achieve a .294 winning percentage — that is, to win 47.7 games per year. Baseball Prospectus was left out of the WAR cartel, and persisted in defining a replacement team as one which would win “a little more than 50 games per year.”
But when I was trying to define what fWAR would see as an average WAR for the 2022, using the Fangraphs Depth Charts chart of teams’ predicted WAR, it was clear that an average team (which would by definition win half its games, going 81-81) was coming in at a 38.0 fWAR. Which means Fangraphs has let its estimate of replacement level sink to 43.0 wins per year.
Baseball Reference denies this is happening. It still lists fWAR and rWAR as tied to a .294 winning percentage (48-114). But if that is the case, FanGraphs is now predicting the average MLB team will win 86 games. Maybe the EFL, which usually averages more than 86 wins, is having more effect than we think?
Don’t be ridiculous.
Meanwhile, Baseball Prospectus has lost its glossary. Or, at least, I have, even though I am a “premium” subscriber. Nor has an internet search revealed a source to tell me what BP’s replacement level winning percentage is. So I can’t interpret this little chart of our BP WARPs as of the end of today’s EFLBay bidding (which I generated by entering our current, post-EFLBay rosters into BP’s Team Tracker, which is going to be where I will track our stats each week).
| BP WAR | |||||
| Batters | Pitchers | Team | Best players | ||
| DC | 27.2 | 11.2 | 38.4 | Harper 5.0 | |
| SS | 23.6 | 12 | 35.6 | Acuna 5.4 | |
| OD | 25.5 | 9.5 | 35 | Buehler, Buxton, Correa: 3.3 | |
| HD | 24.2 | 9.7 | 33.9 | Judge 4.1 | |
| PR | 20.5 | 11.2 | 31.7 | O’Neill 3.0 | |
| PP | 21.5 | 9 | 30.5 | SOTO 8.2 | |
| CK | 18 | 8.3 | 26.3 | Vlad 4.7 | |
| KD | 13.3 | 10.3 | 23.6 | Winker 3.4 | |
| FH | 17.6 | 4.9 | 22.5 | Betts 4.4 | |
| PA | 12.4 | 8.2 | 20.6 | Robert 3.7 | |
| BC | 14.8 | 3.9 | 18.7 | Seager 3.9 |
If replacement level is still “a little above 50 wins”, the premier EFL team would be in line to maybe win 90 games! I’ve looked at that Balkan roster; it’s way better than 90 wins. It looks like a 100-win team to me. No super-power-has-been would dare tangle with the DC Balkans, 2022 version! So has BP let 10 extra wins sneak into their definition of replacement level? Are fWAR and bWAR almost 20 games adrift from each other in their baselines?
Baseball Reference says BP does not tie replacement level to a particular number of team wins. This seems to be true: I took BP’s projected records for three teams (LAD, SEA, CIN) and added up their total bWAR predictions for each of the three teams. Apparently, a replacement-level Reds team would win 52.9 games, a replacement level Dodgers team wold win 54 games, but a replacement-level Mariners team would win 55.5 games. Either replacements are better in the PNW (probably because they’re attracted by natural beauty, relatively cool summers, etc.), or the M’s schedule is a lot softer.
Anyway, what we can say is this: the Balk are close to grabbing the pole position at the starting line of the 2022 EFL season. And they have more money in hand than any of their three closest pursuers. The Pears and the Kangaroos have LOTS of cash left — they are the league leaders in cash-on-hand — but they need to get lots of wins somewhere tomorrow evening to take the pole position away from the Balk. Can they do it? I doubt it… but we shall see.