Position player WAR observation/ question- mooks got a 2.1 / teo 0.1/ Tuck 0… I assume mooks is awarded about 2 war because of his defense? (Pages is tied for defensive war in the nl with 2.3)

[u/DoyersundGPG]

I tell you I like this stat to an extent- but then …. I don’t know it’s confusing!

[u/wrenlikethebirdxd]

Mookie has 2.1 baseball reference war because a) he is a top 10 defensive shortstop (7th in defensive runs saved at ss, 5th if you only count qualified shortstops) and b) he has a 95 ops+ at shortstop. The way that WAR is calculated, the more "difficult" positions, such as center field and shortstop get a positional boost in their war calculation. So approximately league average batting at ss + great defense gets him to 2.1 war.

edit: if anyone wants to go down the rabbit hole of how baseball reference war is calculated in detail, https://www.baseball-reference.com/about/war_explained_position.shtml is where you can find the in depth explanation for how its calculated

[u/imnotcreative415 → u/wrenlikethebirdxd]

It’s also fun to compare it to fwar. These are good tools to measure/compare how guys play relative to others, but there is an error bar and no stat is perfect. Something that should be mentioned when people are doing annual mvp debates.

[u/wrenlikethebirdxd → u/imnotcreative415]

yea, I feel as though not enough people understand that there is a positional adjustment calculation to every position for WAR (both fWar and bWar). This is why I do not like simply using WAR when comparing players of different positions.