The Best Players In Baseball 2004
January 11, 2004
The Baseball Crank establishes the Win Share level of each active player in 2004, using the past three years on a weighted basis.
Another one of the best blogs around is The Baseball Crank. In his latest entry, he reviews the established Win Shares of all major league players, by weighting each of the last three years.
As he notes, the absence of Vladimiar Guerrero from the list is surprising, so I did a little research into Guerrero’s Win Shares.
In 2000, Guerrero created 153 runs, but only generated 29 Win Shares. As a counter example, Pujols created 171 runs this year, and generated 41 Win Shares. Seems like Guerrero should have generated more than 29, doesn’t it?
My first assumption was that the Expos underperformed their Pythagorean projection, but that’s not true. They actually finished one game ahead of their projection.
My second assumption was that the Expos pitchers’ hitting was particularly bad, dragging down Vlad’s Win Shares, but that’s also not true. Expos’ pitchers were about league-average hitters (for pitchers) in 2000.
Here’s one factor: Guerrero batted slightly worse with runners in scoring position (.322 vs. .353 in other situations).
The biggest difference between Pujols and Guerrero, though, was the run scoring environment. The National League scored an average of 5 runs a game in 2000, vs. an average of 4.6 this year.
As another example, the AL scored an average of 4.86 runs/game this past year, Carlos Delgado created 147 runs and generated 32 Win Shares. Project these onto Guerrero’s stats in 2000, and it’s easy to see how he could wind up with 29 Win Shares.
By the way, Vlad only had 467 plate appearances in 2003, with 19 Win Shares. If you spread those totals over his season-high playing time (677 plate appearances), he would have generated 28 Win Shares.
All of which makes you realize what a great feat 30 Win Shares is.
Guerrero is certainly a great player, but he is not quite as great as his general reputaion as a player seems to be. Here are 3 additional factors that appropriately restrain his win shares totals:
1) Montreal is now a pretty extreme hitters park (and San Juan is even more extreme). Thus some of the numbers he has put up are not as impressive as they seem on the surface.
2) Guerrero hits into a large number of double plays, 24, 20 and 18 the last 3 seasons.
3) While Guerrero has stolen 86 bases the last 3 seasons, he has also been caught stealing 41 times, an unimpressive 68% base stealing percentage.
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