Halos Heaven, a Los Angeles Angels community

After just over a year of playing, Trout's ranked 24 on Baseball-reference's list of Angels' career WAR by a position player. The Top 50 has two players on it with less than 1000 PA - Trout at 24, and Bourjos at 40.

Interesting to see relief pitchers cost a heck of lot more per WAR than their counterparts on the team. Also interesting to note that one of the considerations is whether or not " whether general managers are building better bullpens to save their jobs." I would assume this to be foolish, given the volatility of reliever performance year to year.

FanGraphs is now adding UBR as part of its WAR. It is under the "Bsr" stat column. This is retroactive from the 2002 season to the present, so fWAR has been recalculated. Some players, like Angel Pagan, really benefited from this. his 2010 fWAR was 4.9, but now it is 5.4.

A good discussion about replacement level going on over at Baseball Think Factory.

Sportscenter just used WAR to compare Tulowitzki to Hanley and Jeter. I think this is kind of a big deal.

You have 13 minutes.

Find out the player with the most WAR born on your birthday. Mine is Jack Stivetts who was born in 1868. Jack threw 440 innings and 40 complete games for the 1891 St. Louis Browns. (Via BBTF)

Zack looked like he was going to "make history" back in May. You know, the history books that cite pitcher WAR. So, I checked it out using my usual tricks that are actually borrowed from other people: Colin Wyers' BsR-FIP (why isn't this used more?), PythagenPat, etc. to see how he stacked up, and in the meantime, I rank a number of other great seasons. And, yes, this includes some stuff from before the "FanGraphs Era" (2002-).

Two interesting posts/dscussions at The Book Blog today. The first (the one linked above) begins as a discussion of J.C. Bradbury's claim that Garret Anderson is a league average player, but what is more interesting are the comments that follow regarding about whether or not replacement level is the proper baseline to use when valuing baseball players. The second has to do with the way batted balls are recorded in the data used in fielding metrics like UZR, plus/minus, PMR, etc., and the possible bias/inconsistency in that data, using Ichiro's defensive stats as an example.