Why You Can't Always Trust WAR

Looking At Dante Bichette In 1999

Why You Can't Always Trust WAR

You can’t always trust WAR.

In fact — WAR’s fielding component is questionable for any season before 2003.

You see — fielding calculations improved starting around 2003, when Defensive Fielding Runs became a thing. From Baseball Reference:

As time has gone on, our ability to track player movements on the field has increased — allowing us to get a better feel for who defends well and who defends poorly than ever before.

Baseball Reference’s WAR calculations for seasons between 1953 and 2003 use a different metric:

I’ve explained before how difficult it is to figure out precisely what Sean Smith did to calculate TZR. See this post, for example:

For this small study, I looked at the 9 1999 Colorado Rockies games that are available on YouTube. I looked at all plays involving Dante Bichette, using Baseball Reference’s game logs as a guide. These logs, of course, originated in Retrosheet records.

I made a few discoveries that should be concerning to anybody who wants to use this data to make statements about how good or bad a player was defensively before 2003:

There are inaccuracies. In fact, there are more data inaccuracies than you think. I found numerous cases where the ball was reported as being hit to the wrong field. In one example, an infield hit after a bobble by the shortstop was reported as line drive single to left field. The data was clearly never verified, and the problems I found were so egregious as to make me question its usefulness.

It’s not clear how blame should be assigned. Numerous balls that wound up being fielded by Bichette in left field clearly should have been fielded by Colorado’s third baseman, Neifi Pérez. One of Bichette’s problems was that the players in front of him simply couldn’t keep the ball on the infield. If you don’t believe me, just watch the video above. Pérez wound up with a -3 Rfield rating in 1999 — not great, but certainly nowhere as bad as the incredible -34 that Bichette got (which I believe is the all time record).

Baseball is a team sport. Bichette would have looked better if he had a competent center fielder next to him. In fact, Dante did look better in 2000 when he was with the Cincinnati Reds. He received a -2 Rfield rating that year, in part because Griffey’s speed would bail him out. We focus so much on individual defensive ratings that we forget that baseball defense is actually a team effort — and, if you’ve got a center fielder who has good enough range, even the slowest left fielder in the world won’t look that bad.

Most of “pitching” is actually defense. Again — just watch the clips and you’ll know what I mean. Colorado’s pitchers weren’t great in 1999, but they certainly would have looked better if they had competent fielders behind them. It pained me to see Jim Leyland come out to yank the pitcher after yet another ball got through Neifi Pérez on the left side of the infield.

I also learned that Bichette was dealing with knee problems pretty much for his entire career:

One wonders what he could have done if he actually gave his ACL time to heal. Of course, if he had taken that time off, chances are good that he never would have been a regular starter in the major leagues.