Anatomy of an Importance Score: Position Player Deep Dive

 Ultimately, my goal with calculating WAR totals is to come up with an average WAR per year because that's the baseline for my "Importance Score" metric that I use to judge the Hall of Fame candidates. So, for example, someone who produced 50 WAR in 10 seasons would have a baseline Importance Score of 5.0 before bonuses (which are given out for WS Rings, Cy Young Awards and MVP Awards.) 

To make the most accurate comparisons possible, I would ideally compare apples to apples aka shortstops to shortstops and designated hitters to designated hitters etc. To this end, I have sorted the HOF by position where "position" is defined by where they played the most ML innings rather than what WIS says on the site (because sometimes there's a difference.) As of this writing, there are no shortstops in the Stickball HOF and just one DH. This means that figuring out what the "average HOF DH" in Stickball world is fairly straightforward and also my next project...which makes that player, Yeico Johnson, the perfect case study for my "Anatomy" series of posts. Here's how that goes: 

Step 1: Calculate Estimated Offensive WAR 

• When I plug the stats from the HOF spreadsheet into this calculator, I find that he produced 1929 Runs Created in his career as a DH
• According to research that I did awhile back a "replacement level" DH should produce 70 RC/year and his 2433 games played = 15.02 full seasons...so 15.02 seasons * 70 RC/season means that a replacement level DH that got his amount of playing time would produce 1051.30 Runs Created
• That means that he is 1929-1051.30 = 877.7 Runs Created above "replacement" 
• At 10 runs/win, that gives him an "Estimated WAR" of 87.77 on offense 

Step 2: Calculate Estimated Defensive WAR

Once I have an Offensive WAR total, I shift my focus to defense. For this, I lean heavily on the FanGraphs Positional Adjustment.  Their career innings at each position and those adjustments from FanGraphs account for one part of the defensive WAR calculations and Errors, Plus Plays and Minus Plays account for the second part of the defensive WAR calculations. In the wOBA calculations that my more complicated spreadsheet uses a single is worth 0.31 Runs Created, so to make my life easy I do (Plus Plays-Errors-Minus Plays)*0.31 to get a "Raw Fielding Runs" total at each position. Then I combine the Raw Fielding Runs with the Positional Adjustments to get Total Fielding Runs which are then converted to Fielding WAR using the "10 runs per win" rule once again. My calculations for Johnson are below: 

In total, his Estimated Defensive WAR is -12.28 Wins Above Replacement. 

Step 3: Combine WAR totals....87.77 Offensive WAR & -12.28 Defensive WAR = 75.49 total for Estimated WAR

Step 4: Create An "Importance Score" Baseline... Johnson saw ML action in parts of 18 ML seasons, so 75.49 WAR/18 seasons = an average of 4.19 WAR/season. 

Step 5: Calculate "Importance Score" Bonus Points...the Importance Score is essentially borrowed from an MLB.com piece on ranking the best free agent signings of all-time, so I also basically borrowed their scoring system. That system awards 2 points for a WS Ring, 2 points for a Cy Young and 2 points for an MVP Award. They also award 1 additional bonus point for each year that a player recorded 4+ WAR, but I don't give those out until I've had a chance to calculate Park Adjusted WAR for each year of a player's career. Johnson didn't win any rings but he does have 3 MVP awards to his name, so that's 6 bonus points. 

Step 6: "Final" Importance Score with Estimated WAR... Johnson's Importance Score using Estimated WAR is 4.19 (baseline) + 6 (bonus points) = 10.19 total. The general guideline that I have given the HOF Committee is that any player in double digits is likely worthy of election, so Johnson clears that bar. 

(Step 7: Calculate Park Adjusted WAR for all seasons of a player's career)

(Step 8: Adjust baseline Importance Score using new WAR totals)

(Step 9: Award 1 bonus point for each season of 4+ WAR)