Does the current WAR system significanly overvalue SS's and undervalue Pitching & Catching? Using WAR to project Wins by Team and by Team position.

When I think of WAR, I tend to think of it truly in terms of "Wins".  So when i see that a player is rated an 8 WAR player, to me I'm literally thinking this guy will get my team approximately 8 additional wins.  Otherwise we should really just rename this "best player metric".  Not that anything is wrong with a best player metric, but lets not try to "connect" it to wins, if it's not really connecting to wins right?  So I wanted to see how accurate this really is.  So I downloaded the team WAR data from fangraphs from 1985-2013 both hitting and pitching. I summed up the hitting & pitching WAR and plotted them versus the team's wins that year.  Hoping for a strong correlation.

Hitting Stats       Pitching Stats

You can see from the chart above, a correlation of 0.7525 was recorded. Great! This also shows a replacement level team is about a 46.5 win team.  Not unreasonable. Things make sense.

So then I figured, maybe we could try to do this same drill, but instead of using complete team calculations, what if we used individual position components?  Would that result in a more accurate result?  It's possible, since the sum of a team's individual players WAR values is not necessarily representative of the team WAR calculation alone.  So what would this look like?  So i went to fangraphs again and downloaded the same dataset, except by position this time, instead of by team.  For example, i've linked the catcher data below.

Catcher data

I went through built a comprehensive list, tagging each player's position.  For pitchers the fangraphs link was comprehensive, so i determined the RP and SP tag by assigning anybody who had >75% of their games also be games-started, as a SP, and all others as RPs.  In some cases players showed up in multiple categories (i.e. Mike Napoli was listed as a C and 1b in 2011).  In those events, i simply equally split their total seasonal WAR evenly across however many positions.  So if an 6 WAR player showed up as a C & 1b & DH in a single season, each position was credited with 2 WAR. This prevented double or triple counting of players.   So how did this workout?

This actually projected slightly better. I do mean slightly 0.7559 R2 versus the 0.7525 R2 when viewed as just team hitting and pitching.  It also predicted basically the same replacement level team, a 46 win one.  So you could probably make the argument that it's slightly more accurate to try actually use the sum of the individual players WARs on the team instead of just a team calculation.  But it is so close it's probably not worth the extra effort for most exercises.

This then led me to think, why not try to tie wins in as a multi-variable regression using all the positions individually instead of just a linear one where we come Wins to some singular WAR total?

Since i already had the data i gave it a shot. 

You can see here that we actually arrive at an R2 of a bit above 76%.  So this is ever so slightly more predictive again.  Again you also see that the intercept ends up very close to other methods, at 45.4 Wins for a replacement level team.  But bottom line, it's basically as accurate as the other approaches.  However, what I do find interesting in this approach is that it actually appears to value RP highest and the SS position the lowest.   And those values are substantial. Very substantial.

You could probably make the argument then that SS's are being overvalued by the present system. This could possibly mean the defensive position adjustment value for SS defense is too high.  Reasons aside, this seems like a very legit finding, as the "WAR" metric appears to overstate SS value by 26.7% (1/0.789).  So for example, a typical fangraphs contract analysis approach can use a standard $/WAR value for projections into the future. Yet from this perspective, spending that $/WAR on a SS will have you significantly overweighting the benefit you'll get from that SS.  To a lesser extent that would also apply to 2b, CF and RFs.  

Conversely, RP, SP and Catcher values are actually quite undervalued.  This would certainly lend some credence to the approaches of "smaller" and "rebuilding" teams to date (think Royals and Astros, even last years Yankees) who have focused, among other things, on RP groups.  

Based on this data, it would seem that focusing on pitching, specifically RP, and getting an excellent catcher, would be the best ways to focus on turning around a team.  

While this wasn't what I went into this analysis looking for, it was a fairly surprising result. Yet one that seems to be in line with the approach many teams are currently taking.  

I do understand this could be refined even further to re-weight the players WAR values exactly correctly based upon their actual number of games at each position instead of the approach i took which was just to equally distribute those values.   Given the size of that specific sample and what type of change we'd be talking about, i would find it unlikely that would move the needle substantially here though. But i think it's an interesting finding.