[RchW]

Originally Posted by jaa36

I did a quick test- set up a historical sim of 2013, set the injury rate to realistic modern day, and looked at the WAR output over the season. It was very different than Fangraphs WAR...

Position players accumulated 510 WAR, a little lower than the 570 in real life. However, pitchers accumulated 742 WAR, which is significantly higher than the 430 in real life.

In comparing the list of top pitchers ranked by WAR in real life vs OOTP, the OOTP pitchers were consistently credited with about 60% more WAR than their real-life counterparts. (FWIW, 742/430=1.72.) This was a pretty consistent pattern down the list, suggesting to me that the problem is not that the replacement level is set too low, but rather that pitchers are receiving proportionately too many WAR per inning pitched.

The hitters were actually pretty close in OOTP and real life. The top 20 OOTP hitters tended to have WARs about 10% higher than real life, though lower down the list they tended to have about 10% less WAR than real life.

Anyway, this does give pretty good evidence that OOTP WAR consistently overrates pitchers. For me, when considering the top players in the league, it means that I would probably consider a pitcher's actual value to be only half to two-thirds of his reported WAR. Said more scientifically, to better replicate the spread of WAR in real life, you would have to divide pitcher WAR by 1.92: (742/430)/(510/570).

This would also be a good methodology to figure out whether OOTP WAR underrates catchers, though the mechanism there (at least in OOTP 14) seemed to be systematically low zone ratings. I may look at that sometime.

Nice work. I feel somewhat embarrassed that I never checked this before. My MLB fictional based on 2009-2012 MLB output shows 554 WAR for batters and 534 for Pitchers. I do have more dominant starting pitchers by design. If I reduced SP stamina would that reduce pitcher WAR or are you saying the calculation is wrong?