As I read James, Voomo, and as I understand WAR, the pythagorean factor does not figure into WAR, but WAR calculations will correlate to the pythagorean projection, rather than to actual wins, something very different from James’s Win Shares formula.

Yes and no; at no point in the WAR calculation is the “Pythagorean theorem” actually calculated. Rather, the formula attempts to account for things at the level of RUNS, rather than WINS; since the Pythagorean formula and WAR are both gathering their data from runs, they correspond much more closely to one another than they do to wins at a team level. So, in a way, those who are saying the PT is used are correct, as are those who are saying that it isn’t. Your mileage may vary on how you’d prefer to think about it.

Hi all – Haven’t had time to participate here for a while but wanted to add my thoughts to this discussion: 1) Seems to me that WAR and Win Shares are trying to answer two different questions. WAR is trying to answer the question: “How much better was Player X than a replacement level player?”, whereas Win Shares is trying to answer the question “What portion of a team’s wins was Player X responsible for?”. Part of the problem may be nomenclature. WAR might be better recast as PAR – Performance Above Replacement. 2) Win Shares has the potential to… Read more »

nsb, I don’t actually see any important divergence in our ways of thinking, so I have a hard time finding a focus of disagreement to analyze. Both of us seem to me to be pointing to the importance of sustaining awareness of the individual qualitative factors that bear on the human exercise of skill in concrete situations, which lie behind the elements that are homogenized to produce the abstract quantitative reductions we rely on for comparative assessments over the course of a 162-game season or 20-year career. I guess maybe the narrower point I’m trying to make is that while… Read more »

Regarding the value of hitting well in blowouts vs close games, sure, those late & close numbers certainly favor Altuve, and make Judge look like a rattled rookie. But to illustrate the point made by David P above, here’s an example of Judge hitting his 2nd homer of a game, a three-run shot with the Yanx ahead 8-4: https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/NYA/NYA201705020.shtml After that, NYY used the back end of it’s pen to close it out (Layne/Holder). And the following day, after coming back from 6-0, Chapman was fresh to polish off an 8-6 win. There are too many psychological and strategic variables… Read more »

I agree: it is a good point, reinforcing David’s. But once we move into the way a blowout changes the calculus by shifting value from today’s game to tomorrow’s, we can’t restrict that to one team. In the case Voomo cites, while Girardi’s first thought may have been that the Yankee bullpen A-team can rest up for tomorrow, Gibbons’ first thought may have been the same for the Blue Jay bullpen, so Loup comes in instead of, say, Leone, and the net “tomorrow” value becomes the difference in predicted performance quality by a better rested Yankee bullpen A-team vs. the… Read more »