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Two formulations have the lion's share of the market for Wins Above Replacement player metrics on the baseball internet. There's a third robust model out there, though, and studying it can help us see why teams' choices sometimes defy the orthodoxy prescribed by the first two.
Though no longer the top destination for statistically-inclined baseball fans online, Baseball Prospectus was the first site to publish and maintain what we now know as WAR--though they have always called it WARP (Wins Above Replacement Player), and continue to do so. They now have a suite of rigorously-derived, state-of-the-art metrics designed to quantify each player's contributions within pitching (Deserved Run Average, or DRA), hitting (Deserved Runs Created, or DRC), and fielding (Defensive Runs Prevented, or DRP).
Unlike (for instance) Baseball Reference's and FanGraphs's offensive stats, DRC (and its well-adjusted cousin, DRC+) does not rely solely on actual results, adjusted for league and park factors. Unlike either other site's pitching value estimators, DRA (and DRA-) doesn't focus on actual runs allowed or on fielding-independent pitching (FIP). Unlike Statcast-fueled expected statistics you can find on Baseball Savant, none of these stats are directly adjusted based on the difference between actual outcomes and the average ones on similar batted balls (or opponents' batted balls).
Instead, these stats take a more granular, less dogmatic approach. Every plate appearance is accounted for in full. Thus, the framework accounts for the level of opposition and the friendliness of the circumstance in every opportunity being evaluated. This can lead to numbers that deviate sharply from what we saw actually happen, and that always makes fans uneasy, but again, teams sometimes make choices we consider inscrutable. It's by digging deeper into the data and seeing when a player's latent talent and actual contribution might differ from their surface-level production that we can start to explain (or even anticipate) those seemingly peculiar calls. Let's look at some places where the Twins' D-suite numbers and Baseball Prospectus WARP tell an importantly different story than the one more widely-embraced stats have been telling.
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