2025-2026 Tigers Off Season Thread

[Shelton]

12 minutes ago, chasfh said:

My question is, how can the dWAR for DHs be anything but zero? How does a DH lose 1.7 games for his team without picking up a glove? The only way any of this comes close to making any sense for me is if 1Bs generally have negative dWARs and SS generally have positive dWARs because the average 1B loses runs for his team and the average SS gains runs for his team, taken against the average of all eight positions, solely by the nature of positional relativity. That would help explain the difference in dWAR between players at those two positions—but that still wouldn’t explain DH dWAR for me. I’m just trying to make the concept click for me mathematically to help me understand how individual players at positions contribute defensively to runs and wins on the field during games, versus accepting it as a purely economic concept applied primarily to roster management.

We can just go ahead and drop it here since our going round and round like this is no fun for anyone, not even me. I can pursue the question on my own in my spare time. 

So, I couldn’t help but dig around a bit last night following the earlier discussion, and I saw something that said basically “we have to assign something” so they kind of settled on a poor 1B. 
 

The actual number is scaled to the number of games spent at DH (possibly even down to innings), so playing 130 games gives a reduced negative value relative to guy that played 150. 

[chasfh]

7 minutes ago, Shelton said:

So, I couldn’t help but dig around a bit last night following the earlier discussion, and I saw something that said basically “we have to assign something” so they kind of settled on a poor 1B. 

The actual number is scaled to the number of games spent at DH (possibly even down to innings), so playing 130 games gives a reduced negative value relative to guy that played 150. 

The scaling part of it makes sense. That part is inside the question’s room. I’m having trouble getting through the question’s door.

[4hzglory]

2 hours ago, chasfh said:

My question is, how can the dWAR for DHs be anything but zero? How does a DH lose 1.7 games for his team without picking up a glove? The only way any of this comes close to making any sense for me is if 1Bs generally have negative dWARs and SS generally have positive dWARs because the average 1B loses runs for his team and the average SS gains runs for his team, taken against the average of all eight positions, solely by the nature of positional relativity. That would help explain the difference in dWAR between players at those two positions—but that still wouldn’t explain DH dWAR for me. I’m just trying to make the concept click for me mathematically to help me understand how individual players at positions contribute defensively to runs and wins on the field during games, versus accepting it as a purely economic concept applied primarily to roster management.

We can just go ahead and drop it here since our going round and round like this is no fun for anyone, not even me. I can pursue the question on my own in my spare time. 

I agree with you chas - which is why to me it would make more sense to make a postive base line adjustment for postitions like SS rather than negative base line adjustments to positions.

[Tiger337]

3 hours ago, chasfh said:

My question is, how can the dWAR for DHs be anything but zero? How does a DH lose 1.7 games for his team without picking up a glove?

They assign the positional adjustment to both owar and dwar which I agree is confusing.  So, they end up double counting and they don't add up to WAR.   If they just took the positional adjustment out of the dwar part, a full-time dh would have 0 dwar.