WARPed on WAR: How each site’s WAR views the Colorado Rockies

Baseball Prospectus

Baseball Prospectus does things quite differently from Fangraphs and Baseball Reference. For starters, their Park Factors are going to be different from the other two sites. For most other teams it’s not going to always be as drastic, but here’s where it really affects the Rockies:

Fangraphs and Baseball Reference have a Park Factor for Coors Field at 115 and 118 while Baseball Prospectus has it narrowed down to 113. Essentially, the lower the park factor the better for Rockies hitters and Baseball Prospectus certainly favors Rockies hitters.

They also use a stat called DRC+ (Deserved Runs Created) to further help evaluate hitters that also takes into effect things like the level of talent that a hitter is facing and their expected contribution instead of simply averaging out what happened.

Think of it as a stat like wRC+ and OPS+, but BP has worked to try to improve it. You see general differences with Rockies hitters such as Nolan who had a wRC+ in 2019 of 128 while his DRC+ sat at 136. This helps bump up his value through Baseball Prospectus as they view him as a better hitter than the other two sites.

The other main difference with WARP is how it measures players defensively. Yet again, they use a different defensive stat call FRAA (Fielding Runs Above Average) that ignores stats like DRS and UZR and instead simply focuses on each individual play and all the contributing factors to it (a pitcher’s GB%, batter handedness, park factors, etc) and sees how many times more a player made that play compared to league average.