2025 Win Shares for Qualified Players
Applying my Win Shares formula to the league results in some weird results
Regular readers are probably familiar with my Win Shares formula, which I apply to Astros players throughout the season.
I had a thought during the 2025 season to apply it to the entire league and see how it worked out.
Like most things, there was some good, some bad and some questions.
I hope readers can assist with figuring some of this out.
How Did I Get There
It’s a very simple premise, I’m divvying up a team’s wins based on a player’s fWAR.
Team Batting fWAR + Team Pitching fWAR = Total Team fWAR.
Total Team fWAR/Team Wins = fWAR per Win
Players fWAR/Team fWAR per Win = Win Shares
All Win Shares for a team should equal team fWAR.
Flaws Noted in Calculations
There are two major flaws I noted; perhaps you can find solutions.
Players on bad teams get a lot more credit, so you find a lot of Royals and Angels near the top. Intuitively, that seems wrong, but remember, Bobby Witt, Jr.’s 20.2 Win Shares for the Royals would be a different number if he played for some other team. This is designed to show his importance to his team, not the league. Thought about that way - Witt, Jr. meant more to his team than any other player - it doesn’t sound so ridiculous.
It doesn’t work well for teams with negative fWAR, like the 2025 Rockies, and frankly, I never contemplated such a scenario. Any ideas on how to address that are appreciated.
A handful of players played for multiple teams and there’s a manual way around that (split them by the date of transaction and list the player twice), but I wanted to put the idea out first and see if anyone had a better idea.
Given these limitations, neither players for multiple teams nor the Colorado Rockies were given Win Shares in this iteration.
2025 Win Shares - Top 30 - All Qualified Players
2025 Win Shares - Top 30 - Qualified Batters
2025 Win Shares - Top 30 - Qualified Pitchers
The Data
In total, 182 players were evaluated, comprising 133 batters and 49 pitchers.
Here they are, along with the calculations and team fWARs.
If you’re a fan of a particular team you can sort or filter by that team and put all the players for your team together.
Any thoughts, ideas, questions, or ruminations are welcome, either as a comment to this post or by message.
Conclusions
A quick reminder that this is not an attempt to say “Cal Raleigh was better than Aaron Judge”, but more an attempt to quantify their contributions to their respective teams.
When you think of it that way, Cal Raleigh is contributing 20.1 wins and the next Mariner on the list is Julio Rodriguez at 12.6, this makes more sense.
I need brains and data scientists to help me pull this all together!
As always, thanks for reading!