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Thankfully this offseason we don’t have Major League Baseball owners delaying the start of 2023 through a lockout, but if you can think back to 2021 when that was the reality, an interesting proposal was made. Reporting from The Athletic’s Evan Drellich and Ken Rosenthal highlighted a desire for the league to do away with the current arbitration system. The plan was to instead calculate bonuses and increases for player salaries based on accumulated WAR from any given season.
As things stand currently, teams have control over players for six years. They don’t become arbitration eligible immediately, and therefore are only offered salary increases based on the assessed league minimum. This is why players pushed so hard for increased pay, given so many are not rewarded with substantial draft bonuses. A player may work their way through the minor leagues making less than minimum wage, and then never see a true payday until years into their big league career (that’s if they make it that far).
The problem with using Fangraphs’ WAR valuation to determine paychecks is that baseball owners are then placing importance on an outside entity to control the livelihood of their workforce. It seems counterproductive to players, as they would no longer be able to argue in favor of themselves based on other production, and WAR is biased in terms of creating value for relievers or starting pitchers in conjunction with those that play every day.
In The Athletic’s report it said, “Agreeing to a system that keeps the best players under team control, and at a set scale of pay, for potentially a longer period of time than six years — the current time it takes to get free agency — could lessen those players’ earnings in the long run. And, if the top-earning players in the sport don’t have a way to grow their salaries, then other players’ salaries also might not grow over time.”
While that didn’t ultimately come to pass in the newly agreed to CBA, Major League Baseball has now introduced a new statistic.
Enter aWAR.
Currently there is bWAR, which alludes to Baseball Reference’s calculation, and fWAR, which alludes to Fangraphs. aWAR, as described by MLB, is a straightforward average of the two numbers. It is literally defined as “average of fWAR and bWAR.”
The immediate problem here is the nuance. Neither calculation is the same because both companies weigh certain aspects of performance differently. A player could be seen better by one or the other, and therefore have that as a negotiating tactic to their advantage. With this being sent out in a memo as an official statistic, MLB has effectively sought to implement their WAR proposal within the constraints of arbitration.
As players look to file at a higher number than their team may view them worthy, the argument on the team’s side can be made officially around the concepts of an accepted aWAR statistic. Of course team’s could’ve done this on their own previously, but it would’ve been a hypothetical suggestion with no one having to adhere to the aWAR principal.
It will be interesting to see how writers utilize this new statistic, and how much we hear about during the upcoming arbitration cycle. It’s certainly not nothing that the league introduced this statistic in advance of those discussions for teams and players in 2023, and that can’t be something seen as favorable for the MLBPA.
There doesn’t seem to be a reason that aWAR would be advertised on either Baseball Reference or Fangraphs sites as it would counteract the reason to have their own statistic featured prominently, and would provoke a reason to consult the other entity. Either way, this seems like the league saying one of those things they do but shouldn’t say out loud.
Let’s see how this goes. What do you think?
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