Here are the top ten pitchers in Oriole history in terms of WAR (for these purposes, WAR as calculated by Baseball-Reference.com)
There he is, #10 all-time.If Guthrie posts his average season in 2011 (3.7 WAR), that will put him above Scott McGregor and Mike Cuellar and right behind Milt Pappas. Another decent season would put him in the neighborhood of Dave McNally.
Obviously, he won't reach the elite heights of Mike Mussina or Jim Palmer but I was quite surprised to see how well he measured up against the likes of Oriole legends Cuellar and Boddicker already.
Guthrie is under team control for the 2011 and 2012 seasons. Did you ever think you would see Jeremy Guthrie in the Oriole Hall of Fame?
Steve Barber, Mike Boddicker, Scott McGregor, Mike Cuellar and Dave McNally are all in there. Guthrie could be too.
You really should use aWAR (the average of Rally' WAR and FanGraphs' WAR.)
ReplyDeleteBy fWAR, Guthrie has about 9 WAR for the O's. In that list, he's behind Daniel Cabrera, Rodrigo Lopez and Sidney Ponson. He doesn't seem like an all-time great in the context of that list.
Sure, fWAR misses a lot of pitcher seasons (you might have to just set Palmer's fWAR equal to his rWAR, or something), but you're missing out on a lot of data if you're just using rWAR.
That would be nice but for this comparision, fWAR is not practical since it doesn't measure seasons prior to UZR or Total Zone scores.
ReplyDeleteAlso, Guthrie is a rare breed and is penalized (unfairly, I feel) by fWAR for his FIP. But as I talked about here , Guthrie seems to have the repeatable skill of outperforming his FIP every season, all while pitching in front of a defense that is not particularly good, to be kind.
So for this purpose, rWAR works pretty well.