In the nearly 25 years since Sean Forman founded Baseball-Reference while finishing his PhD at the University of Iowa, the website has become the site of record for professional baseball.
It has generated more than a billion page views in a year. Its player pages serve as the front page for careers. And in the days after this year’s World Series, those player pages underwent a small, but significant, change — one noticed by hardcore baseball fans late last week.
For the first time, the website added its version of the statistic WAR — or wins above replacement — to the “standard batting” table that sits near the top of each player page. The metric is now the first statistic listed on each individual season, before games played, plate appearances, at-bats, runs and hits.
The change — which was part of a slew of updates on the site — is the latest example of WAR’s prominence in the sport, influencing everything from MVP voting to Hall of Fame voting to salary projections.
“When we first added WAR to the site, it was a relatively unknown metric,” said Adam Darowski, product director at Sports Reference, which runs Baseball-Reference and its other sites. “But obviously, it has grown over time.”
In this way, it’s a minor change. But just as stats like OPS were once not listed on the back of a baseball card — that changed on Topps cards in 2004 — Baseball-Reference’s “standard batting” table offers a seal of approval for which statistics are considered among the most mainstream. The addition, Darowski said, came after both discussion and feedback from users.
If you want to consume the career statistics of, say, Barry Bonds, the easiest way is to pull up his player page on Baseball-Reference. And if you do that now, one of the first things you will see is that he led the league in WAR in 11 different seasons. Ten years ago? This kind of change might have caused a negative response. But it’s a different time now.
“People are noticing the new features coming to tables more than we thought,” Darowski said. “It’s a great feeling to launch something and I haven’t seen any bit of negative feedback.”
Baseball-Reference originally started publishing its version of WAR before the 2009 season. Evolving from decades of sabermetric research, the all-encompassing metric measured a player’s offense, defense and base running in “runs above replacement” and then converted that number into wins. Across the last decade, the number has become the greatest predictor of Most Valuable Player voting.
The site previously listed a player’s most recent season WAR and career WAR under a summary heading near the top of the page. But year-by-year WAR totals were relegated to a “Player Value-Batting” table lower on the page.
According to Darowski, the recent updates represent the site’s most significant change since 2017, when the site underwent a redesign to offer a better experience to mobile users. In addition to WAR, they also added the statistics rOBA and Rbat+ to the standard batting table. (Those statistics are the Baseball-Reference equivalents of wOBA and wRC+, which can be found at FanGraphs.) Among the other changes: The years on the standard batting table now link to that season’s game log, a feature borrowed from Basketball-Reference.
Many of the changes, Darowski said, may not be noticed at first glance. But the goal was to sync up the presentation and many of the features from Sports-Reference’s various sites.
“The focus on this major project has been standardization,” Darowski said. “And really, it’s all about laying the groundwork to make future updates. There are things we’d like to build on top of the sites in the future.”
(Top photo: Brad Mangin / MLB via Getty Images)
