Reddit mentions of Win Shares

First off, sorry for the very tardy reply.

Bill James created the formula for comparing players. To quote the product description from its Amazon.com page, "Win Shares, a revolutionary system that allows for player evaluation across positions, teams and eras, measures the total sum of player contributions in one groundbreaking number. James' latest advancement in the world of statistical analysis is the next big stepping-stone in the "greatest players of all-time" debate."

According to what I've been told a good portion of the 729 pages of the book is the formula. (Yikes!)


As I mentioned in my previous post, I tried to reverse engineered the formula, as actual Win Shares are hard to find online. The Hardball Times have the stats from 2004 to 2008, here.


My formula proved to be pretty accurate compared to the real Win Shares, (after checking, better than my original post let on. Correlations of 0.964454241 for batting and 0.975917803 for pitching).

As well, when comparing batters with pitchers I made a simple adjustment where a score of 1 represents an average batter or pitcher. (WinShares+)


You asked about Blue Jays, here are my WinShares+ for our 2011 Blue Jays:

Jose Bautista 4.452374202
Yunel Escobar 2.216505966
Adam Lind 1.886325449
Ricky Romero 1.256942346
Eric Thames 0.962502621
Carlos Villanueva 0.91155779
Brandon Morrow 0.771125554
Jose Molina 0.73926944
Edwin Encarnacion 0.733394727
Corey Patterson 0.724255056
J.P. Arencibia 0.723165948
Rajai Davis 0.620873494
Juan Rivera 0.596676048
Travis Snider 0.592509269
Jason Frasor 0.493483763
Jon Rauch 0.475365161
Marc Rzepczynski 0.449524589
Aaron Hill 0.412014019
Casey Janssen 0.388963643
Luis Perez 0.324981719
Mike McCoy 0.316367653
Brett Cecil 0.30566225
Octavio Dotel 0.292764748
Jesse Litsch 0.275750902
Jo-Jo Reyes 0.247845682
Shawn Camp 0.209237456
Kyle Drabek 0.201235745
Frank Francisco 0.182529487
John McDonald 0.157193379
David Cooper 0.056151869
Zach Stewart 0.052773517
Jayson Nix 0.034588224
Mike McCoy (P) -0.003304916
Scott Richmond -0.021442667
David Purcey -0.041792814
Chris Woodward -0.045259959


Edited: Formatting.

You need an intermediate understanding of statistics to see why win shares are misinterpreted. The simple version is that wins are highly correlated with win shares (ie the covariance between wins and win share is not 0, even worse the covariance between win share for two players on the same team is not 0, this makes all popular interpretations of winshares largely invalid)

Here is the primer that invents/discusses win-shares from the baseball perspective: link. Bill James, a statistician for the Red Sox, is the guy who invented the concept of win shares.

Homoscedasticity is an assumption for t-test, which essentially compares two values, ie kinda analogous when you are trying to compare win shares for two players.