We need a new stat for pitchers.
Why? Well, obviously, because of the often glaring differences between bWAR and fWAR for pitchers.
For example, our Yankee fan "friend" recently stated "You lost Wacha and Eovaldi from your rotation and added back Kluber, who isn’t very good."
So I looked up their WAR numbers for last year.
Kluber fWAR 3.0 bWAR 0.7
Eovaldi fWAR 1.0 bWAR 1.5
Wacha fWAR 1.5 bWAR 3.3
(Conventional numbers for Old Schoolers)
Kluber 10-10 4.34 164.0 IP
Eovaldi 6-3 3.87 109.1 IP
Wacha 11-2 3.32 127.2 IP
As we can see, Kluber was the best according to fWAR, but the worst per bWAR. Wacha led the way in bWAR.
Kluber has a huge difference of 2.3 between the two numbers, and Wacha's difference is also pretty large at 1.8.
I have a rudimentary understanding of where the differences come from (like FIP). But the discrepancies can be a bit annoying at times.
So what I propose is this: add the two numbers together.
Now simply adding two stats together sounds ridiculous, but the most popular offensive stat now of course is OPS, which does exactly that.
If we add together fWAR and bWAR we get this:
Wacha 4.8
Kluber 3.7
Eovaldi 2.5
So what do we call this new stat?
fbWAR?
Well, I think this is a little catchier:
FUBAR