Comparing wins above replacement across baseball history

Abstract

This paper introduces iWAR, a system for estimating wins above replacement from historical Retrosheet play-by-play records. We compare its runs-allowed (RA) and fielding-independent pitching (FIP) versions with Baseball-Reference WAR (bWAR), FanGraphs WAR (fWAR) and run-based alternatives. The common historical sample contains 1,471 team-seasons across 79 years and 1,441 consecutive franchise pairs. Under the fixed conversion to wins, same-season mean absolute error was 3.695 credited wins per 162 games for iWAR RA, compared with 4.724 for bWAR and 4.744 for fWAR: reductions of 21.793% and 22.112%. The paired differences were -1.030 and -1.049, with conditional 95% calendar-block intervals of [-1.367, -0.706] and [-1.398, -0.725]. Calibration preserved most of these advantages. A broader bWAR comparison across 118 years retained a smaller advantage; modern differences were smaller or sometimes reversed. PythagenPat reconstructed records more closely than every WAR total. Next-season replay gave nearly identical fixed-map errors for iWAR FIP and fWAR, while calibration changed their ordering. An amended chronological learned-model analysis of 1,552 franchise pairs gave neural RMSE 10.163, versus 9.946 for the development-selected ridge comparator (difference +0.217; conditional interval [0.015, 0.474]). This work provides a new, specialized framework for analyzing WAR across eras and provides context for future work using learning models.