2025 Preseason WAR Update is Live

As the 2025 season begins, we have made some updates to our Wins Above Replacement calculations on Baseball Reference. You may notice some small changes to figures as you browse the site. As always, you can find full details on how we calculate WAR here.

2023 Park Factors
Park factors for 2023 have been re-computed to include the 2024 season, since WAR uses a three-year average for park factors when computing WAR. The most significant changes here are the Cubs and Marlins. Formerly, each team had a 102 park factor for 2023. Now, the Cubs have a 97 and the Marlins have a 107. The next largest move is the Rangers, moving from 104 to 100. This means that Cubs and Rangers batters will generally be rewarded, while the pitchers will lose some WAR. On the other hand, Marlins pitchers will gain WAR, while their batters will lose it.

The biggest gainers from these changes were 2023 Cubs and Rangers hitters Ian Happ (.53 WAR), Cody Bellinger (.4 WAR), Jeimer Candelario (.39 WAR), Dansby Swanson (.36 WAR), Leody Taveras (.36 WAR) and Marcus Semien (.35 WAR), as well as Marlins pitchers Jesus Luzardo (.69 WAR), Braxton Garrett (.48 WAR) and Sandy Alcantara (.41 WAR).

Defensive Runs Saved Update from Sports Info Solutions
Defensive Runs Saved (DRS) is a critical component of Baseball Reference's dWAR. Sports Info Solutions (SIS) provides us with this data via their review of balls in play. SIS has provided us with an update to figures from 2015 through 2024, which also has an impact on WAR across those seasons. The biggest single-season change here is Austin Hays, whose 2022 WAR moves from 2.37 to 2.93 (a .56 increase). Matt Chapman sees the biggest loss, as he moves from 7.79 in 2019 to 7.27 (a .52 dip).

New Data From Retrosheet
We also recently deployed an update to past box scores, play-by-play, and game logs from Retrosheet, including play-by-play for 2,493 games that previously did not have play-by-play coverage. Most of these improvements were clustered from 1913 to 1916. Since we assume a leverage index of 1 in the absence of play-by-play data, pitchers are generally the most impacted by the addition of new Play-by-Play.

A notable change from this new data is Walter Johnson, who sees his WAR increase in three seasons: 1915 (.32), 1916, (.29) and 1914 (.24).

Biggest Career Movers
The largest career WAR change belongs to Ed Konetchy, who sees his WAR increase by 1.23 due to the leverage of his pitching situations. Next on the list is Kolten Wong, whose WAR increases by .93. Next is Nick Castellanos, who loses .91 WAR and Joey Votto, who loses .9 WAR. Matt Olson and Cody Bellinger gain .87 and .86 WAR, respectively, while the previously mentioned Walter Johnson gains 0.85 WAR, as does Chase Headley.

We’ve highlighted some of the more extreme changes here, but to see full lists of the largest changes to season and career WAR totals, please see the spreadsheet here.