Washington Nationals: wRC+

Today, I am going to start a little series here at DoD on some of the most beneficial statistics to look at when watching a game or just wanting to evaluate a player with your friends. If you use these stats that I will be analyzing over the next week or two, you will win the argument every single time. Trust me. I came up with an idea to do this for just the Nationals from Nick Kirby on Twitter. He is a huge stat fanatic for the Cincinnati Reds.

I will start with wRC+. You may look at that and not know one thing about it. You probably don’t even know what it stands for. I am here to help. It stands for Weighted Runs Created Plus. This stat is similar to OPS+ as it will tell you a player’s offensive value compared to league average. 100 is league average and every point above it, is one point better than league average. So if your wRC+ is 125, you are 25% better than the league average. It calculates how many runs a player creates per plate appearance based on wOBA (Weighted On Base Average). I will get to that one one day later this week.

So here is how the Washington Nationals stack up against the league average in wRC+:

Jayson Werth – 160

Bryce Harper – 137

Ryan Zimmerman – 125

Ian Desmond – 116

Wilson Ramos – 114

Adam LaRoche – 103

Anthony Rendon – 100

Denard Span – 97

Kurt Suzuki – 58

As you look as these numbers in front of you, you can easily see that Jayson Werth was the best offensive player for the Nationals last season, based on this one particular stat. It could have a correlation into many other stats, as you will see as the week goes on.

Later on today I will have a post comparing the Nationals to other teams in the National League based on this particular stat. The Nationals had 7 of 9 players listed, at or above the league average. That gives you the indication that this team was very good offensively.

This stat is also ballpark adjusted so when I do compare the Nationals to other teams it won’t be fluctuated at all. This will give you a good indication on how the Nationals stacked up against the rest of the league last year based on this offensive statistic.

So from this I can take that Denard Span possibly needs to be moved out of the leadoff spot and Jayson Werth moved into it or put it in the second spot in the order. I also notice that Bryce Harper needs to be moved higher in the lineup to compliment Werth and get these two players the most at-bats possible. That will give the Nationals the best chance to score runs.

That is wRC+ put simply and into form for one certain team. If you have any questions feel free to use the comment section or shoot me a tweet @BaseballAddicts.