Back to the Cleveland Guardians Newsfeed

Assessing the 2018 Indians bullpen using 3WAR and WPA

A couple of weeks ago we glanced at the performance of the Indians’ 2018 starting rotation through the lens of 3WAR — a simple average of the Fangraphs, Baseball Reference, and Baseball Prospectus wins above replacement calculations. It reaffirmed the fact that the Tribe own four All-Star caliber pitchers and underlined high hopes for Shane Bieber, the youngest of the bunch.

Today, I’d like to take the same approach to the Indians’ bullpen while also including win percentage added (WPA) and leverage statistics. It doesn’t make much sense to me to evaluate reliever performance without considering the average leverage of their “game events” and also the types of situations into which they were brought.