I've spent most of the day reading win shares. It's a fascinating book. I think I'm going to have to read it a couple of more times to get everything I can out of it. The fielding calculations are complicated but fascinating. There are little things about the system that still bother me, but I don't want to criticize anything until I'm sure I understand what James is doing exactly.

One thing that bothered me on the surface, and something that James goes to great length to convince the reader is true, is that the quality of the team you play for does not affect win shares. For those of you unfamiliar with this new system, James takes the actual number of wins by a team, multiplies by 3, and divides those up among the players based on batting, pitching and fielding. So a team with 60 wins gets to divide 180 win shares; a team with 100 wins gets to divide 300 win shares. James, through example, makes a compelling case that players with similar stats, playing on teams of opposite extremes, get the same number of win shares.

I was still skeptical. I had a hunch that you could put together a really good team, and they'd be shown to win an unusually high number of games. Think of it this way; if you could take a year and have the best players at each position, how many games would the team win?

On page 526 of the Win Shares book, the players who gathered the most win shares in the 80's are listed. I selected the middle year of the decade, 1985, and went down the list filling in a team with the first person I encountered at a position. The team I came up with is:

Gary Cater - C

Eddie Murray - 1B

Lou Whitaker - 2B

Mike Schmidt - 3B

Cal Ripken, Jr. - SS

Rickey Henderson - LF 

Robin Yount - CF

Dale Murphy - RF


Dave Steib - SP

Jack Morris - SP

Bert Blyleven - SP

Fernando Valenzuela - SP

Charlie Hough - SP

Dan Quisenberry - Closer

These players total 352 win shares. That's 117 wins. Sure, the other 11 on the team would contribute, but not much, since these 14 would play most of the time. If you look at the 1998 NY Yankees and take out the top 14, the rest of the team contributes 25 wins, but Torre tended to use the whole roster that year. I don't think with the above team that would happen. But say it did, that tells us this team would win between 117 and 142 games. Now look at that team. Does that sound reasonable? This was 1985. Rickey, Cal, Dale and Robin were all in their primes. Carter was still great, as was Murray. Schmidt was getting old, but an old Schmidt was still very good. The offense alone could probably win 100 games with the current Tiger's pitching staff. This is a much better team than the 1998 Yankees or the 2001 Mariners. I think 117 wins is very conservative.

However, this result was also a pleasant surprise, because I thought if you put this team together, they would total more than 162 wins! That would say to me something was amiss with the system. If the actual number of wins a team has doesn't matter to win shares, then even the best team shouldn't be able to win over 162 games. Now, I haven't tried here to put together the best possible team of 1985, but this is very close, and I don't think those changes are going to add 20 wins.

So I'm impressed. This is going to be a great tool for evaluating teams. And as more people do better research, the system will only get better. Get the book, and take your time reading it. Circle things in pencil and do the math. It will help you understand the game better.