In order to accumulate a large negative number in Wins Above Replacement, a player cannot be merely bad. After all, most players who perform at less than replacement level for any extended period of time get, well, replaced. So to pile up a substantial negative number a guy has to be both performing poorly and getting playing time anyway.
That might be because his team believes, for good reason or not, that he will turn it around. Or his team believes that he is more valuable (for tangible or intangible reasons) than the WAR numbers suggest. Or there are sentimental or financial reasons to keep the player playing independent of performance. Or the team simply has no current better alternative, because the organization doesn’t happen to have access to a replacement level player at the position required.
The current Least Valuable Player in the majors for 2012 — the non-pitcher with the most negative b-ref WAR — is Jeff Francoeur, who continues to be Kansas City’s everyday starting rightfielder despite an OPS for the season of .643 (for a starting corner outfielder!) and a 2012 WAR of -2.9. Francoeur has long been a favorite target for statistically-oriented fans and observers. He is both a charming fellow and capable of hot streaks that lead teams to believe that he can be successful. But in the long run Jeff just can’t ever seem to overcome his poor strike zone judgment. Twenty-five more years of “Least Valuable Players” after the click-through.
Lowest Non-Pitcher WAR (Baseball-Reference Version) By Season:
2011 Adam Dunn -3.0
2010 Nate McLouth -2.8
2009 Yuniesky Betancourt -2.4
2008 Jeff Franceour, Mike Jacobs, Jacques Jones and Jeff Keppinger -1.9
2007 Jermaine Dye -1.9
2006 Angel Berroa -1.9
2005 Tony Womack -2.5
2004 Marlon Byrd -2.4
2003 Jose Macias -2.1
2002 Neifi Perez -2.4
2001 Peter Bergeron -2.1
2000 Michael Barrett and Alex Gonzalez -2.1
1999 Willie McGee -2.9
1998 John Mabry -2.2
1997 Jose Guillen -3.4 (Jose was 7th in Rookie of the Year voting this season)
1996 Mike Kingery -2.1
1995 Andujar Cedeno -2.4
1994 Kim Batiste -2.1
1993 Dave McCarty -2.9
1992 Billy Hatcher -2.9
1991 Hensley Meulens -2.5
1990 Alfredo Griffin -2.5
1989 Pat Tabler -2.5
1988 Andres Thomas -2.0
1987 Jeff Reed and Juan Beniquez -1.7
Alfredo Griffin has the most career PAs (over 7000) for a player with negative career WAR.
Luckily now that he’s a Ray, Keppy is having a career year. Also continuing his anti-TTO ways
Birtlecom:
Francouer is on pace for -4.7 WAR. How does that fare all-time? He’s certainly got the 25 year field beat at that pace….Still waiting for Pete Bergeron to make it back to the majors, howver, the French-speaking fans’ favorite angle is kind of limited with the Expos in DC. He’ll have to do it on merit – good luck with that.
-4.7 WAR would certainly break the record, which is currently -4.1, done by Jim Levey in 1933 and Jerry Royster in 1977.
Levey, btw, also had a -3.3 in 1931, giving him two of the 8 worst WAR seasons of all time.
Two more notes on Levey:
1)In 1932, his only other full season in baseball, he compiled -0.7 WAR while playing for a Browns team that went 63-91. Somehow, Levey finished 19th in the MVP balloting that year, earning 5 points.
2) From 1934-36, Levey played professional football for the Pittsburgh Pirates. He was pretty awful at that too, averaging 2.4 yards per carry as a halfback and completing 1 of 4 passes.
Ed:
In 1932 Levey had a very good first half, as did the Browns. To me this is one of the real problems with WAR as some kind of absolute measure. No doubt Levey was not a good player, but for half a year he did something you and I could never do: he played well enough in the big leagues to make someone remember him as a contributor when the MVP vote came around. How did he contribute? He batted .364 in the games the Browns won (Goose Goslin, the team’s star, batted .347 in those games), and he drove in 63 runs from the eighth spot in the order. I don’t know what else, but those two things stand out in his splits for the year.
At 156 lb, by the way, Levey was over 30 pounds lighter than any other player on the Pittsburg squad in 1935. He led the team in TDs.
He wasn’t Bo Jackson, but I’d guess he was a tough competitor, given his abilities. Writing him off with statistics is just what’s wrong with statisticians.
nsb @ 16: The point of listing these guys is not to “write then off” but rather to raise the question, what was it about these guys in these years that had them playing regularly with a negative WAR? Was WAR itself off in evaluating some of these seasons (for example by underestimating the particular player’s defensive value?). Was the team making an investment in a young player, giving him experience despite the short-term loss in value? Was this just a strange season-long slump by a good player? Was this a player valued for his locker-room contributions? Did the team just lack any other alternatives? Stats like WAR at their best can be a jumping off point for inquiry, not an end point.
NSB: In no way as I writing Levey off. I had honestly never heard of him before and I’ll bet the same is true of most people who visit this site. I was mostly posting some interesting information that I found about him. I do find his placement in the ’32 MVP voting to be curious but without the actual ballot we have no way of knowing if it was the result of one voter or multiple voters. I also just think it’s interesting to see how what is viewed as valuable has evolved over time.
As for his time as a football player, I think the fact that he barely played the year after leading the Pirates in touchdowns tells us a bit about how his contributions were viewed.
birtelcom:
I don’t remember if you’re the one I’ve fenced with on this issue before, but let me explain my impression: On this site and others, such as Adam Darowski’s, WAR is usually given implicit precedence over any and all other reckonings, and it is only when people such as myself or Richard Chester, or Steven, or donburgh (at posts #15, 17, & 13 below) try to put a human face to the statistical picture that a need is seen to explain that, no, no, really, nsb, you recalcitrant numbskull, you misunderstand what we’re about.
I understand what you’re about just fine. I simply don’t go along.
Ed:
I too hadn’t heard of Levey before. Curiosity inspired by your comment drove me to take a close look at his record for 1932 where it was fairly easy to discover why he might have gotten some support in the MVP voting. I didn’t just check out his WAR for the year and scratch my head but examined the breakdown of his performance. Doing so involved more work and thought, but it produced an answer that, though unverifiable, is cogent and likely, given the history of MVP voting over the years.
Take a look at the picture on Jim Levey’s Player Page at BR-Ref. He’s wearing a Browns cap, so it couldn’t have been taken later than 1933, when he was 26 years old, but to me he looks older than his assigned years, as do a lot of the players of earlier eras in the photos that we have. Levey was a scrawny 5′ 10″ 156 pounder who at the age of 28 (birthday Sept. 13) made the roster of a pro football team and played, apparently as a support player, for three years. In the 1936 season he was 30 years old, the oldest player on the team. I’d guess that his age may have more to do with what happened than how his contributions of the previous year were viewed. Maybe not, but I think my guess is as good as yours.
NSB: Honestly, I resent the insinuation that all I did was look at his WAR and scratch my head (whereas you put in more “work and thought”). FYI – I did look at his other numbers. They’re quite simply not very good. And while you’ve decided that your explanation is “cogent and likely”, I quite strongly disagree with your explanation. You stated the Browns had a good first half. No, they didn’t. They played .500 ball. And while Levey did have a good first half, he was quite bad in the second half something that voters might very well have remembered as well, along with how bad the Browns were in the 2nd half. (and the splits for how he hit in games the Browns won wouldn’t have been available back then).
Meanwhile, look at some of the shortstops on other teams, teams with winning records (unlike the 63-91 Browns):
1) Eric McNair .285 BA, 47 doubles, 18 home runs, 95 RBIs for the 2nd place A’s.
2) Johnny Burnett .297 BA, 4 home runs, 53 RBIs, 81 runs scored for the 4th place Indians.
3)Billy Rogell .271 BA, 9 home runs, 61 RBIs, 88 runs scored, 14 SB for the 5th place Tigers.
So we have one shortstop – McNair – who had a clearly superior season than the others at least in terms of the counting stats that would have been used back then. Burnett and Rogell had numbers comparable to Levey but played on teams with winning records in comparison to the Browns 63-91 record. Defensively, Levey had the most errors and the lowest fielding percentage of the 4.
And yet, guess which one of those four did the best in the MVP voting? Yep it was Levey. He even beat out McNair (5 points to 3), even though McNair had the clearly superior season and played for a much better team. Neither Rogell nor Burnett received a single MVP vote despite putting up comparable numbers as Levey while playing for better teams.
Nope the “cogent and likely” explanation for Levey’s MVP vote was that they came from one or both of the Saint Louis voters, looking to reward one of the local players for reasons only they know.
Ed: I didn’t mean to imply that you personally hadn’t looked at Levey’s stats, although I admit that my wording makes it seem that way. I was commenting on the widespread practice of not doing so when WAR is there for the picking, a nice, complete package wrapped up in a bow by the experts. Obviously you looked at them because your comments on his football stats show that you were paying attention.
On the subject of the MVP vote, though, I’ll still differ a little, even though his support may well have come from the St. Louis sportswriters, something I’ve felt all along to be likely. If you look at the Browns page for that year, you’ll see that four players had clearly better hitting stats than Levey: Ferrell, Burns, Campbell, and Goslin. Ferrell and Goslin came out ahead of Levey in the MVP vote. The others weren’t mentioned. I think this suggests that Levey’s play impressed someone.
Hope we can exchange views more amicably in the future.
I know that Adam Dunn’s numbers were slightly mitigated by his lack of playing time and that the offensive context in the AL between last year and the early 30’s is pretty significant but it’s impossible for me to imagine that any players performance has done more to negatively affect his teams performance. Maybe it’s the size of his contract that’s influencing my thinking.
He wasn’t hurting them in the field very much last year, so he was only destroying the team on the offensive side of the ball.
Royster’s ’77 season at short made Atlanta’s first base dugout seats as exciting as a weekend in a warzone. There was never a baseball made that he or Pat Rockett couldn’t boot,bobble or throw away.
Yet somehow Royster remained on the Braves roster for the next 7 years, sometimes as a regular, sometimes as a semi-regular. He even returned to them in his final season of 1988.
He was often the only “speed” in the line-up,for all the good it did with such a poor OBP. He was also “versatile” playing almost anywhere except catcher and first. And there wasn’t much around any better in the Braves system during those sad days.
That leads to an interesting question. Who played in the most games in his career and produced a negative WAR? I don’t know the answer, but Francouer’s season has got me to wondering who had the “longest” career while producing a negative WAR.
Mike D- I would guess that the answer is Doug’s post #1
Wait, I’m supposed to read first? : -)
As I posted the question, I was wondering if it was possible for a player to achieve a negative career WAR while having a fairly lengthy career. My gut was probably not. I was wrong. 7000+ ABs is far more than I would have guessed.
I can tell you that 5 time All Star and 5 time MVP vote-getter Doc Cramer comes close in his 2230 games and 9927 plate appearances in his 20 year career.
He managed a positive WAR of 4.2 for his career.
Mike: As Doug pointed out, Alfredo Griffin had the most career PAs of any player with a career WAR below zero. Here’s the top 10 list:
1. Alfredo Griffin 7,331 PAs, -0.1 WAR (1976-1993)
2. Willie Montanez 6,407 PAs, -0.7 WAR (1966-1982)
3. Tommy Dowd 5,969 PAs, -3.7 WAR (1891-1901)
4. Ski Melillo 5,537 PAs, -2.5 WAR (1926-1937)
5. Pete Suder 5,474 PAs, -4.1 WAR (1941-1955)
6. Chris Gomez 5,148 PAs, -3.3 WAR (1993-2008)
7. Cub Stricker 5,083 PAs, -4.3 WAR (1882-1893)
8. Ken Reitz 5,079 PAs, -4.9 WAR (1972-1982)
9. Bob Kennedy 5,065 PAs, -4.4 WAR (1939-1957)
10. Lou Finney 5,034 PAs, -0.3 WAR (1931-1947)
Among active players, Yuniesky Betancourt is now up to 3,857 PAs with a career WAR of -2.4. He’s had a negative WAR every season since 2008.
Two of my 1970’s favorites on the list above…Willie Montanez and Ken Reitz
It’s hard to imagine that Francoeur will both continue to play as poorly as he has and also stay in the everyday lineup all season. Something’s gotta give before he can break the record set by Royster and Levey.
On the pitching side, the worst season WAR (since the 1890s) is also 4.1, by Steve Blass in 1973, when he suddenly, in the midst of a fine career, lost all ability to find home plate.
I remember that season. I saw him pitch on television just once but he had the look of a guy standing in the middle of a minefield that stretched for miles in every direction. It was painful to watch.
I’m hoping Tim Lincecum doesn’t find his way on the list of poor War among pitchers…he’s definitely on his way though.
Adam Dunn was profoundly awful last year and should thank his manager for playing him less in September.
Fastest to accumulate -2 WAR or worse.
Here are the players to do this in fewer than 200 PAs (Player, PA, WAR, Team).
– Jerry Buchek, 93, -2.0, 1961 STL
– Scot Thompson, 127, -2.3, 1981 CHC
– Carmelo Castillo, 142, -2.1, 1990 MIN
– Marquis Grissom, 147, -2.3, 2005 SFG
– Andy Anderson, 152, -2.0, 1949 SLB
– Pat Rockett, 157, -3.0, 1978 ATL
– Tommy Brown, 160, -2.1, 1944 BRO
– Dave Rosello, 161, -2.0, 1974 CHC
– Ron Clark, 188, -2.2, 1969 MIN-SEP
– Dell Alston, 191, -2.1, 1978 NYY-OAK
– Jerry Kindall, 192, -2.0, 1957 CHC
– Mike Shannon, 193, -2.2, 1970 STL
Tyler Pastornicky of the Braves has -1.6 WAR in 163 PA this year. No doubt he’d be past the -2 mark had Atlanta waited a month before calling Andrelton Simmons up. Pastornicky has become such a defensive pariah that’s he’s unlikely to see the field again this year even though he’s currently on the roster.
Tommy Brown was only 16 years old at the time.
Shannon in 1970 tried to come back after being diagnosed with what would be a career-ending kidney ailment that Spring.
What I find surprising about you list is that even though 9 of those seasons have occurred since I became a baseball fan I was totally unaware of all but 1 of them (Grissom in ’05). I don’t know if that’s because it wasn’t as well understood at the time just how bad they were or if sportswriters were just more reticent about calling peoples attention to it until recently or what.
Marquis Grissom was a very good player for a while and a pretty good one at other times but he also went thru a long stretch where he pretty much stunk up the joint in the middle and then again at the end of his career.
Jose Guillen was deemrd ready for the majors out of spring training (and handed the rightfield job) despite never having played above A ball. Of course he made the minimum, which was really important to the Pirates that year.
Shouldn’t negative WAR be referred to as Wins Below Replacement? Should the WeBeR be the trophy for such a “winner” on a yearly basis?
Oh, and if the Mets continue to give Jason Bay at bats, he could easily catch or pass Frenchy. He has a -0.9 WBR in 122 PA, which is about the same pace.
then he would be +0.9 in wbr, -0.9 wbr would make it +0.9 war, or something like that…
I was struck by how many of those recent guys either played for the Royals at the time of the negative WAR, were former Royals, or were later signed by the Royals.
2012 – Franceour plays for the Royals
2009 – Betancourt played for the Royals
2008 – Jacobs did not play for the Royals, but was signed to play for them the next year, and of course, they acquired Franceour later, also
2007 – Dye was a former Royal
2006 – Berroa played for the Royals
2002 – Perez played for the Royals
I knew they have had an awful farm system until just recently, but this really shows that either they didn’t have replacement level players in the system, or didn’t want to call them up. Crazy that Wil Myers can’t get a call up this year …
Wow. That royally stinks for the Royals.