Main WAR page

WAR-like stats Timeline

1980's - Pete Palmer publishes Total Player Rating (TPR) in Total Baseball (Wiki)

1992 - The Baseball Sabermetric by Brock Hanke publishes leaderboards of Total, Offensive and Defensive "Wins Above Replacement" (tweet)

1993 - First found reference to "Wins Above Replacement" on rec.sport.baseball (google groups)

1995 - Keith Woolner develops Value Over Replacement Player (VORP) on the Bosox Mailing List (Google Groups, Archive.org)

2001 or so - Baseball Prospectus launches Wins Above Replacement Player (WARP) (Google Groups reference)

2002 - Bill James publishes Win Shares (Wiki)

November 2008 - Sean Smith publishes his work on replacement level and WAR in the Hardball Times (now with Fangraphs, previously an independent website). Values later appear on baseballprojection.com. (archive.org, archive.org)

Tom Tango publishes a how-to for what is the current framework for most WAR implementations. (Link)

December 2008 - Fangraphs adds WAR (Blog post)

May 2010 - Baseball-Reference adds WAR from Sean Smith of BaseballProjection (Blog post)

WAR is really just an idea of how to value players. Once you have the idea in place, there are dozens of implementation details that have multiple reasonable approaches to take. We've summarized the major frameworks below for easy comparison.

FanGraphs also has an explanation of their WAR and our previous WAR framework. Baseball Prospectus has their framework, WARP. I'm happy to add more WAR frameworks like Baseball Gauge's WAR if folks want to help me fill in the details below.