Joe - pondering last night the macro implications of WAR and thought it might be a great rabbit hole down which you could go. Basically: does WAR play out across teams in ways that make sense? If we total up a team's WARs do we get a sense of their won-loss record, where we might imagine a 0 team WAR is .500? And Mike Trout, for example, playing with 24 other 0 WAR players, would put a team at 86, 90, or whatever wins? Acknowledging the need to figure out if an average major leaguer is really a 0, account for injuries, etc. Worth looking at some all-time great and all-time bad teams and how it plays out?
Your mistaking 0 WAR with "average" suggesting a team of average players would be .500 - true. But replacement level players are below average and thus, less than a .500 team.
Joe - pondering last night the macro implications of WAR and thought it might be a great rabbit hole down which you could go. Basically: does WAR play out across teams in ways that make sense? If we total up a team's WARs do we get a sense of their won-loss record, where we might imagine a 0 team WAR is .500? And Mike Trout, for example, playing with 24 other 0 WAR players, would put a team at 86, 90, or whatever wins? Acknowledging the need to figure out if an average major leaguer is really a 0, account for injuries, etc. Worth looking at some all-time great and all-time bad teams and how it plays out?
Your mistaking 0 WAR with "average" suggesting a team of average players would be .500 - true. But replacement level players are below average and thus, less than a .500 team.
0 team WAR wouldn't be .500, it'd be something close to .310. You're probably thinking of 0 team WAA... that would be .500.