This might be one of the coolest things I’ve seen in baseball analysis in awhile. Chone Smith — developer of the CHONE projection system and BaseballProjection.com — has put together Wins Above Replacement Data for every player — position players for now, pitchers to be added soon — going back to 1954. This is seriously cool.

Want to know how Willie Mays compares with Barry Bonds? This is a great jumping-off point for that discussion. The WAR calculation includes almost every trait you can think that’s needed in a position player: baserunning, defense, throwing arm, hitting ability, and a positional adjustment (based on era).

Go, check it out. Right-now.

You’ve seen WAR used heavily here on BCB over the last few months and with this new addition to the baseball community, that’s not going to change anytime soon.

Fun WAR Fact of the Day: In 5,365 career plate appearances spanning over 15 seasons, Neifi Perez has a career WAR of +0.4. In 2005, Barry Bonds only batted for 51 PAs because of his knee surgery, but in those 50 PAs he was worth +0.4 wins above replacement.

50 PAs of Bonds in ’05 = 5,365 career PAs of Neifi Perez

That still blows my mind. They are situated on complete opposite ends of the player value spectrum.

Edit: More math, yay!

Bonds has a career WAR total of 175.1. In order for Neifi Perez to be able to reach that total (if we figure out how many wins above replacement he’s creating per PA — Career WAR/Career PA) it would take him 2,348,528.75 career plate appearances to match Bonds’ career win total. That’s 2 million+ career PAs! If we say that Neifi is an iron man, and could net 750 PAs per season, it would only take him a little over 3,131 seasons to be able to reach Bonds.