WAR is a counting stat. Kind of. Just like RBI, or HR, WAR is basically a tabulation of performance. The difference is a player can have positive or negative events as it relates to replacement level. So a player can see his WAR decrease during the season. That said....it's still a counting stat. As such, it can be a little misleading when looking at the raw counting number of WAR as players with more playing time have the chance to put up more WAR.

What I was playing around was simply looking at oWAR/PA and WAR/PA. oWAR of course being everything BUT defense, and WAR including defense. I wanted to see how the players on the D Backs ranked on a per PA basis. Numbers after the jump.

First oWAR. As BB-reference explains, it's everything but defense. So Batting runs, Baserunning, Double Plays, Positional and replacement adjustments all apply. The number I am showing below is simply PA/oWAR and then multiplied times 1000. Why ? Because it's easier to read then a bunch of numbers stuck behind a bunch of zeroes behind a decimal.

Well, thats pretty interesting. Of course the top is the top. No surprise Miggy, Hill and Goldy rank where they do. And no surprise about the bottom 5 or 6 guys either. Some interesting points in this chart to me are Eaton ranking as high as he does, despite is plummeting batting avg. (Remember this is offense only, no defense). And of course the MAJOR surprise here is Jason Kubel's rather mediocre ranking. But he gets dinged pretty hard by his massive slump, lack of walks, and poor baserunning. I think this is really striking. It's one thing to say when you add in defense a lot of Kubel's value is stripped away. It's another totally when you don't even include defense and he falls this far.

Here is the chart WITH the defense included, so just straght bWAR

Thats quite a different list, isn't it ? Of course Parra and McDonald leap frog quite a few guys, Kubel falls even further. Chris Johnson takes a hit too, which should come as no surprise. I think that passes the "smell test", don't you ?Looking at the pure offense, you get one sense, but if you add in defense, the guys you would expect to get a boost do indeed get a boost, and the guys you expect to take a hit, take a hit.

Or at least the guys I expected.