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Brian Dozier has been having an All-Star caliber season for the Minnesota Twins, but his fate in making next week's star-studded affair comes down to him winning the Final Vote as selected by fans. And if the way Kansas City fans cast their ballots for the All-Star process is any indication of how things will go, Dozier is a long shot with the Royals' Mike Moustakas the favorite.
But who should really be the favorite?
For the purposes of this article, I'm going to cherry pick one stat: WAR (wins above replacement).
Now, WAR is one of the newer, advanced statistics that some people love and others, well, don't. I can understand the latter as it is not really easily computable (like, for example, batting average) and there doesn't seem to be one set formula. Baseball-reference and FanGraphs have different calculations.
Still, WAR -- which estimates the value of a player compared to a replacement player, i.e. an average minor-league call-up -- is being used more and more and is a decent indicator of how a player is doing over a season (we can debate career WAR later).
If you are interested in how WAR is formulated, I'll leave that to the sites. You can check out the explanations from both baseball-reference.com and FanGraphs.
OK, with that mumbo jumbo out of the way, here's how Dozier stacks up against other players, including his Final Vote mates Moustakas, Boston's Xander Bogaerts, Detroit's Yoenis Cespedes and New York's Brett Gardner.
Using baseball-reference.com's figures, Dozier's WAR is 3.1 which ranks No. 22 in the majors and No. 10 in the American League. The nine AL players higher than Dozier are the Angels' Mike Trout (4.9), Cleveland's Jason Kipnis (4.7), Baltimore's Manny Machado (4.7), Toronto's Josh Donaldson (4.5), Boston's Mookie Betts (4.1), Detroit's Miguel Cabrera (4.0), Kansas City's Lorenzo Cain (4.0), Tampa Bay's Kevin Kiermaier (3.6) , Detroit's J.D. Martinez (3.3) and Gardner (3.2). (Note: Boston's Brock Holt is tied with Dozier at 3.1.)
The news is even better for Dozier when using FanGraph's WAR figures. Dozier is also at a 3.1 when using that formula, but that places him at No. 17 in the majors and No. 8 in the American League.
The seven players in the AL with a higher WAR than Dozier according to FanGraphs are Kipnis (4.9), Donaldson (4.7), Trout (4.6), Machado (4.0), Martinez (3.5), Cain (3.4) and Cabrera (3.3).
Now let's compare the five players up for the Final Vote using the WAR from both sites:
Oh, and in case you were wondering, the WAR for the AL All-Star Game starter at second base, Houston's Jose Altuve's, is 2.2 (B-R) and 2.3 (FanGraphs).
WAR, what is it good for? Maybe the Fan Vote will tell us.
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