This is the fourth time in the last month that The Common Man and I have had the opportunity to take over the SweetSpot for the day, and if you’ve been following along (or reading our blog), you know that we’re both fans, albeit with reservations, of the various versions of Wins Above Replacement (WAR). We have used, or at least mentioned, WAR in most posts on here. WAR is just a convenient, flawed, but still helpful way to get an idea of the value of a player and how he compares to others.

We’ve received some comments on these posts to the effect that WAR unfairly benefits certain long-career players (like Rick Reuschel, who racked up 66.3 Baseball-Reference WAR) at the expense of more talented players who had shorter careers, but higher peaks (like Sandy Koufax, who comes in at just 54.5). And in the context of a Hall of Fame discussion, I think that’s a fair criticism; maybe Reuschel did in fact provide more total value to his teams than Koufax did, but most seem to agree that the Hall is for “great” players, and I doubt even Reuschel himself would question which of the two was the “greater” pitcher.

So today, I want to draw your attention to one impressive attempt to correct for that: "weighted WAR,” or wWAR. Created by Adam Darowski of Beyond the Box Score, wWAR is a simple-to-figure metric that assigns extra WAR “credit” to a player’s particularly good seasons, and even more extra credit to great seasons, to account for the extra value most of us place on true greatness (as opposed to simple sustained above-averageness).

Adam explains it much more fully here, but here’s a short summary of how it works:

• A player’s “wins above excellence” (WAE), first used by Sean Smith (who designed the version of WAR found on Baseball-Reference), is simply a player’s seasonal WAR above 3.0. Albert Pujols racked up 7.2 WAR in 2010; he gets 4.2 WAE.
• A player’s “wins above MVP level” (WAM), Darowski’s extension of the WAE principle, similarly counts up a player’s WAR above 6.0 in a single season (the low end of where we’d expect a typical MVP candidate to come in). Pujols’ 2010 WAM is 1.2.
• wWAR combines those concepts: a player’s wWAR is his WAR plus his WAE plus his WAM. Thus, a player gets single credit for WAR below 3, double credit for WAR between 3 and 6, and triple credit for WAR above 6. Pujols’ 2010 wWAR is 7.2 + 4.2 + 1.2 = 12.6.

While I just gave you a single-season wWAR, Darowski admits that it’s really useful only for career-based Hall of Fame discussions. 7.2 wins more or less accurately reflects Pujols’ 2010 contribution, but his career wWAR is, theoretically, more reflective than his WAR than the value we place on his season-by-season greatness. So with that in mind, here’s a look at how a few interesting or common player comparisons are affected by wWAR:

• Koufax (54.6 WAR) vs. Reuschel (66.3): As you’d expect, Koufax ends up ahead in wWAR, 97.7 to 91.5.
• Lou Whitaker (69.7) vs. Ryne Sandberg (62.0): A dead heat, with Sandberg at 91.4 wWAR, Whitaker 90.7.
• Jack Morris (39.3) vs. Bert Blyleven (90.1): It actually gets even worse for Morris at 48.7 wWAR and Blyleven at 131.1.
• Dale Murphy (44.2) vs. Jim Rice (41.5): Murphy’s case improves a bit to 69.0, with Rice at 55.5.

So there’s a taste. You can see some additional head-to-head comparisons on Darowski’s post linked above. This week, he’s been reevaluating the Hall of Fame using wWAR; check out, for instance, his “Hall of wWAR” for catchers and left fielders.

There’s nothing terribly scientific about wWAR, and there are a number of cogent criticisms of it (see this for several of them), but if you want a way to better recognize players who had a number of truly great seasons, I think it’s a fun and very useful tool.

Bill blogs at The Platoon Advantage on the SweetSpot Blog Network. You can also follow him on Twitter.