SAA vs. the establishment

Spearman rank correlation — 1.00 is a perfect match, 0.00 is no relationship. Read down as the pool narrows from every ranked hitter to inner-circle careers.

Broad agreement, loosening as you climb. That's expected: among role players the systems agree on almost everything, but among genuine stars the philosophy starts to bite — a peak-and-rate metric and a career-counting one will rank the same twenty players in a different order. SAA tracks WAA more closely than WAR at every level, which is the metric behaving as designed — it was built to measure above average, not above replacement.

Picking the Hall

Of each system's top N hitters, how many are already in Cooperstown. The hitter pool holds 172 inducted players.

And the same test on the mound — of each system's top N pitchers, how many are in Cooperstown. The pitcher pool holds 78 inducted pitchers.

This is the headline result. SAA identifies the Hall of Fame about as accurately as WAR and JAWS do — level with them through the top 150, a handful behind by the top 300, where the last names in are the most arguable anyway. Whatever the disagreements in ordering, SAA is not picking a different set of great players; it's ranking the same ones differently. On pitchers the result is even cleaner: SAA matches or leads bWAR, bWAA, and JAWS at every cutoff — the mound version of the formula picks Cooperstown's pitchers at least as well as the established metrics do.

Every hitter, both rankings

The 683 hitters with a career bWAR of 25 or better, ranked within that group by each system. On the dashed line, the two systems agree exactly. Hover any point for the name.

The cloud hugs the diagonal — the two systems mostly agree. The players well below it are the ones SAA ranks lower than WAR does (long careers, defense-and-longevity value); the players well above it are the ones SAA ranks higher (short careers, a dominant peak, an elite rate). Those two groups are the whole story of the disagreement, and they're broken out next.

Where they disagree — and why

The twelve biggest gaps in each direction, among hitters with 40+ career bWAR. ★ marks a Hall of Famer.

The left column is mostly the thesis working as intended: a long career of solid, a-little-above-average seasons banks a lot of WAR but very little SAA, because SAA measures the rate, not the accumulation — and the four bat categories lean 60% on average and power, so a light-hitting dead-ball slap-and-run outfielder scores modestly however long he played. A secondary effect: SAA blends its five z-scores rather than adding runs, so a player who is historic in one category and ordinary in the rest lands closer to the middle than a counting system would put him.

The one everybody asks about

Derek Jeter ranks 145th by SAA, still behind Alan Trammell and Lou Whitaker. Here is that group by every system.

Baseball-Reference's own above-average metric, WAA, also ranks Jeter behind all three — #132 to their #50–58 — for the same reason SAA does: he was a below-average defensive shortstop by every advanced system, and once his bat is measured against other shortstops rather than the whole league, a .310 hitter with modest power is very good rather than historic. An earlier edition of SAA had Jeter down at 238th on a crude home-made fielding metric; moving the defensive input to Baseball-Reference's Fielding Runs — which credit him for playing shortstop even while docking his range — pulled him back to 145th, in line with where JAWS (77th) and WAA (132nd) have him. The ordering was always mainstream; the distance has closed.