Larkin had 24.83 Win Shares per 648 PAs. Through 2001, that would rank 112th among all players with 5000+ PAs (861 players). Concepcion had 18.08 at 586th. At SS, Larkin is 7th and Concepcion is 55th. Here is the link:

Wins Shares Per PA

Sean Smith has Larkin 59th in career WAR with 68.8. Concepcion has 33.8 and is 375th. Here is the link:

Top 500 Position Players

It looks like there are at least 20 SS ahead of Concepcion. Jose Valentin has a WAR of 33.8.

Concepcion also passes Derek Jeter, who scores 50.8 points and Nomar Garciaparra, who scores 45.9 points in the system.

OK, forget for a moment that Concepcion is 7 points ahead of Jeter, and that Jeter is currently well below the average HOF shortstop. How is Nomar so close to Jeter? Jeter has almost 10,000 PA at an OBP heavy 121 OPS+ and is a terrific baserunner. Nomar has almost 4,000 fewer PA at a SLG heavy 124 OPS+, and has played 1,000 fewer games at SS than Jeter. FWIW, WAR has Jeter at 68, Nomar at 42, which seems much more reasonable.

JAWS heavily considers peak years in its calculations (I think it's best 5 seasons, consecutive, excluding seasons lost to injury). Basically, a player's JAWS is 50% career WARP + 50% peak WARP. By WARP3, Nomar's peak and career are basically the same - of his 47.6 WARP3, 36.4 occur in his peak stretch. Jeter, on the other hand, doesn't have a great 5 year peak stretch, with his best being 26 WARP3.

When you also consider the constant complaints around here about the quality of BP's defensive metrics, and how they're used in WARP3 calculations, those numbers should probably be taken with a grain of salt.

Using Sean Smith's site again, Larkins best 5 year stretch is 27.5. Concepcion's is 18.5. It just seems that the two are not close or at least not as close as 6th & 14th. Larkin's best 5 year stretch is nearly 2 wins better per season and it is 80% of Concepcion's career WAR. I am also not sure if Sean makes an adjustment for strike years. I adjusted up Larkins WAR for 1994 & 1995 to make up for lost games and his best 5 year stretch becomes 28.9.

Dave Concepcion does very well on the JAWS program. In fact, Concepcion rates as the 14th best shortstop of all time with 57.6 points. The JAWS program states the average HOF shortstop has 59.0 points, and Concepcion is the first player listed in the line below the average HOFer score.

Concepcion also passes Derek Jeter, who scores 50.8 points and Nomar Garciaparra, who scores 45.9 points in the system. So much for the “great three.”

On Thursday morning, Chief, I bumped into a friend of mine, Derek Sanderson Jeter from the Bronx. Baseball player. Good mate. One time he'd been bitten below the waist by Miss Venezuela. Nice smile she had, but it got in the way that night. Heh. Jeter. One of those types who's so polite that you end up hatin' him. Gives ya so much good news, you go lookin' for the bad. A lot of 'em thought so. That's about when the sharks began cruisin' in. First one by one. Then in tight groups. The idea was, they take one bite, then another, and pretty soon the big man don't look so big. I saw it happen. He tried to go left but there weren't nowhere for him to go. Naturally, when the water started turning red, the fellas up in Bristol started poundin' and hollerin' and screamin' and sometimes the sharks'd go away... but sometimes they wouldn't go away. Sometimes that shark, he looks right deep into your UZR. Right into your zone rating. And he tears ya to pieces. You know, the thing about Tom Tango, he's got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. But there wasn't nothin' any of them sharks could do to stop it. November 10, 2009. The day Jeter won his fourth Rawlings Gold Glove. Anyway, he beat the Phils.

No adjustment for strike years in my system. Or WAR years. It is what it is, number of wins above replacement level. Those are some adjustments that are probably needed to turn a list like that into "best player ever rating".

Tony Fernandez, both contemporaries of Concepcion

This is kind of like saying Roger Clemens and Greg Maddux, both contemporaries of Phil Niekro.

Thanks for clarifying that.

#5 is brilliant -- and I don't even know what it's ripping off.

Is JAWS using Dan R's work on "true replacement value"? I know under that method, Concepcion shines because, for whatever reason, all of MLB went collectively insane in the 70s and early 80s and everybody but the Reds was playing guys who hit 230/270/290 at SS meaning replacement level was even lower than that. Other than that, I can't imagine the amount of torturing of the data you need to put Concepcion above Jeter.

[8] #5 is imitating Jaws (the movie)

From imdb.com:

Hooper: You were on the Indianapolis?

Brody: What happened?

Quint: Japanese submarine slammed two torpedoes into our side, Chief. We was comin' back from the island of Tinian to Leyte... just delivered the bomb. The Hiroshima bomb. Eleven hundred men went into the water. Vessel went down in 12 minutes. Didn't see the first shark for about a half an hour. Tiger. 13-footer. You know how you know that when you're in the water, Chief? You tell by looking from the dorsal to the tail. What we didn't know, was our bomb mission had been so secret, no distress signal had been sent. They didn't even list us overdue for a week. Very first light, Chief, sharks come cruisin', so we formed ourselves into tight groups. You know, it was kinda like old squares in the battle like you see in the calendar named "The Battle of Waterloo" and the idea was: shark comes to the nearest man, that man he starts poundin' and hollerin' and screamin' and sometimes the shark go away... but sometimes he wouldn't go away. Sometimes that shark he looks right into ya. Right into your eyes. And, you know, the thing about a shark... he's got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll's eyes. When he comes at ya, doesn't seem to be living... until he bites ya, and those black eyes roll over white and then... ah then you hear that terrible high-pitched screamin'. The ocean turns red, and despite all the poundin' and the hollerin', they all come in and they... rip you to pieces. You know by the end of that first dawn, lost a hundred men. I don't know how many sharks, maybe a thousand. I know how many men, they averaged six an hour. On Thursday morning, Chief, I bumped into a friend of mine, Herbie Robinson from Cleveland. Baseball player. Boatswain's mate. I thought he was asleep. I reached over to wake him up. Bobbed up, down in the water just like a kinda top. Upended. Well, he'd been bitten in half below the waist. Noon, the fifth day, Mr. Hooper, a Lockheed Ventura saw us. He swung in low and he saw us... he was a young pilot, a lot younger than Mr. Hooper. Anyway, he saw us and he come in low and three hours later a big fat PBY comes down and starts to pick us up. You know that was the time I was most frightened... waitin' for my turn. I'll never put on a lifejacket again. So, eleven hundred men went in the water; 316 men come out and the sharks took the rest, June the 29th, 1945. Anyway, we delivered the bomb.

Walt

There may be some truth to this. During Concepcion's career, the average NL SS had a .630 OPS while the average player (pitchers excluded) had .719. For all of baseball history, those numbers were .670 and .729. So historically, SS had an OPS equal to 91.9% of the league average. If that had held during Concepcion's time, the average SS would have had a .661 OPS. So that may help him some. The DH might affect this somehow and if we removed his years from the historical average, then we would get a slightly higher adjustment than .661. How much all this helps his WAR, I don't know.

Cy

During Larkin's career, the average SS had an offensive winning pct of .395. In Concepcion's time it was .365. So a difference of .030. Divided by 9 we get .03333. Times 162, we get .54. So that is half a win a year. Over a 15 year career, that adds up to an extra 7.5 of WAR.

The best parts about that scene were the reactions of Hooper and Brody. Hooper, who knew the story of the Indianapolis, was immediately dumbstruck. Brody, who didn't, continued his drunken Gene Krupa impersonation until Quint's tale got serious.

At Sean Smith's site, if we add in 7 WAR, Concepcion would jump to 265th all-time in WAR (from 375th).

Concepcion: 69.5 WARP-1 (BPRO), 33.8 WAR (smith)
jeter: 58.9 WARP-1, 68.7 WAR

The difference in jeter's rating is pretty much all explained by evalution of defense. Concepcion on the other hand, whilst there is a disagreement in this area, defensive ratings only explain about 10 wins of about a 35 win gap. ~16 more are accounted for the positional adjustment calculation. Basically, WARP-1 takes a lot more notice of the dearth of hitting from shortstops in the 70s (positional adjustment is as far as I can tell directly calculated from positional average whereas I think WAR is done by looking at fielders who switch positions?).

Basically either viewpoint for these is fairly arguable (BPRO's method for positional averages is not one I'd like to defend - but Dan R's method gets a similar result).

The remaining ~9 wins I don't really get, WARP-1 just seems to take a much more favourable view of Concepcion offensively (Park factor? EQA treating SB's weirdly?). WAR is right in line with BBref (an 88 OPS+, albeit with value on basepaths) and intuition here ( 12 wins below an average player) - WARP has him with a .257 eqa where .260 is league average.

In his BPro article, Jaffe says (and props to him for mentioning it) that Jeter would be 80 runs better just since 2002 if you use UZR instead of FRAA. He concluded "Jeter... could see his standing improved markedly by revisions in our defensive metrics; I wouldn't lose too much sleep over his numbers here."

FRAA is useless.

Any analysis based on that, and any article based on that analysis, is a waste of time.

Just stopped in to say...Jack Glasscock.

Ouch.

Can anyone briefly explain "offensive winning percentage"?

Thanks.

Can anyone briefly explain "offensive winning percentage"?

It's a hostile version of winning percentage, you stupid ####.

And here's the real definition.

Can anyone briefly explain "offensive winning percentage"?

You use a run estimator (RC, Baseruns, EQRuns etc) figure out how many runs per game (27 outs) a player creates, then using pythag figure out how many wins/losses an entire lineup of such players would have (assuming average pitching and DEE).

if the player replicated himself 9 times so he WAS the batting order, how often his team would win games, assuming avg defense and pitching. Babe Ruth has a OWP of about .850.

Cool, thanks.

So, does anyone plan on adopting "Tom Tango's Lifeless Eyes" as a handle?

I probably should have put in the definition of OWP. I guees I am old-school or just old.