Today's Birthday Team has a surfeit of catchers. Half of the starting position players spent a significant amount of time behind the dish.

C: Chris Iannetta (15.0 WAR)
1B: Carlos Santana (31.7 WAR)
2B: John Peters (13.7 WAR)
3B: Jeff McNeil (9.7 WAR)
SS: Non-Sea Bass Alex Gonzalez (11.2 WAR)
LF: Charlie Maxwell (19.8 WAR)
CF: Bill Crowley (4.8 WAR)
RF: Gary Carter (70.1 WAR)

SP: Felix Hernandez (50.2 WAR)
SP: Catfish Hunter (40.9 WAR)
SP: Jeremy Guthrie (18.4 WAR)
SP/Spare OF: Lady Baldwin (14.8 WAR)
SP: Jeremy Hellickson (11.6 WAR)
RP: John Hiller (30.5 WAR)
RP: Turk Farrell (27.1 WAR)
RP: Kirby Higbe (17.6 WAR)

Backup 1B/Bench bat: Yonder Alonso (8.0 WAR)
Mets cult hero: Timo Perez
Fun names: Kirk Dressendorfer, Rich Batchelor, Mac Scarce, Tom Butters, Reddy Grey

Tom Butters could maybe GM the team - Duke AD for 20 years, hired a pretty good coach there. Butters came up through the Pirate organization in the early 60s, was just looking like a plausible major league reliever when he suffered a whiplash injury in a car accident. He couldn't come back from that, and went to work for Duke.

This is a sneaky good team, but the WAR totals of the top two relievers remind me how suspicious I am of RP WAR.

Farrell earned most of his WAR as a starter (Kirby Higbe, too). Hiller was an outstanding fireman back in the days when those guys still threw 125 innings a year.

It's kind of amazing that John Hiller is still alive, isn't it?

Farrell earned most of his WAR as a starter (Kirby Higbe, too). Hiller was an outstanding fireman back in the days when those guys still threw 125 innings a year.

I think they're still getting a fair boost from LI. Hiller only has 230 RAR, but is getting 31 WAR.

The Reds are hitting .316 with a 1.002 OPS as a team this year. That's 110 BA and 343 OPS points ahead of the Cardinals, who are second in the division in both stats. The Cubs are hitting .124, but they still have a better OPS than the Brewers.

Jonathan India leading the NL with a .476 BA. It is an "empty" .476 though. His 1.099 ops is only like 7th on the team.

So because Kauff was indicted without a chance to defend himself, he was suspended without a chance to defend himself. Got it.

Being a Jew probably didn't help.

Well the guys who did defend themselves were found not guilty but they still got suspended.

Within the context of reliever WAR and the quality of today's birthday team, it doesn't particularly matter if Hiller's WAR is screwed up or not as long as every (major) reliever is screwed up similarly -- he's still relatively a very good reliever for a bday team.

In the broader scheme of things, they can give as many WAR as they want for Hiller's 1973 (7.9 as it turns out). That was 125 innings of a 1.44 ERA and, even better, a 1.51 RA9. He went 10-5 with 38 saves. He does have a whopping gmLI for that year that adds about 2.5 wins with his WAR but he was still over 4 wins better than the average reliever.

Snapper's point, which I share concern with, is that it's not clear why that is worth the same WAR as Kershaw's 198 IP of 1.77 ERA and 3 UER in 2014. Kershaw would have given up about 5 more runs in the 125 innings but then added 72 innings of outstanding pitching. Kershaw has 9 more RAA and 11 more RAR but less WAR. But even if we take that as wrong, it's still just 1 win and Hiller should probably be around 7 which is still awesome.