NL Wild Card Divisional All-Stars

The Wild Card team features "the best of the rest" - players taken from all three NL divisions who didn't score quite enough points to be included in their division's all-star team. Doesn't mean they're not solid players, one and all. Here's the list:

The first thing I did when analyzing this list was to tally up which players came from which divisions, to see which division had the edge. And guess which one did? Not a single one! 21 players on the roster, 7 from  each of the three NL divisions. What are the odds!? (This is counting Ted Lilly just for the Cubs, since that's where he spent most of his time. Ditto with Dan Haren who actually spent the latter part of his season in the American League.) Pretty uncanny, eh? The East and the Central are pretty split in the batting and pitching, and the West dominates the bullpen.

According to WAR, Brian Wilson was better than the guy who beat him in the NL West, Heath Bell. But the difference in swp is small; I don't know what accounts for the difference of 0.7 WAR. Maybe the beard factors in. Like I said, I don't understand what witchcraft goes into sabermetrics.

Also look at Edward Mujica's swp/WAR ratio. Unbelievable, right? First Gregerson, then Mujica. Suddenly the Padres' stellar bullpen isn't looking so impressive after all...

Working up, check out how Jonathan Sanchez, the Giants' No. 3 starter, headlines this Wild Card All-Star Team. Speaks volumes about the new World Champs, doesn't it?

But the team leader in WAR is NL East third base runner-up Ryan Zimmerman, which puts him in the running for the highest-valued swp in the league. Here's the top 10 ranking:

As you can see, Zimmerman sits at No. 7, good for 4th among position players, and 1st among non-catcher position players. (Catcher swp are notoriously overvalued, because replacement level catchers are such notorious light hitters.) I don't know what caused his points to be valued so highly, but I'll bet it hinges on that high slugging percentage, indicating a high number of extra base hits. If there was a stat stock market, I would envy the visionary who first bought stock in OPS...

Batting behind him in my fictional order, despite his higher swp total, is right fielder Hunter Pence, who sports some of the lowest valued points in the league - second lowest to Mark Reynolds. (I won't put the whole list up here - it's too depressing.) Sure enough, if we look at Pence's stats: low walk total and a SLG well south of .500. Maybe there's a correlation to be found after all.

Once I have all 8 of these teams done, I'll likely calculate an average swp/WAR ratio, and with 8 (teams) x 21 (players) + however many honorable mentions I calculated, I should have a pretty decent sample size of the best players in the game right now to see how the two metrics compare. Hopefully it'll be enlightening. I hate to think that I might be wasting my time with all these lists...