San Francisco Giants: 3 Stats That Show Bryce Harper’s Potential Impact

The first of these three stats is a pretty simple one, offensive WAR (oWAR). WAR in general is a difficult stat to quantify to an exact thing. It’s a relatively devisive stat mainly because of that. But what it does give us is a direct comparison to each other’s offensive output. For the purposes of this article, we used BBREF’s oWAR.

The 2018 San Francisco Giants only had one player with at least a 2.0 oWAR, and his name was Brandon Crawford. The two closest to him were Buster Posey and Andrew McCutchen, both with 1.9 oWAR. Those values are honestly quite miserable. So let’s look at their “mainstream stats” put together so I can give those who either don’t believe in WAR, or don’t understand it enough yet.

The combined slash-line for those three is good for .263/.382/.395/.776. Throw in the totals for individual events and you’re looking at 34 homers, 150 RBI, 298 k’s, 168 BB, and 59 non HR xbh. For three guys that’s not a whole lot.

Let’s take a look at what would happen if you swapped out Bryce Harper and his 4.2 oWAR for Andrew McCutchen though, which would proverbially be 2019’s situation:

• They score 35 more runs, which bumps their runs per nine inning rate from 3.69 to 3.93 (nearly the 4 we’re looking for!)
• OPS jumps 70 points, and slugging percentage jumps 61 points. More XBH usually means more runs (duh)
• Oh and the OBP jumped 30 points, so more guys on base (which also equals more runs)

However, that’s to be expected when you add a guy that’s worth both of your top to oWAR players combined.