Baseball Reference Thinks Cristopher Sanchez Is More Valuable Than Jacob Misiorowski. Why?

[Jason Wang]

Image courtesy of Bill Streicher-Imagn Images / Benny Sieu-Imagn Images

In 2026, Jacob Misiorowski fully ascended to superstar status and took over as the face of the franchise. He had an incredible year, leading all of baseball in ERA (1.86), ERA+ (224), FIP (2.16), WHIP (0.80), and strikeout rate (38.2%). He made ten starts with 10+ strikeouts, and his best outing of the year came against the Phillies on June 12th when he punched out 15 hitters on the way to a complete-game shutout.

By most accounts, he should be the favorite to take home this year’s NL Cy Young award. He has more fWAR (FanGraphs) than any pitcher in baseball and has been a significant part of the Brewers’ success this year. Why then does bWAR (Baseball Reference) seem to rate Phillies southpaw Cristopher Sánchez so much more favorably?

Sánchez has a bWAR of 8.0 this season compared to Misiorowski’s 6.1, a difference that’s even more jarring when you take a look at how superior the latter has seemingly been in several key categories.

So if Misiorowski has an ERA more than a run lower than Sánchez, a much better ERA+ and strikeout rate, what’s causing the difference in WAR?

Baseball Reference is pretty transparent about how they come up with their WAR numbers. For obvious reasons, pitchers and position players are evaluated differently, and for pitchers, the two individual statistics that really matter are the workload and total runs scored against them across that span, regardless of whether they were earned or not. Sánchez does have nearly 40 more innings, but his RA9 (3.17) is still almost a full run higher than Misiorowski’s (2.29), so that by itself doesn’t explain the difference.

Here’s where the math really starts to get deep. After pulling the workload and RA9, we have to get to work on defining what the league-average level looks like. There are three parts to calculating what Baseball Reference calls xRA_final: team defense, averages for starters and relievers, and park factors.

For team defense, we want to know how many runs would’ve been conceded assuming a perfectly average defense was playing behind each pitcher. Thus, pitchers on better defensive teams get their numbers written down while those with worse defensive support get a little boost. 

The Brewers, as per usual, were one of the best fielding teams in baseball, combining for 60 Defensive Runs Saved (4th in MLB) courtesy of players like Brice Turang (22), Jackson Chourio (13), and Luis Lara (10). On the other hand, the Phillies had -40 DRS (29th in MLB) thanks to players like Trea Turner (-17), Bryson Stott (-9), and Alec Bohm (-8). Consequently, Sánchez gets a little more credit for preventing runs because of the skill gap in their respective supporting casts.

Since both Sánchez and Misiorowski are starters, the positional adjustment is irrelevant here, which brings us to park factors. According to Statcast, Citizens Bank Park had a Park Factor of 102, ranking it eighth in terms of batter-friendliness. On the other hand, American Family Field had a Park Factor of just 98, making it 22nd in terms of batter-friendliness. Baseball Reference reports a similar difference, giving the Phillies’ park a 107 park factor as opposed to the Brewers’ 101. So once again, Sánchez gets a little more credit for pitching in a park more geared towards offensive output.

So, the League Average Pitcher Performance for each player is computed in terms of runs and is calculated with the following formula.

xRA_final = Park Factors * (xRA - Team Defense Adjustment + Starter/Reliever Adjustment)

This run total is the key difference and is the first number where we start to see how Misiorowski and Sánchez begin to diverge. According to their calculations, Baseball Reference believes that a league-average, not replacement-level, pitcher would’ve conceded 41 more runs than Jacob Misiorowski, assuming he had the same workload and defensive support. On the other side, a league-average pitcher would’ve conceded 54 more runs than Cristopher Sánchez. This figure is called Runs Above Average (RAA).

These runs get converted to wins in an equally (if not more) complex process, and we arrive at Wins Above Average (WAA). The difference of 13 RAA between Misiorowski and Sánchez results in a WAA difference of 1.6 between the two pitchers, but WAA is not WAR. In order to get from WAA to WAR, we need to do the following:

WAR = WAA +  Replacement-Level Wins + Leverage Adjustment 

Because WAA compares performance against the league-average pitcher and WAR compares performance against a replacement-level player, who will be worse than league-average, we need to make the adjustment. Pitchers who throw more innings get a greater replacement-level adjustment because their performance is carried out over a larger workload. This is where the additional 37 ⅔ innings pitched by Sánchez really help, turning his 1.6 WAA lead into a 1.9 bWAR lead. Because both pitchers are starters, the leverage adjustment is negligible in this case.

Ultimately, bWAR cares about how many runs the opposing team scored while a given pitcher was on the mound. fWAR follows a very similar formula, but the biggest difference is that it starts with FIP instead of RA9, a metric that has become a more preferred method of pitcher evaluation. Misiorowski’s MLB-leading FIP of 2.16 is better than Sánchez’s 2.80, but the difference in workload means the difference in fWAR between the two players is just 0.3 in favor of Misiorowski.

Though bWAR may be the one statistic that favors Sánchez’s case for the Cy Young award, since nearly every other metric points to Misiorowski, Brewers fans can rest assured that their ace will receive the proper recognition.

Before advanced analytics, things were even worse, with statistics like wins being prioritized over other, more meaningful numbers. A particularly memorable example was the 2005 Cy Young award, which was given to Bartolo Colón despite having worse statistics across the board compared to Johan Santana — voters felt his 21 wins were enough to push him over the edge.

Nowadays, the prevalence of public data has made decisions clearer for everyday fans, but it has also brought about a new problem. Some argue that awards like MVP and Cy Young are now simply awarded to the player with the highest WAR, which can defeat the purpose of the best parts of sports fandom: the discussions. In this case, bWAR would suggest that Sánchez is the runaway favorite for the NL Cy Young despite fWAR preferring Misiorowski.

WAR is messy, complex, imperfect, and not meant to capture the whole story in a single number. This doesn’t mean it’s worthless, but like every statistic in baseball, it’s not definitive by any means. Nonetheless, it’s become an important figure in the world of baseball analytics, and it’s important to understand (at least at a high level) how it’s derived so you can make more informed decisions on how to interpret it.

Although both starters have had outstanding seasons, Jacob Misiorowski will more than likely take home the award by a large margin. His utter dominance in several categories makes it hard to argue against his case, but hey, at least one number seems to support the other guy.

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[bean5302]

Baseball References' pitcher WAR is nonsensical. The difference over a season from the best to the worst defense in baseball is maybe 0.25 ERA. 125 runs in 13,000 innings pitched, and it's wildly different for different defensive metrics.

By using ERA+ or xRA they're just double-counting defensive impact and then multiplying Type II errors over and over. Can't use any version of ERA/RA and then apply a defensive multiplier, then a starter multiplier, then a WPA multiplier.

Junk. Absolute GIGO.

[Jason Wang]

23 minutes ago, bean5302 said:

Baseball References' pitcher WAR is nonsensical. The difference over a season from the best to the worst defense in baseball is maybe 0.25 ERA. 125 runs in 13,000 innings pitched, and it's wildly different for different defensive metrics.

By using ERA+ or xRA they're just double-counting defensive impact and then multiplying Type II errors over and over. Can't use any version of ERA/RA and then apply a defensive multiplier, then a starter multiplier, then a WPA multiplier.

Junk. Absolute GIGO.

Yeaaaaaah and I think this is a great example of that. I think it's really difficult to argue that Sanchez is that much more valuable than Misiorowski.

The whole idea of using ERA over RA9 in normal discourse is because pitchers shouldn't be punished for having bad fielding, so using RA9 seems like a strange decision to me.

I guess it helps give pitchers more credit for having bad defensive support but I think FanGraphs using FIP as a starting point is just a better way of normalizing for that already.