The Problem with Bwar and why Cristopher Sanchez is not an 8 win player
I am going to preface this post by saying this is not a Sanchez hate post. I think he is clearly a top 3 pitcher in the world. I just think he is overrated by bwar. He currently ranks 6th with 5.9 fwar and second with 7.7 bwar which is a pretty large gap.
I don’t need to tell you that the Phillies defense is bad. Across the board they have several negative defenders playing key positions such as Trea Turner. They rank poorly in both DRS and FRV.
(Credit TJ Stats)
However the Phillies have actually played good defense behind Sanzhez. While we don’t have this data for DRS we do have it for FRV.
Baseball reference uses a defensive adjustment formula to calculate war.
https://www.baseball-reference.com/about/war_explained_pitch.shtml
In this formula it assumes that a team's defense performs consistently behind each pitcher. While it uses DRS I am going to assume that the defensive metrics are close enough. All that matters is that the team does better than average with Sanchez pitching. In essence baseball reference is giving Sanchez free runs because the defense performed worse when other pitchers were pitching. Sanchez is getting .22 runs per 9 or an extra 4.4 runs in total when in actuality he should be getting negative value from defense. While this isn’t a huge amount the assumptions in bwar essential unfairly shift war from unlucky to lucky pitchers on the same team. Andrew Painter only gets a .02 extra run value because he has more balls in play despite a 10 run difference in reality.
Sanchez’s reference page: https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/s/sanchcr01.shtml
Painter’s reference page: https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/p/paintan01.shtml
Posted Sep 8, 2026, 4:55 PM UTC