A surprise Nats selection for my 2024 NL all-star team

It’s time for my annual selection of an NL all-star team. To ensure that the selections are based on merit, I use formulas based on WAR (wins above replacement) to make my selections.* For the second year in a row, none of the Nationals were among the 20 best position players or 12 best pitchers in the league. But as with the actual All Star Team, every team in the league is represented, so I have methods to make selections from the teams that otherwise wouldn’t be represented. This year, those teams were the Rockies, Pirates, and Nationals.

*My formulas use a player’s 2024 WAR, 2023 WAR and career WAR to come up with a point total that is used to determine the selections. The system is laid out in my 2022 post, though this year I’m making a minor modification to the weights used for combining the WAR statistics, which is described in a technical appendix at the end of this post.

How did I pick the Nats player for my team? I look at players in three buckets—position players, starting pitchers, and relief pitchers—then compare the top-ranked Nats player in each bucket to the last player selected in each bucket. For position players, the top-ranked Nat was CJ Abrams with 13.0 points. That represents 60% of the total points of the last position player selected to the all-star team on merit (Elly De La Cruz with 23.3 points). Despite the considerable progress that Abrams has made with the bat this year, he’s below average as a fielder and the NL is loaded with good shortstops. It’s hard to argue that he should jump past players like Willy Adames, Ha-Seong Kim, Trea Turner, and Dansby Swanson, all of whom rank ahead of Abrams in WAR-based points yet weren’t able to qualify for the team.

Turning to starting pitchers, the highest-ranking Nat was Trevor Williams with 14.8 points, which was 67% of the total for the last SP to make my team. (Williams, of course, is injured, but I’ve decided to ignore injury status in making my selections because it is hard to predict which players might be back on the active roster before the All Star Game.) Williams was having a really good season, but because my method also pays attention to his performance last season and over his career, he only ranks 17th in points among NL starting pitchers.

So, my selection to represent that Nats on my all-star team is going to be a relief pitcher. And… drum roll… the honor goes to Dylan Floro! Yes, Floro comes out ahead of the closer, Kyle Finnegan, and the setup man, Hunter Harvey. Floro leads the Nats’ relief staff in ERA with 2.15 (compared with 2.23 for Finnegan and 3.49 for Harvey). He’s also ahead of them in FIP (fielding independent pitching, based on strikeouts, walks, and home runs allowed) with 2.47 compared to 2.98 for Harvey and 4.02 for Finnegan.) For the NL as a whole, Floro ranks 13th among relief pitchers in Fangraphs WAR (which is based on FIP) and 12th in RA9-WAR (which is based on runs allowed per nine innings). In overall points, Floro’s 7.9 is 73% of the total for the last relief pitcher to make my team on merit, which makes him my 2024 all-star team selection.

Here are my all-star team selections with their total points in parentheses. (Note that for outfielders, I treat corner outfielders (COF) as interchangeable, so I pool the left and right fielders and select the four with the most points. But I consider center field (CF) to be a skill set that must be represented on the team, so the two best center fielders are selected separately.)

Starters

C – William Contreras (23.3)

1B – Freddie Freeman (33.7)

2B – Ketel Marte (26.0)

3B – Austin Riley (19.5)

SS – Mookie Betts (35.2)

COF – Ronald Acuña Jr. (25.5)

COF – Fernando Tatis Jr. (22.3)

CF – Cody Bellinger (16.3)

DH – Shohei Ohtani (34.9)

SP – Zack Wheeler (25.9)

Reserves

C – Will Smith (21.7)

1B – Bryce Harper (30.4)

2B – Nico Hoerner (16.3)

3B – Alec Bohm (17.9)

SS – Francisco Lindor (29.5)

SS – Elly De La Cruz (23.3)

SS – Ezequiel Tovar (17.0) (*selected so the Rockies would be represented)

COF – Christian Yelich (21.7)

COF – Brandon Nimmo (21.6)

CF – Corbin Carroll (15.2)

DH – Marcell Ozuna (20.6)

SP – Ranger Suárez (25.9)

SP – Sonny Gray (24.6)

SP – Logan Webb (23.4)

SP – Chris Sale (23.0)

SP – Reynaldo López (22.1)

SP – Mitch Keller (17.3) (*selected so the Pirates would be represented)

RP – Bryan Hudson (13.8)

RP – Matt Strahm (11.1)

RP – Tanner Scott (10.9)

RP – Jeff Hoffman (10.8)

RP – Dylan Floro (7.8) (*selected so the Nationals would be represented)

Technical Appendix – changes to weights

If I had used the same formula as last year, I would have calculated the points for each player with this:

Points = 4 * 2024_WAR + 2 * MAX(2023_WAR, 2024_WAR) + Squareroot(Career_WAR)

The formula combines the players WAR for this year, last year, and his career to obtain a total. It is a weighted average, with a weight of 4 for this year, 2 for last year, and 1 for the square root of his career WAR.

I noticed last year, however, that the formula was giving a little bit too much weight to the previous year and career performance and a not quite enough to this year’s performance. I didn’t want to be like a lot of writers and just ignore previous performance (since singular focus on year-to-date statistics can lead to some pretty bad selections), but I did want to make sure the selected players were all making positive contributions in the current year. So I slightly increased the weight for this year and slightly lowered the weights for the previous performance, while still having the total weights add up to 7:

Written as an equation, this year’s formula is:

Points = 4.4 * 2024_WAR + 1.8 * MAX(2023_WAR, 2024_WAR) + 0.8 * Squareroot(Career_WAR)

That’s the formula I used this year and plan to use going forward.