Who Has the Most, and Fewest, Dingers per WAR?

What follows is a whimsical post that considers a fun, but ultimately inconsequential, metric: Dingers per WAR. As one might quickly surmise, Dingers per WAR (or DPW from here) simply represents the number of home runs any given player has hit, all over their fWAR total.

DPW provides a brief snapshot of how much, or little, home runs relate to any given player’s production more broadly. Some players hit outsized numbers of dingers relative to their ultimate production, as measured by fWAR; other players accumulate quite a bit of value despite hitting fewer home runs than that value would suggest.

Dingers and fWAR are accumulated across player-seasons beginning in 2000 and running all the way through July of 2026. Only players with more than 1,000 plate appearances and 1+ fWAR —DPW makes little sense when examining negative or near-zero fWAR cases— are considered.

Given data only runs from 2000 onward, plenty of qualifying players’ career statistics are truncated. For instance, Alex Rodriguez will not have the home runs and fWAR he accumulated in the 1990s count toward his totals here.

DPW is interesting because it highlights two truisms in baseball: first, that home runs are valuable, but second, that there remain plenty of alternative ways to accumulate value as a position player.

A quick scatterplot of home runs and fWAR illustrates each of these points: home run totals unmistakably relate to player value, as measured by fWAR (the correlation between the two is 0.81), but the dispersion of those points underscores the fact that so too are there plenty of exceptions.

There is not really such a thing as “good” or “bad” DPW, given that fWAR alone represents a player’s value. The relative frequency of going deep on the path to accumulating that value is of far lesser importance than the value itself.

But what is a “typical” DPW value? That question is best answered using the context a histogram provides; the histogram below illustrates the non-normal distribution of DPW. In fact, DPW is heavily left skewed.

Despite that severe left skew, many players have large DPW values up to as high as ~80 DPW. Setting the distribution of values aside, the average DPW among this group is 11.5 while the median value is 8.74.

Put another way, a player that hits ~30 home runs in a season, let’s say, would hypothetically in turn generate ~3 fWAR, on average. While the histogram above highlights that such a case is in fact rare, it represents something of a median outcome.

Let’s take a closer look at some leaderboards. The players who top the “low DPW” list are those who found ways to provide value in the absence of frequent dingers.

Some of the players listed above did not have particularly strong MLB careers. Reggie Willits and Jason Tyner, first and third on the above list, accumulated less than 2 fWAR throughout their careers, respectively.

Still, there are other players who had pretty impressive careers too. Juan Pierre and Luis Castillo, a tandem perhaps best known for sitting atop the 2003 World Series champion Marlins’ lineup, each had really strong 20+ fWAR careers. Those fWAR values in fact outpaced their number of home runs, resulting in <1 DPW values.

Next, those players with the highest DPW values.

Andrew Vaughn represents the high water mark in DPW for now; he’s hit 90 MLB home runs (at the time data was gathered) while providing essentially replacement level value in his career to this point. That said, FanGraphs has Vaughn as having produced 3.0 fWAR to this point in his Brewers career after some rough early seasons with the White Sox; should he continue to produce, he may soon fall out of this list altogether.

While it was noted above that there is no real good or bad DPW values, one can see from that second list that those players on the extreme high end of the spectrum are/were not generally impactful players, as none eclipse(d) 3 fWAR. Pretty simply, if it takes a player 40+ home runs to accumulate ~1 fWAR, that player’s game is likely not rounded such that they are reliably contributing much above replacement level.

As a final point, when considering this data, it seems to me that players with high DPW values may become increasingly rare. As baseball continues to better understand, quantify, and emphasize all those other components that contribute to a measure like fWAR, I don’t think “home run specialists” will get so long a look before the other parts of their game must improve.

Lastly, the tables below have been added as something of an appendix; those tables essentially list those players that were most and least valuable relative to the rough number of home runs they hit, respectively.