Win shares is the name of the metric Bill James describes in
his 2002 book Win Shares.It considers statistics for baseball and basketball
players, in the context of their team and in a sabermetric way, and assigns a
single number to each player for his contributions for the year. A win share
represents one-third of a team win, by definition. If a team wins 80 games in a
season, then its players will share 240 win shares. The formula for calculating
win shares is complicated; it takes up pages 16–100 in the book.
The general approach
is to take the team's win shares (i.e., 3 times its number of wins), then
divide them between offense and defense.In baseball, all pitching, hitting and
defensive contributions by the player are taken into account. Statistics are
adjusted for park, league and era. On a team with equal offensive and defensive
prowess, hitters receive 48% of the win shares and those win shares are
allocated among the hitters based on runs created. An estimation is then made
to decide what amount of the defensive credit goes to pitchers and what amount
goes to fielders.
