Using WAR And The Harmonic Mean To Find The Best Rookie Of The Year Duo

I first thought of just adding up the career WAR of the AL & NL ROY winners for each year. But there could be a pair where one player has a very high WAR and the other a low WAR who might rank high just because of the better player.

The Harmonic Mean prevents extremes from having too much influence. Bill James uses it in his PowerSpeed# based on HRs & SBs. A player has to be balanced to do well.

So my formula here will be

(2*AL*NL)/(AL + NL)

where AL is the career WAR of the AL ROY and NL is the career WAR of the NL Roy. The table below has the top 10.

Year	Name	WAR	NL	WAR	Harmonic
1967	Rod Carew	81.2	Tom Seaver	106	91.96
2001	Ichiro Suzuki	60	Albert Pujols	101.7	75.47
1956	Luis Aparicio	55.9	Frank Robinson	107.2	73.48
1977	Eddie Murray	68.7	Andre Dawson	64.8	66.69
1951	Gil McDougald	40.6	Willie Mays	156.1	64.44
1991	Chuck Knoblauch	44.6	Jeff Bagwell	79.9	57.25
2012	Mike Trout	82.4	Bryce Harper	42.5	56.08
1997	Nomar Garciaparra	44.3	Scott Rolen	70.1	54.29
2006	Justin Verlander	78.1	Hanley Ramirez	38	51.12
1964	Tony Oliva	43	Dick Allen	58.7	49.64

Just missing the top 10 are the 1972 ROYs Carlton Fisk (68.5 WAR) & Jon Matlack (38.9 WAR) with a Harmonic of 49.62 and the 2007 ROYs Dustin Pedroia (51.9 WAR) & Ryan Braun (47.1 WAR) whose Harmonic was 49.38.

It will be interesting to see in the coming years where Harper and Trout finish.

Carew and Seaver, the runaway leaders, of course, both achieved great stardom.

Carew, in addition to being a Hall of Famer, was an 18 time All-Star who won 7 batting titles and was MVP in 1977.

Seaver, also in the Hall, won 3 Cy Young Awards, led the NL in strikeouts 5 times and ERA 3 times. A 12 time All-Star he was the key man on the 1969 miracle Mets.

One more thing, they each achieved a major milestone on Aug. 4, 1985. Carew got his 3,000th hit and Seaver got his 300th win. Steven C. Weiner of SABR has written about this. See See August 4, 1985: Tom Seaver wins his 300th game in New York as Carew reaches 3,000-hit milestone on same day.