Historical Profiles: Bill Wegman

Bill Wegman was a career Brewer who spent 11 seasons in Milwaukee from 1985-1995. His best season came in 1991, when he won the Hutch Award and had a career-low 2.84 ERA. According to WAR, however, his 3.1 mark was the second best of his career. In 1992, Wegman had a 3.4 WAR. The only other time that he had a WAR of at least three came in 1987, but he had a 4.24 ERA that season. In fact, the ’91 and ’92 seasons were the only ones in which he had an ERA under four.

Another interesting thing to note is that those three seasons were the only full seasons in which Bill Wegman had a positive WPA. He had solid control, played good defense for a pitcher, but he was terrible at striking out pitchers.  There really aren’t many sabermetrics out there to help us evaluate him, but we can give an effective overview of his career just by looking at statistics.

Wegman’s career BABIP against and LOB% are both average for any pitcher, so we can safely say that his ERA will only be slightly effected. In fact, his ERA- is a barely above-average 99, while his FIP- is 104. This means that he was just a little bit lucky in his career, so it’s safe to say that he was a league average pitcher over those eleven seasons.

What really helped Wegman out was his control, because his .271 BAA against was significantly higher than the league average of .260 during that time span. However, his .315 OBPA was lower than the average of .327. Wegman did give up his fair share of home runs during his career, and that’s seen when you look at his career .430 slugging against as opposed to a league average of .395. His OPS against? .745, which is higher than the norm of .721.

Just by examining the statistics out there, we can see that Bill Wegman was a slightly above average pitcher (about 2.3 WAR per full season) and would make about 11.7 million dollars per year on average if he played today (with the same skill set). Wegman was a fan-favorite who did his job and helped his team win games. If he played today, Wegman would probably be a #3 starter, and there’s definitely no shame in that.