You like Win Shares? We got Win Shares. We got a whole lotta stats and rankings based on them too, all courtesy of the good folks at Baseball Graphs.
We'll start with a breakdown of the Jays' 2003 season according to Win Shares -- makes for some interesting reading. We'll follow that up with a position-by-position ranking of all American League players according to WS. To save you the calculations, here's where each Blue Jays position player ranked in the AL in offensive and defensive Win Shares in 2003 (rankings below 30th aren't listed; also, these rankings don't include any minimum number of plate appearances or anything).
C Greg Myers: 6th offensively, below minimum defensively
1B Carlos Delgado: 1st, 5th
2B Orlando Hudson: 8th, 1st*
SS Chris Woodward: 15th, 10th
SS Mike Bordick: 9th, 11th
3B Eric Hinske: 5th, 14th
LF Shannon Stewart: 14th, 15th
CF Vernon Wells: 2nd, 6th
RF Frank Catalanotto: 17th, 30th
DH Josh Phelps: 9th
Not enough ABs to produce useful rankings: Reed Johnson, Bobby Kielty, Tom Wilson.
The asterisk indicates that Orlando Hudson's defensive Win Shares (9.84) not only were the most of any second baseman -- they were the most earned by any player at any defensive position in the entire league. Other interesting results include:
- the Blue Jays' pitching and defence did improve somewhat in the second half
- for a lost season, Eric Hinske still had a pretty good year with the bat
- the Jays are going to miss Mike Bordick a lot next season
I'm not a big WS buff myself, personally -- I bought the New Historical Baseball Abstract, couldn't really make sense of Win Shares from that, and figured I'd be wasting my time buying the book. But others here, like Craig and Robert, are more statistically bent than I am, so they may have some further insights on this, including the relative value that can be assigned to these numbers. Another interesting angle on the 2003 Jays.
https://www.battersbox.ca/article.php?story=20031105124228999