🥜 NUT Score™

Net Unbiased Total

NUT Score™ is a proprietary, trademarked formula that measures how many wins a player adds or costs their team compared to a league-average player — using only hitting and pitching. No defense.

NUT was built to solve a real problem for baseball fans trying to find the true value of a player to their team. Most fans reach for WAR — bWAR from Baseball Reference or fWAR from FanGraphs — to answer questions like “who's actually better?” or “was that contract worth it?” But both versions bake defense into the number, and defensive metrics are notoriously unreliable — they swing wildly year to year, reward positioning over skill, and routinely make good hitters look like bad players. NUT strips all of that noise out and measures only what the numbers actually tell us: how much a player is genuinely worth at the plate and on the mound.

NUT is calculated fresh each season and added to a player's running career total. Every season counts — a slow year chips away at the total just as a great year builds it up. The badge on a player's profile shows their average NUT per season; the career number reflects everything they've produced (or cost) across their entire big league career.

Qualifying thresholds: Hitters need at least 100 plate appearances in a season to register a NUT. Pitchers need at least 25 innings pitched. Below those thresholds, the sample is too small to be meaningful.

Most fantasy leagues score only hitting and pitching — home runs, RBI, ERA, strikeouts. Defense never appears on your scorecard. WAR rewards the Gold Glover who hits .240; NUT ignores his glove entirely and tells you exactly how much he's moving the needle where it counts. Stolen bases aren't captured either — not because they don't matter, but because they're one hamstring away from zero. NUT measures the repeatable, contact-and-power core of a hitter's game — the part you can actually predict. If you play fantasy baseball, NUT is the number you actually want.

Perdomo (+1.7 NUT vs 7.0 bWAR) and Hoerner (+2.1 vs 6.2) are elite defenders whose bWAR is inflated by 4–5 wins of defensive value that NUT doesn't count, and Raleigh's gap is driven by catcher framing metrics bWAR credits heavily. Judge and Witt both play strong defense, which explains their smaller but still meaningful gaps. Ohtani's numbers match (6.6 vs 6.6) because he DHs — no defensive value in either direction, and both systems converge on the same offensive math.

Raleigh's fWAR of 9.1 includes catcher framing — NUT measures his bat only, which puts him at 4.1. Perdomo (+1.7 vs 7.1) and Carroll (+2.9 vs 6.5) are both elite defenders whose gloves explain most of the gap. Turner, Ramírez, and Lindor all play strong defense at premium positions, and that 2–3 win defensive premium is exactly the kind of value NUT filters out to show you what their bats are actually doing.

bWAR credits pitchers for runs prevented with defense behind them, while NUT uses FIP — only strikeouts, walks, and home runs — so the gap between the two metrics reveals how much a pitcher relied on his defense. Sánchez (8.0 bWAR vs 3.1 NUT) and Crochet (6.3 vs 1.9) both show big gaps, meaning their defenses turned a lot of batted balls into outs that FIP doesn't reward them for. Skenes and Skubal track closely across both metrics — a sign their stuff was genuinely dominant however you measure it — while Wheeler flips the script with a better NUT than bWAR, meaning he was pitching better than his results showed.

Both fWAR and NUT use FIP, so the rankings stay mostly intact — the consistent gap across every pitcher comes down to baseline: fWAR measures value above a replacement-level player, NUT measures value above average, and that difference adds roughly 2 wins per full season. Crochet's gap is the widest (5.8 vs 1.9) because he logged a lot of innings, which inflates fWAR more than NUT, and his peripherals weren't as clean as his ERA suggested. Webb, Fried, Yamamoto, and Brown all cluster in the +2.0–2.3 NUT range with gaps right around 2.5–3 wins — exactly what you'd expect from quality starters doing their job for a full season.