What Is the NUT Score? A Better Way to Measure Player Value
If you follow baseball, you've probably heard of WAR — Wins Above Replacement. It's the go-to stat for measuring how valuable a player is. But WAR has a problem: it includes defensive metrics that are unreliable, inconsistent, and change dramatically depending on which version of WAR you use.
That's why we built NUT (Net Unbiased Total) — a player value metric that measures how many wins a player adds or costs their team using only hitting and pitching. No defense. No opinion. Just the numbers.
How NUT Works
NUT answers a simple question: how much did this player help their team win?
For hitters, NUT uses weighted on-base average (wOBA) — a stat that values each way a batter reaches base according to how much it actually contributes to scoring runs. Singles, doubles, home runs, and walks are all weighted differently based on their actual run value. NUT compares a player's wOBA to the league average and converts the difference into wins.
For pitchers, NUT uses Fielding Independent Pitching (FIP) — which only considers the outcomes a pitcher directly controls: strikeouts, walks, hit batters, and home runs allowed. ERA gets influenced by the defense behind a pitcher. FIP strips that out.
What's a Good NUT Score?
NUT is measured in wins. A NUT of 0.0 is league average. Positive means the player is helping their team win more games than an average player would. Negative means the opposite.
| Hitters | Pitchers | |
|---|---|---|
| Nutty | ≥ 6 | ≥ 3 |
| Premier | 5 – 5.9 | 2.5 – 2.9 |
| Elite | 4 – 4.9 | 2 – 2.4 |
| Great | 3 – 3.9 | 1.5 – 1.9 |
| Good | 2 – 2.9 | 1 – 1.4 |
| Above Avg | 1 – 1.9 | 0.5 – 0.9 |
| Average | 0 – 0.9 | 0 – 0.4 |
| Below Avg | < 0 | < 0 |
In 2025, Aaron Judge led all hitters with a +7.8 NUT. On the pitching side, the top arms hovered around +3.0 to +4.0 NUT. These are the players who had the biggest measurable impact on winning.
2025 Top Hitters
| Aaron Judge | +7.8 |
| Shohei Ohtani | +6.2 |
| Kyle Schwarber | +5.0 |
| George Springer | +4.9 |
| Cal Raleigh | +4.5 |
2025 Top Pitchers
| Paul Skenes | +3.8 |
| Tarik Skubal | +3.7 |
| Cristopher Sánchez | +3.6 |
| Logan Webb | +3.5 |
| Garrett Crochet | +2.7 |
Why Not Just Use WAR?
WAR is a great concept — one number to capture a player's total value. But it has real problems. Baseball Reference's bWAR and FanGraphs' fWAR frequently disagree by 2+ wins for the same player in the same season. The gap almost always comes from how they measure defense.
Defensive metrics need multiple seasons of data to stabilize. A single season of defensive data is noisy. NUT sidesteps this entirely by focusing on what we can measure precisely: what happened at the plate and on the mound.
Where to See NUT Scores
NUT is built into every part of Baseball Nut. You'll see it on:
- Game cards on the scoreboard — team records, live pitcher/batter matchups, and total NUT generated in each game
- Stats leaderboard — sort all players by NUT
- Trending Players — hottest players ranked by 7-day NUT
- Player profiles — full career NUT history with color-coded tiers
- Standings — team-level NUT rankings
- Player comparison — compare any two players side-by-side with NUT
- Trade analyzer — evaluate fantasy trades using NUT values
Try It Now
Baseball Nut is free, has no ads, no gambling odds, and no clutter. Just live MLB scores, stats, and a better way to measure who's actually winning games.