What Is the NUT Score? A Better Way to Measure Player Value
NUT is the number the box score doesn't want you to see.
The box score tells you who won, who hit, who pitched, and what the final was. It doesn't tell you whose performance actually moved the needle. A .310 hitter can be costing his team wins. A pitcher with a 4.50 ERA can be one of the best in baseball. The traditional stats most fans reach for were designed a hundred years ago — they describe what happened, not what mattered.
NUT (Net Unbiased Total) is one number that fixes that. It measures how many wins a player adds or costs their team using only hitting and pitching — the parts of the game we can measure precisely. No defense. No opinion. No two competing versions arguing with each other. One number, same everywhere.
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 | ≥ 5 | ≥ 2.5 |
| Star | 3 – 4.9 | 1.5 – 2.4 |
| Solid | 1 – 2.9 | 0.5 – 1.4 |
| 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. The problem: there's no such thing as "WAR." Baseball Reference's bWAR and FanGraphs' fWAR are different stats. They routinely disagree by 1-2 wins on the same player, sometimes more. Whichever version you cite, someone will tell you to use the other.
Most of that disagreement comes from defense — the two sites use completely different defensive models that produce different numbers for the same plays. Defensive data is also noisy in single-season samples. NUT sidesteps the argument by leaving defense out and focusing on what we can measure precisely: what happened at the plate and on the mound. One number. Same everywhere.
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, batter vs pitcher career history, and each team's NUT shown under its score
- Stats leaderboard — sort all players by NUT with a distribution histogram showing where everyone falls
- Trending Players — hottest players ranked by 7-day NUT
- Player profiles — organized in five tabs: Season (quick stats with All/7D/14D filters, actual vs expected with xNUT, percentile rankings), Trends (cumulative NUT chart, 7-game rolling NUT avg, NUT by month, game log), Splits (L/R, Home/Away, Day/Night, by count, monthly, career splits), Zones (strike zone heatmap, pitch data, spray chart, exit velo vs launch angle), and Career (year-by-year stats, milestone watch, NUT trend, NUT breakdown, awards)
- Standings — team-level NUT rankings with hitting vs pitching NUT breakdown bars, filterable by AL, NL, or all of MLB
- Player and team comparison — compare any two players or teams side-by-side with NUT, also accessible from every game page
- Trade analyzer — evaluate fantasy trades using NUT values
- Team pages — ABS challenge tracking with win rates, plus percentile rankings and rolling NUT trends
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