This posting is not strictly about college softball. It is about past Olympic softball players, but most from the U.S. previously played at the college level. Some of you may be familiar with the website Five-Thirty-Eight (named after the number of electoral votes in U.S. presidential elections), which features quantitative analyses of politics, sports, and other cultural phenomena. Five-Thirty-Eight has a new article available, looking at which Olympic softball players have the best Wins Above Replacement (WAR) statistics.
WAR is a relatively straightforward concept, in principle: How many extra wins does a player get you compared to a marginal replacement player? For Major League Baseball, a "replacement player" is considered someone who would be brought up from the AAA minor-league level to play in the big leagues. However, WAR is very complicated to calculate and different analysts use somewhat different formulas.
Putting all that aside, which softball Olympians have produced the most WAR, both for a career and a single Olympics? Most of the names should be familiar to readers of this blog: Fernandez, Osterman, Abbott, Finch, and so forth...
For additional background on WAR, I wrote an introductory piece pertaining to college baseball (click here and then find the Spring/Summer 2019 issue).