(Bill James’s) War on WAR

Judge and Altuve | Articles | Bill James Online

Additional context from JosPos

More on WAR

 

Win Shares sucked, Bill. Get over it.

 

So does WAR.

 

So does baseball, to be honest

 

Bill James is Willie Mays flopping around centerfield for the Mets. It was a good run but it's over.

 

Don't different seamheads have different "recipes" for WaR? I think the best stats (and science) doesn't depend on one person's particular emphasis.

 

That sure was a lot of words to agree with the decision of an overwhelming majority of selected American League baseball beat writers, to wit, Altuve more valuable than Judge in 2017. Bill's still a good writer, but this essay represents my major quarrel with baseball's new (not so new now) math. So many times it's used to demonstrate what's obvious to anyone who watches baseball and is presented as startling new information to boot. For the record, fans of the 1974 A's (I lived in Oakland in '73 and became a fan) did not dismiss their team's crappy hitting as unimportant. They knew the A's won because of power hitting with Jackson and Bando to supplement the best pitching staff in the majors.

 

In 2005, it was “obvious” to people who wrote about baseball for a living that Bartolo Colon was better than Johan Santana and Mark Buehrle.

 

I was accusing James of beating a dead horse. Seems to be a thing with the numbers crowd.

 

@Michael_ Gee, for you - and plenty of others - it always seems to come back to this: The “new” statistics don’t tell you enough. It is as if if they don’t tell you that Vance Law was actually better than George Brett, they aren’t useful. But they don’t and they have never laid stake to that claim. What they do is indicate pretty clearly that Johan Santana was actually degrees better than Bartolo Colon in 2005, to cite one of dozens of such examples. They indicate pretty clearly that Tim Raines was a Hall of Famer even though he could barely crack 20 percent in his early years on the ballot and walks didn’t even appear on baseball cards for much of his career, I’m guessing. They indicate that Avisail Garcia is much more likely to bat .270 next season than .330. Less than a generation ago, the White Sox would probably have rewarded his 2017 with a contract offer that would be an albatross for the better part of a decade.

When you say they don’t tell you much, what you are really saying is that you aren’t that interested in knowing that much. Colon and Santana were both good in ‘05. Why sweat the details? Albert Pujols is a Hall of Famer under any measurement and the BBWAA will get that right. If they get it wrong on a few marginal guys, why sweat that, either?

You have stacked the deck. No, Copernicus didn’t just re-model the solar system. But GMs win by exploiting the margins.

 

I still like you, though.