The War Against WAR

Mike Trout has already assembled a better career than Eddie Murray. If this statement seems a bit suspect to you, well, you’re not alone. I concur with you. But there’s one massive, tidy, all-encompassing statistic called WAR which insists that Trout has accomplished just such a feat. And if we quibble over the veracity of this stat, proponents of WAR will tell us, then we are old school dunderheads.

Just for a quick recap on such an obscure player as Eddie Murray, he’s a Hall Of Famer who topped 500 HR, 3000 hits, won a Rookie of the Year award and finished top 5 in MVP voting six times. He was an integral part of three different World Series teams, is the all-time leader in sacrifice flies, and as far as I can tell was an above average player up to his age 39 season. Yet most of this legacy is dismissed by modern theorists, as they scoff at the trifling, overrated “counting stats” we fans hold so dear. And herein lies the two-headed problem baseball is facing at the moment: those controlling the narrative for this game insist that following most traditional statistics makes us out-to-lunch fuddy-duddies, and meanwhile, we simply must embrace WAR and some of its even more radical ilk instead. But I’m not exactly convinced that either of these things are true.

Let’s start with the basics and for the sake of argument just assume modern theory is bulletproof. I would still argue it’s a major mistake to tell fans that batting average, wins, steals, RBI, runs, saves, and sacrifice flies are all dumb stats, and that we really need to be following wRC+ instead. If you want to discuss this in your fantasy league, fine, that’s understandable, but those in charge of MLB’s media and marketing might wish to tone these things down in print and in broadcasts. Anyone who seriously believes the average fan is interested in this crap, and that the reason attendance keeps plummeting is because we need to shave five more seconds off of the intentional walk time or something instead, well, let’s just say your name probably rhymes with “Rob Manfred.” The closest analogy I can think of is the QB Rating in football, but even so, as far as I know NFL scribes and analysts are not telling fans they’re morons for being interested in such laughable statistics as touchdowns, interceptions, and passing yards.

I want to state for the record that I am not anti-innovation, or a traditionalist or anything. Fresh new ideas on the field, like this opener concept where relievers start games, or the heavy shifting that began a few years ago, are always fascinating, and fun to watch. I was into that whole Moneyball business as much as the next guy. But if you’re wondering why prospective new fans are turning away from the game with a queasy look, as if you’ve just proposed they take up tournament chess for a living, as they say, nah, I think I’m good, thanks, think I’ll pass, then this is your answer.

This phenomenon is compounded in that many of us who do actively follow the game are not completely sold on some of these metrics, either. We have a name for these numbers: “Stats From Who-GAF-istan.” It was bothering me for a while that I couldn’t seem to ever remember what wRC+ even meant, much less how to calculate it, until reaching this epiphany and realizing I really don’t care. I’m now making a conscious point of refusing to learn this statistic, on a couple of different principles. I mean, the first thing I do every morning, after firing up the coffee pot, is go online and read article upon article about what went down in the world of major league baseball the night before. A recent piece about my beloved Indians had me scratching my head and wondering, though: what the fCK+ is all this stuff even supposed to mean? It was listing the recent trends for a few players and I couldn’t make heads or tells of the article, between the wOBA and the FIP and every other acronym you can possibly dream up, with or without plus signs.

Meanwhile, nary a mention about something as pedestrian and debunked as batting average. Now, while aware that this rant has me sounding somewhat like a geezer yelling at kids to get off his lawn, I do have a problem with this. We might know better in this advanced era than to place as much importance on batting average as we used to, but it is still a handy and useful statistic, with the added advantage that most observers can understand and calculate it simply enough. If you see a guy hit .362 over the course of a full season, you don’t need to know anything else whatsoever — he had a great year at the plate. Furthermore, I think it actually has some advantages over a purported all-encompassing statistic like WAR in that you clearly wouldn’t expect batting average to tell you anything about a guy’s defensive prowess.

And this is assuming that you even trust WAR tells you what it’s alleging to, how many wins a guy is adding to the ledger with his overall play. Even the stats creators will tell you it doesn’t actually mean this, that rather it’s measuring ten run chunks a guy created or saved versus a theoretical bottom rung fringe player (never mind that we are told in the same breath that the old school actual stat of Runs is mere farcical piffle). But of course, there’s no catchy handle for that, without which this stat never would have caught on. In theory, I think the WAR concept is a cool one. It’s just that I don’t believe this statistic is telling us what it purports to. Most people in the same boat as me just shrug and keep their mouths shut because the math is way over our heads at this point. However, I think there are enough philosophical problems and contradictions that you can poke holes in some of this without any math at all.

I was already mulling this angle when the baseball gods handed me a gift early this year, and Mike Trout came up with an injured groin. Somewhere along the line Alan Trammell’s 1992 season caught my attention, a year where this HOF bound starting shortstop, still basically in the middle of his career, played all of 29 games and yet is credited with a 1.0 WAR anyway. However, Trout’s injury, which occurred two weeks into the 2019 season, really crystallized my thoughts on this topic. The various Secretaries of WAR were already awarding him with a value right at 2, even at such an early point in the campaign. There are three separate reasons why I find this completely ridiculous:

1) This averages out to one point of WAR per week, which would be a historic pace. He clearly was not and is not having that great of a season.

2) As a mental exercise, instead of comparing him to others, let’s just compare two versions of 2019 Mike Trout. Pretend that he played a full 162 instead at 2.0 WAR pace. Are we seriously saying this has the same value — both to his team and his career WAR value — as the two-week 2.0 WAR season?

3) Okay, so let’s extend that last point outward. I know what this number is supposed to measure; you’re saying if he missed the rest of the year, those two weeks were still 2.0 WAR better than the most bottom rung, fringe, marginal center fielder would’ve managed for two weeks. But you would obviously expect more production than that out of your projected starting center fielder for an entire season, or even a platoon situation in center field. Alan Trammell in 1992 wasn’t 1.0 WAR above the worst full-time starting shortstop, and the same would be true for two weeks of 2019 Mike Trout versus an entire season from the other 29 front line center fielders. We need a number that would actually measure this.

Any one of these points make the statistic look silly. All three in conjunction sends it off into the absurd. Simply put, there has to be some value in remaining on the field, not to mention longevity, and I don’t think anyone’s figured out that statistic yet.

So let’s get back to the Eddie Murray comparisons. Maybe my thinking is flawed on this, but here’s what I believe you are signing off on when you start gushing, “Mike Trout’s already had a better career than (insert HOF player’s name)!” You are saying you would take 8 years of Mike Trout, plus 13 years of a guy putting up exactly 0.0 in WAR, versus 21 years of Eddie Murray. Otherwise, what are you arguing? That it’s better to have the best player in baseball all the time as opposed to not having the best player in baseball all the time? This point is obvious to the point of inanity and not worth mentioning. Of course that is true. But that’s not really the argument.

I’m sure some would instead insist, no, what I’m saying, dude, is this frees you up to have whoever you want for the next 13 years! Fair enough, but it doesn’t quite work like that. The whole selling point of this WAR stat is that every team in baseball is presumably working like mad to field the best player it can, within whatever budget and/or philosophy it’s operating under, and this all combines to assume no more and no less than a 0.0 WAR at every position. Even if rebuilding or tanking or whatever, it doesn’t matter — this fringe theoretical ghost, call him Casper O’ Fouray, would generate that number. However many teams are competing, of which we can probably assume this team in question is one, it doesn’t really matter anyway because try as they might, teams can still take for granted a WAR no larger than 0.0 at every position. After all these very Angels, we are told, recently ran Albert Pujols out there for a full season in which he drove in 101 RBI yet compiled a WAR of nearly negative 2. They were trying to win and were still apparently unable to find anyone better. Chris Carter, who’d been released by the Yankees halfway through that season, presumably had his phone disconnected or something (call me a “math nerd” but I think Carter’s half year of –0.8 projects to better than a purported full year of Pujol’s -1.9, no?).

So you can’t even assume future years of Mike Trout above 0.0, much less replacement players. But we can really just chuck aside my theory of what this means and ask the question point blank: would you take 8 years of Mike Trout and 13 of a 0.0 guy versus 21 of an Eddie Murray? I’m answering no to that, for the reasons outlined above, and also for a few others.

The first of these is kind of a lighter, fun exercise, though still possibly valid to consider. Would you rather have two guys putting up a 10 WAR, or one guy putting up a 20? No one has ever put up a 20, so this is maybe an extreme example, but I’m guessing there has to be some breaking point with this statistic, even if you buy into it wholesale. Would the Giants rather have had 2001–04 Barry Bonds, or to have taken that cumulative WAR, and spread it out across four more seasons beyond?

There’s probably no definitive answer to this. You would likely have to take it on a case by case basis. Still, I think it’s worth analyzing this angle, along with my thoughts on longevity. I’m guessing most GMs would take the guy putting up 20, and figure out something for the other position, assuming they could find better than a 0.0 somewhere. But maybe not. After all the Angels were definitely playing to win that year where Pujols put up a –1.9 and I have to believe, given the preposterous deals they were handing out like candy, that if a better option existed anywhere up to and including benching Pujols, they’d have gone for it. Of course, you could certainly argue that the Angels are in the same camp as me (you’ll notice the statistic is not called Wins Above Average, which would be a much smaller and more boring number; it’s projected wins against some theoretical 4A ghost) and don’t exactly buy that a guy driving in 101 runs had a negative impact on the team.

Whatever the case, this kind of ties in with my next point, is that it seems strange to me that this stat doesn’t take into consideration the players who should be on the field, but aren’t. I feel as though I’ve read 28 million articles insisting that the reason the Angels can’t win is because they’ve wrapped up so much money in Pujols. His middling and often allegedly negative WAR numbers are usually given as the primary pieces of evidence. But I’m having a hard time comprehending how the clearly far worse deals handed out to the likes of a Josh Hamilton are almost never mentioned — and also why you wouldn’t factor in these catastrophes somewhere, alongside or in lieu of this “replacement” fringe apparition who doesn’t actually exist. I understand the argument here that these guys aren’t playing, but they are on payroll and should in theory be on the field. If a guy driving in 101 RBI cost you two wins on the year, what of the guy who’s not playing at all? Shouldn’t this adjust the value of those remaining healthy and productive somehow?

This figure also fails to weigh how a player might fare — you could argue how he should fare — with a different approach, and how his decisions are affecting actual game time results. To give you a specific example of what I’m talking about, let’s consider Edwin Encarnacion. Those numbers for the past few seasons look pretty strong on paper. But he’s a great example of how you just can’t tell about a player until you are watching him in action every day.

It says that for those last two campaigns playing for my Indians, 2017 and 2018, he put up a cumulative 4.7 WAR. But I’m here to tell you, he lost at least 5 games with idiotic approaches at the plate. Countless situations where he was batting in a tight game, with a tied score or the Tribe down by one, and a runner in scoring position with less than two outs. Yet he’s coming out his shoes trying to blast one to the downs anyway, every swing, every at bat. And why wouldn’t he? Every scribe, talking head, analytical wizard and coach in the business is telling him this launch angle crap is the ultimate consideration regardless of the situation. I would counter that, however, by saying it doesn’t matter what the optimum launch angle is on a Jose Canseco swing in that spot. It’s just bad baseball. Are we trying to win games, or stack up beads on the WAR abacus, here?

Now, I already know what the grand champions of this stat are going to claim in rebuttal. That there’s no way to measure this, that we don’t know what the outcome would have been even with a different swing, that everyone makes mistakes and even the best hitters are failures most of the time. But none of this applies to what I’m talking about, really. First off, let’s dispense with some unspoken truths about what’s actually happening here, though nobody wants to admit as much. While as a professional athlete you have to give lip service to winning, and winning is surely better than losing, in reality the reason Edwin’s up there hacking is that he hopes to maximize his payday. It maybe doesn’t help matters that everyone in the universe is telling him that the way to do so is to maximize WAR, and that the way to maximize WAR is to swing for three run jacks in a vacuum, all the time, but whatever. This isn’t what I’m talking about, either, technically.

What I mean is that any of these answers are a major cop-out, given the prominence WAR is now assigned in this game. If it were some obscure fine print statistic buried on the player’s Baseball Reference page, okay, that would be one thing. Yet at this point I wouldn’t be surprised if they started engraving these numbers on Hall Of Fame plaques. Even if ignoring the mini arguments-within-arguments here (would you rather have two weeks of Mike Trout or…Encarnacion’s entire 2018 campaign? Why are these assigned basically the same WAR total?), this is a silly and preposterous statistic. You can’t sit there in the press box and cheer, woo hoo! Yes! That’s right, launch angle and exit velocity are the only thing you need to worry about, ever! This is the ticket to maxing out your WAR! This concept shall never be improved upon! But then, if someone points out flaws in the concept, or specific game time situations where it made no sense whatsoever, to quibble, yeah, but that’s not what I’m talking about, man. We’re not actually measuring wins, and I have no idea how he would have done with a different swing. Plus it’s not actually based upon league average, per se, because that would be much more boring and smaller. We’re guessing what some theoretical fringe player would contribute as a bare minimum.

Sorry, but no. If this is the ultimate statistic, then it should take all of those things and more into consideration. Otherwise, we need to step back a few paces from embracing it with such overweening enthusiasm. As it stands, contradictions abound, both with the statistic itself and some of the concepts leading to it. Maybe a mathematician can step into the comments sections and explain why I’m wrong, but again I feel like you can appreciate some of these concepts at a glance, and a lot of it just doesn’t add up.

As anyone who’s paying any attention to the modern game knows, strikeouts are at all-time high. Somewhere along the line, two completely opposing thoughts have taken root, yet we are constantly told both of these things are true: strikeouts are a measure of how absolutely filthy the modern pitcher is; however, if you are talking about hitters, strikeouts are a shrug inducing triviality, a meaningless by-product of swinging for home runs all the time. I mean, how many times have you heard announcers gush about something along these lines, often during the same broadcast:

“Max Scherzer has just struck out 10 batters for the 8th consecutive game! Is this not the most positively insane thing you have ever seen IN YOUR LIFE!?!”

But then also:

“Yes, Pat, Joey Gallo is wearing the golden sombrero yet again. But as we all know, that’s just a result of the modern approach at the plate. I’ll tell ya, the key takeaway for me is really the launch angle he got on that flyout in the 5th.”

Call me an antiquated crank, but I don’t believe each of these sentiments can be true at once. While we’re on the topic of strikeouts, though, there’s an even larger, gaping hole right at the center, all the more curious in that nobody even bothers talking about it anymore. To wit, what is the launch angle on a called third strike? Is it me, or are these an epidemic as well?

I would like to see some numbers on this, because it sure seems like guys are taking called third strikes at an unprecedented clip. There was a game earlier this year where Brad Peacock had 8 called third punchouts. This is completely idiotic. Even prime Randy Johnson should not have had 8 called third punchouts. You cannot convince me that praying a borderline pitch is called a ball if you can’t drill it out of the yard is better than defending the plate with two strikes.

Why can’t we call this what it is? Managers and hitting coaches have lost control of their teams. We would have been benched in Little League for not defending the plate with two strikes, and with good reason. Managers should go down swinging if their players are not willing to in today’s game. The first called third punchout, tell them the next guy who does so is riding the pine. After the next, start benching them. If the front office takes issue with this, ask them if you are or are not in charge of game time decisions (unless you happen to be managing the Mets — you might get a free pass on that topic, if little else).

Ten years ago the announcers would have made constant references to all these called K’s, but it’s been at least a season or two since I’ve heard a single peep on this topic. Though this might suspiciously resemble a gag order, I think there are a few different things which combine to explain such silence. I would ballpark this as about 1/3 of the announcers buying into the modern theories, 1/3 living in fear of looking like an old school caveman, and 1/3 who have been maybe “helpfully” instructed to try and put a positive spin on the situation at all times. Particularly on television, where a bland affability has taken hold and just about all of the blunt dinosaurs have been put out to pasture.

More importantly, though, on the field, there are major contradictions at work with letting these guys rip away. If you’re talking about a Justin Turner, someone who hung around forever before finally latching onto a swing that worked, then that’s one thing, and surely justified. He has likely found his best approach at the plate. But there’s no way you could possibly know this about a rookie who’s offsetting 200 whiffs with a whopping 25 or 30 home runs. A marketer would tell you there hasn’t been enough A/B testing conducted. These mathematicians should be screaming about lack of a sufficient sample size.

Instead now we’re in this climate where everyone’s kind of patronizing and patting veterans like Trout or Pujols on the shoulder, when even they declare in print that they think RBIs are an important statistic, as we then go and write our condescending articles about how they aren’t mathematicians and couldn’t possibly understand what a pointless number that is…but then meanwhile, we’re trusting that even the freshest face off the bus from the minors has done his math, and can flail away with whatever goofy swing he desires. I know Cody Bellinger is setting the world on fire this season, and he had a killer rookie year, too, but I remember being positively befuddled by some of the cuts they were letting him take during the 2017 World Series, i.e. the tail end of his first year, particularly late in game seven. It’s hard to imagine what the hitting coach would have even said in this spot, if hooked up to one of those headsets for an in-game dugout chat. Possibly something like this:

“Well, yeah, Joe, I’ll tell ya, yes he is a rookie, but we trust he’s done his research on launch angles n’ stuff. So we’re not sweating base runners per se. We have faith in the process and that our guys are going to hit four solo bombs here in the next three innings, even against the best team in baseball.”

Detractors of these piece will probably start guffawing right here, as they point out that you can’t change somebody’s swing late in game seven of a World Series. But this merely reinforces what I was saying about benching them throughout the year, and making your corrections then. It doesn’t matter what kind of rookie home run record Bellinger might have established during the regular season. To defend these ridiculous bleacher rips in this spot is just more of prioritizing maximum-WAR-in-a-vacuum over winning a game, and the most important game of the year at that.

As mentioned, even the broadcast teams have been pulverized into submission, and are gun shy about criticizing today’s game. This is how you find them getting misty eyed with their bromance as they wax poetic about certain managers being alleged fundamental gurus, and pointing out examples when this is true. But hitting the mute button on their mics during Yasiel Puig’s hero throws to nowhere, or these loopy — and looping — Swiss cheese swings from the likes of Bellinger. Either that or conveniently rationalizing, you know, this player is out of control and there’s nothing the fundamentals guru can do about him. During which time the hitters taking called third strikes down Broadway are getting high fives in the dugout, being told it’s not only acceptable, but that they are brilliant for doing so.

So we now encounter these constant polarized reactions to launch angle/exit velocity mania. When it works, all you hear from coaching staffs and those defending the coaching staffs is, this is the most revolutionary idea in history! Are you kidding me? Today’s hitters are amazing! But when it doesn’t work, or you want to point out specific situations where this swing made no sense, it’s, well, what do you want us to do? Are you kidding me? Today’s hitters are terrible! If I had to guess, the truth lies much closer to the bottom of this spectrum. Teams are aware it would be suicide to alter the one thing somebody might do sort of well, and that these guys are often hanging on by just a thread despite what WAR might say or how impressive it looks on paper. This is how you go from Chris Carter leading the league in homers one season to playing his last game a half season after that.

Many of these older sluggers make for fascinating case studies when discussing modern theory. I mean, Chris Davis still posts some decent velocities and angles when he actually hits the ball. How important can this possibly be? You might be surprised to see where Pujols sits on some of these boards over the last five seasons as well. The problem with a lot of this is that the numbers are often contorted or ignored when convenient.

Look, nobody is claiming that older players such as Miguel Cabrera and Albert Pujols are anywhere near peak form. However, it is still a major stretch to state that their current levels of production are easily replaced from Triple A or the waiver wire. Without getting into whether it makes financial sense to have these contracts on your payroll — which we aren’t allowed to discuss in relation to the Josh Hamiltons and Yoenis Cespedeses of the world, anyway, the guys who aren’t playing, and isn’t really the point of this article — it’s just not that simple to replace these results.

We are often told that numbers speak for themselves. That might be true if the numbers had voices. Unfortunately, numbers rely on humans to interpret them, humans which often use the numbers to make whatever point they want. Batting average is useless, we are told, which is why we’re not going to mention that Miguel Cabrera has been hovering around .300 for much of this year; however, it’s okay to bring up batting average if you’re talking about Albert Pujols’s decline. We also choose to point out Sir Albert’s poor batting average on balls in play, and his status as the hard hit outs leader for the past five years, as further proof that he can’t beat the shift and is now the worst hitter in baseball; yet, if you are discussing these same numbers in relation to Bryce Harper, they merely indicate how unlucky he’s been. He’s still hitting bullets all the time! They just happen to be right at somebody’s glove! Sure, buddy.

You might also be under the impression that the notion of “clutch hitting” was debunked back during the Moneyball era, because this too is seldom discussed now. However, this is not quite the case. There’s still an active analytical debate regarding the subject, and the latest evidence seems to suggest that some guys could possibly be a little more clutch than others. As such, it’s one of the reasons I have a hard time completely discounting the RBI.

Nobody has ever led the league in RBI for 4 straight seasons, so there is some randomness here. And yet, a glance at the RBI leaderboards from year to year does appear to uncannily resemble a list of all-time greats. There is less randomness here than on a year to year ERA leader list, for example. It stands to reason that a good hitter might change his approach with runners on base, and indeed, even into the present day, lo and behold, a putrefying corpse like Pujols still maintains a consistently higher batting average with runners in scoring position than without, as well as beating the league average in these spots. Furthermore, I find it impossible to believe that something you did with the bat which is kind of the point of the game — contributing to the scoring of runs — adds up to a meaningless statistic. You could have struck out, for example, but did not.

Striking out is not as bad as it seems, though, the sabermetric community will tell us, because it’s far worse to ground into a double play. Yet here we encounter another of these contradictions. Knocking in runners is supposedly not a skill because you had nothing to do with them being on base. Somehow grounding into double plays does negatively impact your WAR, however…even though, last I checked, this would require runners on base as well. I used to always love seeing seasons on the back of baseball cards like Tom Herr’s 1985 campaign (110 RBI on 8 HR) or his possibly even more outrageous 1987 one (just 2 dingers yet knocking in 83), and while I’m aware he had some amazing table setters floating out there on the pond, this still amounts to mad productivity with the bat, I don’t care what anyone says. Last year I heard a couple different announcers, apparently outmoded sentimentalists like me, claim that a player’s high RBI total versus not that many home runs was an indication he’d gotten better as a hitter. And I agree. It might be randomness, but I suspect that only explains away a small portion of their success. After all, weren’t the kind of 28 HR and 59 RBI type seasons that your Dave Kingmans or Rob Deers were piecing together, with high strikeout totals, always held up as proof that those hitters were a joke? Does this mean they were retroactively awesome now?

This brings us back around full circle to the validity of some of these counting stats. When you saw a pitcher post 20 wins back in the day, I think that even the casual fan appreciated that a Phil Niekro or Wilbur Wood type 20–19 mark was probably not that impressive. However, I would seriously like to see the worst 20–8 season anyone ever posted. What does that look like? It might be a zany, arbitrary statistic, but it does tell me a couple of things. This guy probably pitched deep into most games he started, and he in all likelihood had a great year.

If a pitcher manages to accumulate 300 of these, maybe he had a rubber arm and hung around forever a la Niekro. Or maybe he was completely masterful. Either way, there is some value to remaining on the field and piling up these milestones, and WAR is not the measure of this. If Mike Trout played his last game tomorrow, I would be hard pressed to go around telling people he had a better career than Eddie Murray. In fact, there is no way I would tell anyone this right now. Is peak Mike Trout a better player? Yes. Will he amass a greater body of statistics over time? Possibly. But he has not arrived there yet. And if the only evidence in your argument, really, in the face of lackluster counting stats, is this still relatively newly invented metric, you’ve got problems.

And some of the others are even worse. The Washington Nationals recently sent out a hilarious tweet pleading with fans to show more support for Anthony Rendon as an All-Star candidate. As evidence they cite his wOBA. Come on, people, don’t you care about his wOBA? I think you answered your own question, there. So here’s what I would like to see in the meantime, if those with the keys to the kingdom are still serious about these numbers yet would like to see greater fan interest, if we really are so nutty for clinging to things like runs and saves and RBI: an informal point system like chess.

In chess, it’s generally understood that a queen is worth nine, a rook five, bishops and knights three. These don’t count for anything, but allow a passive observer to calculate who is ahead, and the value of various events. Instead of wOBA and wRC+, maybe the analytical geniuses can go back x number of years and assign a similar point value to every baseball event, when taking into account and averaging out every situation, park effect, day/night split, and so on. This would allow us middling laymen to appreciate what’s happening between the lines in real time without a calculator and various websites pulled up while we’re trying to watch the game. If it turns out that a bases empty blast is worth 40 and a single 2, because strikeouts are 1 and double plays 0, I will eat my words, but suspect this isn’t the case. We would therefore know instantly that the dude hitting one bomb every fifteen at-bats while whiffing eight times, two of them on called third strikes, with one walk and a few infield popups, maybe he kind of sucks.

Henry James once said, the war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party. The only reason I include this is because I stumbled onto the quote after already starting and naming this piece, and it seemed too good a coincidence to ignore. But I think it has some relevance when applied to the topic at hand. Those defending this stat are surely going to put up a fight before it is altered or eradicated. We can only do our part in attempting to debunk it, or at least propping open the door for continued examination.

Yet one nice thing about WAR is that it’s not official, and can therefore be adjusted at any time. Unlike the Olympics, baseball is not in the business of revoking awards, so we’re therefore stuck with Bruce Sutter in the Hall Of Fame, and Rafael Palmeiro’s gold glove for 28 games at first base. Outside of discussing an error in ancient box scores, there’s also nothing that will ever affect such pointless numbers as batting average, saves, and sacrifice flies. None of this applies to WAR, however, and that’s why I just know that twenty years from now, a large percentage of those currently defending this statistic and telling us we’re knuckleheads, they’re going to be writing opposing articles claiming that “everyone” was wrong about WAR, mainly to make themselves feel better. You heard it here first.