The Pros of WAR

Dave Cameron responds to the Bill James criticism of WAR:

For the MVP voting, perhaps WAR is less useful than James would like it to be. On that point, I agree, and I used other metrics when filling out my MVP ballot when I was assigned to be a voter. But for many cases, the questions people are attempting to answer by using WAR are better answered by a context-neutral metric. It might not answer those questions perfectly, but it at least aligns with the questions about which fans are curious.

Is there a place for a context-dependent version of WAR? Perhaps. But then again, we’re already accused of undermining the model’s credibility by having multiple popular methods of calculation. And as James himself found when developing Win Shares, tying individual player performance to team wins isn’t quite as easy as one might hope.

I have no problem admitting that WAR as a model contains a number of flaws, or that our specific implementation of the framework is also flawed. There are a lot of areas for improvement. Forcing it to account precisely for the exact number of wins with which each team finished, though, would probably make it less useful overall as a measure of individual performance.

This quite reminds me of arguments between my mother and father, in that they argued topics upon which they agreed. They were really arguing about how to properly express that agreement. If I may be so bold as to summarize the argument/agreement:

• James: WAR is good for future evaluation, but does a poor job of capturing the actual value of a player for an MVP vote. Win Shares is better for this as it captures context.
• Cameron: WAR is context neutral, so use other measures in addition when casting an MVP vote. Creating a single number that combines value and context is tough. Win Shares only includes situational context for the batter, not context created by the batter.

In general, I like having multiple measures of player quality. Often, the aggregate of different measures is better than the results of the best measure. So we should be happy we have different versions of WAR, and Win Shares on top of that.

from baseballmusings.com http://ift.tt/2B61XTn