This is what progress looks like:
A state of perpetual WAR
Jeff Passan’s reservations about Wins Above Replacement are actually a good sign for the stat, for the game, and for all of us.
No, wait: this is what progress looks like:
”WAR is an incredible idea, an effort to democratize arguments over who was best. Bringing any form of objectivity to such singularly subjective statements is extremely challenging and worthwhile work”Jeff Passan’s Yahoo! Sports article last Sunday night, which laid out some of the criticisms of Wins Above Replacement, represents a marked improvement in the discourse surrounding the statistic and on the culture surrounding statistical analysis. It’s a sign, frankly, that WAR has won.
Unlike previous high-profile columnists who have tried to bury WAR in the past, Passan comes at the all-encompassing statistic requesting a parley, but laying out why the defensive valuations that are currently used to calculate WAR are problematic. He doesn’t want to lay waste to what has become the go-to tool for analysts, he wants to reform or improve it.
This is a huge step. In the bad old days (like, last year) of baseball analysis on the Internet, when “WAR, what is is good for?” headlines (or other dumb puns like I made in my headline) felt relatively fresh and people were still making jokes about how VORP sounded like a snack you take hiking, we could not have this conversation. Here’s Bob Ryan in March of 2013, for instance, saying that WAR describes, “how much more Player X is worth than a player that doesn’t exist! ... This ‘replacement player’ who constitutes the very linchpin of the entire premise is mythical. There is nothing measurable or precise about his existence. Yet supposedly intelligent people have signed off on this utterly bogus piece of baseball idiocy ... WAR is nonsense.”
The venerable Ryan isn’t an outlier in the mainstream press either. This was, and in some corners still is, what passes for discourse about what has become one of baseball’s most powerful stats.
Flat-Earth map, 1893 (Wikimedia Commons).
Passan, on the other hand, approaches WAR as a frustrated ally who wants to continue to use it and to have greater confidence in its accuracy. This is not to say his entire argument has merit. For one thing, he says that the stathead community is "guilty of the very thing for which they long crucified the mainstream" for by buying so heavily into WAR as a way to compare ballplayers' performances, and he wanders into bizarre logic when he asks if Jason Heyward should be "rewarded" for being an above-average defensive right fielder when he wasn't as good a center fielder. This is like denigrating the Beatles because their "Roll Over Beethoven" was superior to their "Moonlight Sonata."
That said, responsible users of WAR don't treat it as the kind of "be-all, end-all" Passan suggests they do. They use WAR as a starting point for the discussion, not the end. Passan's opening plea for WAR's proponents to "please do better" is also entirely undercut by the rest of his article in which he readily outlines how analysts such as Dave Cameron, Sean Smith, and Ben Jedlovec are working to do just that by revising their formulas and acquiring better data to reduce the statistical grey areas. As he notes, "They've changed WAR formulas before. They'll change them again." That, friends, is precisely the point. The issue isn't that sabermetrics have settled on how to demonstrate value. It's that there is positive disagreement, argument, creative friction that, yes, leads to some confusion between the different versions of WAR, but that's the path to progress -- freeze-frame it now and you risk mistaking the journey for the destination.
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Alex Gordon (Denny Medley-USA TODAY Sports ).
While this dissonance doesn’t help Passan in the short run, it’s good for the field, as proponents of the versions work to make their formulas better reflect the reality on the field. We’re getting there, Jeff. Please calm down.
Objections aside, I’m encouraged by Passan’s piece. Passan has a giant audience at Yahoo! Sports, and that audience largely consists of casual fans. When he endorses the theory behind Wins Above Replacement, and acknowledges how useful it can be, he spreads the good word about WAR to an audience that can be resistant. It’s a sign that the initial battles about WAR, whether nonsensical or not, are drawing to a close.
Yes, it can feel redundant to cover this territory again and again with Passan and other mainstream writers, it’s incredibly worthwhile. I’m so glad we’re digging into the guts of it now, focusing on how to improve the stat rather than just fighting to legitimize it.
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