Quote:
Originally Posted by pilight
All the haggling about WAR and it's objectivity/subjectivity is missing one very important point: Stats don't tell the whole story. They are evidence, but not proof.
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To be its arguing about something had was settled in the mid 2000s. And arguing about a single stat is pointless. To get a good handle on a player you have to look at a lot of different metrics.
And this is what most front offices do.
I am also sure they have access to proprietary data that the general public does not and their own analytics departments are looking at things like exit velocity, steps taken to field a grounder, steps taken off a batted ball to judge a player recognition on defense and hundreds of other such things.
This war (not the stat) the war of using data has been fought and data won many years ago. Every front office uses it to some extent.
And yes, all of these stats are created by human beings who may or may not have played the games they choose to follow. But when you create a stat that more or less falls in line with other stats and those stats create a general consensus of a players value then we can judge it as a good stat.
And baseball is lucky in that we have about 120 years of good data of which to go on and a sport that has largely not changed.
And once you start creating advanced stats that vindicate the historical greats then you have created a stat that passses muster and can be used to analyze current players.
A lot of the advanced stats used in this very thread, do you know if you look at all time leaders in them who they tend to favor?
Players who are consensus all time greats
Ruth, Williams, Musial, Cobb, Bonds, Mays, etc
Almost every advanced stat has Ruth as the best player ever by a somewhat wide margin. And that is consistent with what what we know even with the more traditional stats.
There is no one all or be all stat. To have one is folly. You have to take into account many different ones to get a true measure of a player.
And that is what real front offices do.
And you don't necessarily need to have played the game to create these. You just need to have a strong passion for the game, be very skilled with mathematics and be able to defend what you create and be willing to make adjustments as flaws are pointed out and make corrections as new data emerges.
The advanced stats that have survived for more than 10 years or so have met that criteria and that is why they are still kept in use.