I was reading
an article the other day about Justin Verlander after his third no-hitter. The premise of the article is that based on his Jaffe Wins Above Replacement Score (JAWS) he is a below-average Hall of Fame candidate and is not a shoo-in to be inducted. The article got me thinking about WAR since JAWS is based on WAR and then I realized how little I understand the calculation of WAR. So I looked it up and got all the more confused. I was excited as a kid when I was able to calculate ERA.
This is a tad different.
Could someone who understands WAR please explain it to me? As in, please explain the formula and its parts and how each one is calculated. And then, practically, could you use someone like Mike Trout and his real numbers to show how his WAR is calculated?
And secondly, separate but related, as I was trying to understand WAR better I ran across a few articles from reputable sites stating that WAR is not an exact science (my word not theirs). But yet, going back to the article mentioned above, exact numbers are used to rank people based on their WAR. Meaning, Verlander's career WAR is currently 69.8 and so he ranks just behind Zack Greinke's 70.8 for active pitchers. But Verlander's career WAR could actually be something like 70.3 and Greinke's 70.4 because of how inexact WAR can be. So why does it seem like advance stats leans so heavily on an imprecise stat?
Thanks to whomever helps and old man understand.