Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth
It's by no means a perfect metric, but if someone has a better one, let's use it. Almost any metric, to me, is better than "I saw him play 5 games live and another 10 on TV and he was AWESOME." Other than someone on the team one follows, I don't think anyone really saw enough of any given player to give a meaningful evaluation. Small sample size. And even then, it's skewed by bias, memory, etc.
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Personally, I think rate stats compared to league average are better. Things like OPS+, though it weights slugging too much.
I’m not a fan of WAR’s fictional minor leaguer as the base line instead of the league average. I don’t agree with all the weighting, such as the components adding value to guys who played when there weren’t many good players at their position in the league (a big part of Grich and Randolph’s misleading WAR), etc. etc. I think it is designed around the modern game and is less and less useful the further back you go.
But, it’s objective and mathematical. It’s a calculation applied cleanly to all. An objective measure beats a subjective measure. Those arguing against WAR aren’t making a case based on other objective measures. Appeals to emotion, to ‘I remember him’, to subjective measurements (since when has an MVP and a couple gold gloves been a hall of fame ticket anyways?) are not reasonable. Math is reasonable. A reasoned debate should be about the application of the math and which objective math should be used and where the line between in and out belongs.
You know a player probably isn’t a great selection when his advocates rely on memory and the subjective instead of the objective.