Is WAR the be all tell all stat that a lot of people think it is?

[TURBO]

Found this on another site, thought it was pretty interesting:

Lou Brock is a member of the HOF based primarily on over 3000 hits, former steal king and a great playoff resume. Today's analytical stats present a different picture.

 

Lou's WAR resume

 

●45.3 career WAR

●32 WAR7

●2.8 WAR/162

Average HOF LFer WAR

●65.1 career WAR

●41.6 WAR7

●4.8 WAR/162

 

Brock ranks last among 21 HOF LFers in WAR/162. Shockingly he never even had a 6 WAR season.

 

Lou has a career 109 OPS+ which ranks dead last among HOF LFers.

 

According to JAWS, Brock ranks 37th all time in LF. He's sandwiched between Matt Holliday and Brett Gardner.

 

 

 

 

[Brock Beauchamp]

WAR is a good metric but the older the player, the less confident I am in it, especially someone like Brock who is punished defensively. Where we have StatCast and lots of reliable defensive metrics today, using old, less reliable, defensive data to evaluate a player's worth is pretty shaky.

Offensively, though, I think WAR is pretty reliable for players of all eras. And it does a good job of contextualizing things baseball insiders were just wrong about in the past, like stolen bases. Lou Brock racked up a ton of steals but he wasn't a great base stealer and is rightfully punished for it by WAR. And while Brock didn't hit an "empty" .300, he didn't bring a whole lot to the table beyond batting average. His discipline was fine but not great. His power was mediocre.

Brock's stolen base success rate: 75.3%. It's fine. Not great.

Whereas if you compare that to someone like Rickey Henderson: 80.7% success rate. And Henderson had 500 more steals than Brock. That's a ton of accumulated value.

[sveumrules]

Lou Brock has a number of things contributing to his low WAR. 

First would be that despite his speed, he was never considered good enough to be a regular CF.

Playing LF his whole career comes with a -108 positional adjustment. Total Zone thinks he was -51 fielding runs to boot, further dragging down his value.

If he was an average CF, that would add about 20 WAR. But he was a below average LF.

The other main thing holding him back was lack of walks (79 BB+) and power (94 ISO+). 2,247 of his 3,023 career hits were singles.

Even his speed doesn’t add up to as much value as people think comes with being the one time stolen base king, because his success rate (75.3%) was so low compared to other great runners like Rickey (80.1%), Raines (84.7%), Coleman (82.8%), Morgan (81.0%), Lofton (79.5%), Ichiro (81.3%), etc.

[igor67]

I also think it is worth appreciating the qualitative impacts of a player. Whether it is Blyleven pitching forever, or Eddie Murray, or Brock Longevity stats are a big part of baseball's story as well. Players who play 2 decades are kind of important. Heck now that the LOOGY is basically extinct I wouldn't even mind enshrining Jesse Orrosco in the HOF because of his significance as part of the evolving game. In Brock's case he was still the premier base stealer before Rickey.

[sveumrules]

WAR isn’t intended as a be all tell all stat & people who think it is are misunderstanding.

It is intended to start conversations, not end them.

The real purpose is to help us understand the game better by questioning our pre-existing assumptions then investigating to see if those assumptions were correct or not.

[owbc]

When interpreting baseball stats, I would consider the following checklist of what the stat includes:

- Batting, fielding, or both? (WAR is both unless you look at oWAR/dWAR separately)

- Counting stat or rate stat? (WAR is a counting stat)

- Is there a park/league adjustment? (yes for WAR, yes for OPS+)

- Is there a positional adjustment? (yes for WAR, no for OPS+)

- Is there a replacement player adjustment? (yes for WAR, no for OPS+)

So the formula for WAR is actually quite simple:

WAR = (Batting Runs + Base Running Runs +Fielding Runs + Positional Adjustment + League Adjustment +Replacement Runs) / (Runs Per Win)

(runs per win is basically the 'year' adjustment) 

With WAR I think you have to first buy into the idea that a player's value is best quantified by runs created / runs prevented. Preventing runs is probably the more interesting one since some positions have way more opportunities to prevent runs than others, and DH can not prevent any runs at all.

So if you're going to dream up an ideal baseball player to maximize WAR, it's probably a CF who gets on base a ton and hits for power...Mike Trout. It would be impossible for Trout to achieve his lofty WAR total if he was playing 1B, as it should be since he can't prevent as many runs at 1B and it's easier to find a 'replacement player' at 1B to generate decent offensive production. 

By that logic, it stands to reason that an OPS of .850 is far more valuable at some positions than others. 

I think of Chris Carter's 2016 season as an example of where these park and positional are so valuable in quantifying value. A 1B with poor defense and a low OBP isn't that valuable even if he hits 40 home runs. 

 

[JimH5]

I don't think any one stat tells a complete picture of a player's contribution to the game, or of his Hall of Fame worthiness.  

Brock was a unique talent, worthy of his place in Cooperstown.  But I don't think if he compiled the same statistics today he would be valued as he was in the 1960s and 1970s.  He didn't walk.  He was a below average defender.  He was caught stealing too often.  He produced little power.  

But he was a product of his times, compares very favorably to his peers, and was a compiler.  I think he also gets favorable treatment from being associated with a historic franchise most of his career, and his end of the Brock for Broglio trade is a fun bit of legend.

As for WAR, I think it works fine for bringing to attention the guys who are overlooked by traditional stats.  19th century pitchers putting up 15+ WAR seasons because they threw so many innings. . .guys like Gene Tenace and Eddie Yost who were OBP machines, superior defenders. . .WAR casts a brighter light on them than they might have otherwise gotten.

Where WAR fails is with any postseason contributions players made.  Those are completely ignored.  WAR also treats every plate appearance as equal to every other plate appearance, and we know that baseball isn't played that way.

That said, I agree with Sveum that it's a good starting point for discussion.  I just wouldn't use it (especially fractions or WAR) as the only way to award MVP, Cy Young and HOF votes.

[Playing Catch]

Without ever having watched him play, and only talking to people that did, I would have guessed that as a LFer, his career value was somewhere between Matt Holliday and Brett Gardner.  If memory serves, my dad describes Brock as a good, never great, player who played a long time.

As others have mentioned, I'm skeptical of defensive metrics, even those of recent vintage. But my guess is they are rapidly improving based on FO personnel decisions in recent seasons.

[Thurston Fluff]

3 hours ago, sveumrules said:

WAR isn’t intended as a be all tell all stat & people who think it is are misunderstanding.

It is intended to start conversations, not end them.

The real purpose is to help us understand the game better by questioning our pre-existing assumptions then investigating to see if those assumptions were correct or not.

One of my problems with WAR is people don't use it that way. I think it's better than it used to be because the defensive metrics have improved enough to make the sample size used in WAR functional.