This post is so inaccurate and absurd that you must be trolling. What makes a player valuable is subject to personal opinion which exactly why this is a discussion. For example: 5 different RFers had at least 5.0 fWAR. The #2 C had 4.7 fWAR. The rarity of Cal's production and how hard it is to replace him is one reason why Cal could be more valuable than Judge. It's unfair to say your opinion is the only right one and any other OPINION is FACTUALLY wrong.
The war leader should be the mvp every season without exception, there’s no reason at this point to even have a vote. It’s similar to balls and strikes, there’s no reason to have a human decide something subjectively when we know the correct answer.
WAR is generated by statistics which are weighted based on position. You arectalking about the most outdtanding player, not necessarily the mist valuable. There is more than just statistics that determine value. The human element is what sets baseball atop of the cretin sports like football and basketball.
It’s getting better though. We have some replay now, we’ll have some ability to fix balls and strikes calls, so things are improving. Of course it’s sad 13/30 people who should know better did what they did but hey, it means 17/30 had it right. Glass half full!
Saw that the other day. I honestly had no idea about any of it. I always thought it quite peculiar that he hit 35 hr’s and then never played again.
Me neither, I knew he was fully "all HR, all strikeout" guy. Sending a live rat in a box to a female reporter at the stadium is some next level assholery
Berkman getting bounced out of future consideration after his first round of voting is one of the weirdest things that makes absolutely no sense.
eta: switch hitters a: .287 .359 .476 .836 129 b: .298 .421 .557 .977 172 c: .293 .406 .537 .943 144 d: .303 .401 .529 .930 141 e: .279 .350 .486 .837 119 Spoiler Eddie Murray, Mickey Mantle, Lance Berkman, Chipper Jones, Carlos Beltran
WAR is a subjective measure though. It's an arbitrary formula created by people - and it's one that different organizations can't even agree on, which is why you have fWAR and bWAR and no one likes WAR for pitchers. Just as 10-15 years ago, people had different analytics to decide value, in 10-15 years, WAR will probably be seen as outdated and not a great measure of value. It's just the best way anyone has now to try to sum up a player with a single number. Beyond that, WAR is also entirely theoretical and doesn't measure *actual* value. Take two players with identical hits, slugging, walks, batting average, etc. But one gets all their hits with 2 outs in blowouts when there is no one on base. As a result, they have very few RBIs or runs scored and have virtually no influence on their team's success. The other player gets all his hits in close games and with runners on base. He has numerous game-winning hits and repeatedly actually impacted his teams wins and losses. WAR would say these two players were equally valuable to their teams. Why? Because it can't account for actual results. It only can estimate what that person would have been in an average setting if they were a robot. So it might be great for a "most theoretically valuable player in a theoretical universe" award, but not actually most valuable player. For a similar issue in football, you can see the evolution from QB Rating to Total QBR, which tries to account for game-situations and the performance of the player in each moment in time. How well it actually does that, I don't know - but it tries to discount garbage-time performance, etc.
WAR is objective. It's a defined formula using defined numbers. It may be flawed and need adjusting in the future, but that is different than what we had which was the eye test, which is subjective.
The end result is objective in terms of what it measures -as Buck says, if you want to rank people by WAR, WAR is a great tool. But it's creation is subjective in that some random people subjectively decided how to value different things. In this case, they chose to give 0 value to actual on-the-field impact and results, which would be involved in most people's definition of "most valuable". Beyond that, no one can agree on the right formula. It's similar to how the BCS formula was objective in that it was determined before the season started. But the creation of it and deciding how much to weight each component, which polls to use, which computers to use, etc was all subjective. And if you picked different ones, you'd get a completely different result. So the idea that the BCS formula was the be-all, end-all that decided officially what the best two teams were is silly. That's the argument I was responding to that WAR automatically measures the definitive most valuable player in baseball. If something is flawed and "may need adjusting", then using it and it alone to determine an award seems a bit ludicrous.
When you have to put a square peg in a round hole, the peg is smaller leaving gaps. There will never be a numerical statistic that completely measures a human game. It's measuring art with science. I love WAR. It's the best comprehensive stat we have. But no stat can ever be perfect.
