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Friday, August 14, 2009
WAR v Win Shares
On the one side, you have my win metric of choice, WAR. There are a few implementations out there, like Rally has and Fangraphs has. They all adhere to the same basic principles that I formulated with WAR in the beginning, and they’ve added their own flavoring to “make it your own” (*). On the other side is WSAB, which is Win Shares (that I’ve highly criticized in the past) but set to some sort of reasonable baseline ("bench") by studes. It’s a step up from Win Shares, but in no way would I want to use it as anything other than initial evidence. I won’t argue for it.
(*) You will not be missed Paula.
Studes plotted the relationship of career WAR to career WSAB to get an r=.98. All to say that you can take the absolute best, and a half-decent measure, and you will end up with virtually the same thing. There’s only so much you can twist and turn performance stats to get anything truly insightful. That’s at a career level. At the individual seasonal level, things are different.
