THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

I think it’s important to remind people that there are many interpretations of WAR.  The construction of WAR basically goes like this:

Offense+Defense+Position+Replacement

You can include park adjustments, baserunning, league adjustments, quality of batters faced adjustments, etc. as well.

Offense can use anything you want, including WPA, wRAA, or even something like Runs+RBI’s above average.  Defense can use UZR, Total Zone, FSR, +/-.  Replacement level and positional adjustments can be anything you want, as long as you have some reason to back it up. 

The point of this is that it bothers me to no end that people refer to FanGraphs WAR as “WAR”.  That leads to people discrediting the stat itself because they don’t like FIP, or they believe context should be included.

I have seen many more people use rWAR for career evaluations and more use fWAR for projections or to evaluate short-career pitchers, which seems appropriate.  I agree that many people do not understand the differences between the different WAR models, and that we should be careful to use the best models for the best situations and discuss the differences to newbies.