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Tuesday, July 12, 2011
“Everyone has their own WAR”
Fangraphs has its WAR and Baseball-Reference has one as well. But in truth, everyone has their own WAR.
My dad and I were talking about this the other day. He was talking about why he thinks no one in baseball is better now, and what he was doing was processing all the factors he values…he puts a higher value on speed (and triples) than you or I might…and he thinks there is a “fan popularity” impact for every player.
In his mind, he’s smushing all those factors together, just as the Fangraphs version and BB-Ref versions do. His version is personal. He and I don’t have to agree. But it makes for the most fun kind of baseball discussion.
We all come up with our “single number”, even though we kick and scream that we shouldn’t come up with a single number. If one guy argues that Felix is better than Lincecum, and the other argues the opposite, then guess what: they’ve each “smushed” a bunch of parameters, considerations and gut feelings to get to their final opinion.
I remember an old boss of mine deriding the idea of a spreadsheet that would take a bunch of factors into consideration to come up with everyone’s rating at the office, and, in turn, everyone’s salary. He said that he has to do everything on a case-by-case basis.
But, lost to him is that, in the end, everyone DOES get a final number: a salary. So, you can have a consistent process, that considers everything objective and subjective. Or, you can consider those same objective and subjective things, and smush them together in your mind on a case-by-case basis. You are STILL considering the exact same things.
The difference is that by going case-by-case you may be applying different weights to different parameters for different people as the mood strikes you. If you have a process, that doesn’t happen.
No one is telling you not to overweight or underweight strikeouts or HR. But a system requires you to spell out the rules for weighting, and apply that consistently to everyone.
The one good thing about the case-by-case basis is that it forces you to think about parameters. You’d like to ding Manny Ramirez a little, you’d like to up Jeter a little. So, you have to create a “heart” parameter. And that’s perfectly fine! Just spell it out that that’s what you are doing. And tell us how much you are giving to each player for heart. I have no problem with giving out wins for heart, over-and-above whatever his actual performance tells us. Just spell it out and be consistent.
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