Not for starting pitchers they aren't. Certainly not for starting pitchers prior to the LaRussa era.

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
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I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

I really dislike the idea of one aggregated number being the be all end all of a sports debate featuring two players. Player A's WAR is .02 higher than Player B, debate over. How interesting is that?

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I think if you're dealing with a number like .02 the debate is wide open. Most proponents of WAR would probably agree.

WAR has its issues and loopholes just like every other stat.

Its a good start if you're looking at a lot of years, but that's it


Bernstein WAAAAY overstates its value

I don't think we can use the macro to have intelligent conversations about the micro. And people often use numbers like WAR in that manner. You can't ignore the fact that games are events played by human beings who can't spit out fractional numbers in the course of those games. It's extrapolation in reverse, this assumption that if a guy hits forty homers, x number will be critical and x number will be relatively meaningless, etc. Clearly, it doesn't always work out that way. The popular viewpoint is to insist that it's all just random or coincidental based on correlation or the fact that it cannot be proven otherwise. That doesn't make such a thing a fact, however. I'm not sure what "clutch" is, but if you define it, I'll find a guy who is better at it than other guys.

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

The issue is, most people (not everyone, JORR), don't have much ammo to fight against WAR. The typical B&B caller isn't going to call up and propose a powerful argument against a player's WAR. WAR, while not at all perfect, is better than most... especially when it's "I'VE SEEN 200 CUBS GAMES IN PERSON, I KNOW THERIOT IS A GRINDER!"

Explain these points further, I'm not sure I understand.

One could call in and say that dWAR is often weighted too heavily and screws up the WAR rating and you end up with Brett Lawrie and Darwin Barney ahead of guys with 25 homeruns

what the hell happened to those defensive metrics that were coming along where the ball was going to be laser tracked and we would know range factors unequivocably?

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Reality is your friend, not your enemy. -- Seacrest

I agree, but I also think it's foolish to dismiss a player like Theriot based on his numbers simply because you have no other way to define his contributions. I think it's obvious to anyone who follows baseball that it isn't the kind of game where you can just take a guy with better numbers, e.g. J.J. Hardy, replace Theriot and automatically make your team better. I think Theriot is bringing something that Hardy is not, the fact that it is not easily measured notwithstanding.

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

It's possible Theriot is bringing something extra. But if you can't even explain it, let alone quantify it, it probably shouldn't be a part of the discussion.

And whatever it is, I just can't fathom the notion it negates his poor hitting and popcorn arm.

Okay, you've got a pitcher with a 4.50 ERA. Obviously no one allows 4 and a half runs over nine innings. It's impossible since I don't know the guy who can actually score half a run. (Maybe Gordon Beckham can do it and I just haven't seen it.) So the pitcher is allowing eight runs here and one run there, etc. It seems very simple, but apparently in the rush to embrace statistical "analysis" many fans are missing that fact. The assumption being that the runs just fall randomly into places and that it is beyond said pitcher's control. I don't believe that. All 4.50 pitchers aren't equal. To take it further, all 2.3 WAR guys aren't equal either.

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

I think the problem is that so much media now(Bernstein is hardly alone) is dedicated to covering it strictly from a numbers standpoint. I don't follow baseball very closely, but I do follow it and much of the analysis I see from a variety of different mediums is much more numbers oriented than the other sports. This guy's stats were better than this guy's, that's it. I don't really see football, basketball, or hockey analyzed quite that simplistically.

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Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

That's where we disagree. And is that a profession of your atheism?

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

This.

_________________
Reality is your friend, not your enemy. -- Seacrest

Baseball is a funny game and the other sports aren't. If you replace Henry Burris with Tom Brady your team got better. No question. You can replace Ryan Theriot with Alex Rodriguez and your team may get worse.

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

the sox got swisher to improve the clubhouse then got rid of him to improve the clubhouse.

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Reality is your friend, not your enemy. -- Seacrest

Yeah, and they got Keppinger because he didn't strike out and now they're getting rid of him because he strikes out too much.

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

and the cubs got todd hundley because he's todd hundley, then got rid of him because he's todd fucking hundley, you know?

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Your 1st statement about baseball and other sports is incorrect. Also, the Theriot/Rodriguez scenario occurs in other sports too. That quirkiness is not exclusive to baseball.

It's much more rare and unlikely. You replace Robin Earl with Walter Payton, you got better. There are all kinds of examples of baseball teams where the "better" guy didn't make you better. Of course, there's the argument that it wasn't because of that guy, but we don't really know. We just know that it happens all the time.

A baseball team is a different animal than the teams in other sports. They have a clubhouse. Other sports have a locker room. By the nature of the length of the season and the amount of time spent in close quarters with these guys, it just different. Hockey is probably the most similar in that respect.

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

My memory doesn't have the sample you have. Being in my 20s I've only known football in the free agency era. So my thinking may be skewed when I feel football is most random of major sports.

It kind of is, I guess.


But if you can't even define it, how can we have a baseball discussion about it when you're using it to quantify a player's impact? You don't know what it is, how it manifests itself, and I know even less about it. And that's not even scratching the surface on what actual impact it does have, should it exist.

Because, more than any other, baseball is a game that goes beyond the numbers. It's made up of hundreds and hundreds of moving parts on every pitch and they are all related in some way or another. When we look at the statistics we are more or less looking at the batter v. pitcher confrontation from a one-dimensional perspective with little regard for anything else that was happening and whether or not those events were causal in any manner. It's a simplistic way of viewing a complex game. I've heard bernstein express the thought that baseball is basically an individual sport. Nothing could be more wrong.

I'm not one hundred percent sure if when something happens is random or not, but I am sure Tuffy Rhodes isn't Reggie Jackson even though they both hit three homers in a single game.

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

Let's cut to the chase and get to where all baseball arguments on here go.

Perfect Game > 20 strikeouts in a game

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

I love stats but things like WAR and PER don't always pass the eye test. No one with a brain would haves said Zobrist was better than Pujols a couple seasons ago but WAR did. Kobe was by far the best player in basketball at one point but PER had him outside the top 10. You still have to watch the games. IMO a pitcher that has a low WHIP and ERA but has a bad win/loss record tells me he's had bad luck or been on awful teams. You should win more times than not when you don't allow a lot of people to get on base and give up a lot of runs.

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Be well

GO BEARS!!!

It's called the "it" factor. You can define it but you know it when you see it. It doesn't always show up on a stat sheet.

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Be well

GO BEARS!!!

You think Theriot has the "it" factor?

If you look at oWAR, you take away those quirks


Like I said, the defense that goes into WAR is just weighted poorly

Why do you say its "weighted poorly?"

_________________
Reality is your friend, not your enemy. -- Seacrest