WAR: Do You Know It When You See It?

[JimSlade]

I hope this is the right place to share some dugout chatter. Here's a question I've been pondering, that applies to both real-life baseball and our game.

I'm probably one of the older GMs here. It took me a while to get used to sabermetrics, when those new stats came into being - ages ago - but I've since made sense of their usefulness. I'm also a math-phobe. I used to have some complaint that I didn't want to hear about any stat with more than 3 variables or factors - whatever you would call it. Computing an ERA is as complex a baseball equation as my brain can handle.

Playing this game has further opened me up to Nu Statz, as I jokingly refer to them, even though they're older than some of you. One metric that I now find informative, despite still feeling as incomprehensible as the day it was first introduced, is WAR. I trust that there is some way WAR gets calculated, but I know that if I ever live for even 1000 years that I wouldn't be able to do so. I'm happy that someone is calculating WAR, but as Bob Dylan once sang, "It ain't me, babe."

So here's my question: The way Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once said about obscenity, "I know it when I see it," can you tell a high-WAR player in real life and in this game merely by seeing him?

For positional players, I assume that a guy with well-rounded tools is more likely to deliver a 2+ WAR. For pitchers, I'm never too sure. The metric seems to favor starters.

That's my question: If I put my finger over the WAR column, would you be able to pick out the high-WAR players?

[BaseClogger]

Since WAR tries to account for aspects of the game previous advanced metrics failed to capture, such as fielding and base running, I actually think it’s more intuitive to evaluate for a casual fan than say, wRC+.