[Bigdaddy]

nat - thanks for the WAR primer. Being an engineer, I like to see what is behind the final numbers. WAR is a good general measure of the many things that we can quantify during a baseball game. Situations, actions, outcomes, we can measure them all (and assimilate all that data) and WAR does a good job of that for both offense and defense, and puts it in terms of winning ballgames.

As others have said though, there are things we can't measure that also contribute to winning or losing. How does a player 'feed the fire' of his teammates, how is their locker room demeanor, do they loaf or hustle on a routine ground ball/pop fly? We don't have a way to measure those things, but they do have an effect on the fate of teams.

So when evaluating a player, we must use 'data fusion'. Statistics of things we can measure and judgement of those things we can't. Without both, the picture is incomplete.