Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth
Yeah, just a couple of weeks ago we had a long discussion of Grich. He seems to be a lightning rod for people who don't like WAR. Lots of divergent viewpoints, but I think most agreed he was not likely to make the Hall despite his WAR which obviously would qualify him if you valued the metric.
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I was slow to fully embrace WAR, but then I noticed so few cases where I disagreed with it. Many of them were 19th century outfielders getting poor defensive ratings. It seems now that a lot of people who don't like it, just point to some outliers they disagree with, but a lot of them have explanations.
Someone on Twitter yesterday mentioned Brendan Ryan being rated higher than Paul Konerko one season as their reason it made no sense, but all they showed was offensive stats. Of course a lot of people agreed. Ryan was a well above average defensive shortstop. Konerko was a well below average defensive first baseman, who had a very mediocre season by his own standards at the plate. WAR helps show the massive defensive value difference between an elite shortstop and a below average first baseman. There's also some value taken from base running, which again was a huge advantage to Ryan.
I see very few surprises with the stat now, though I'll mention I use Baseball-Reference (bWAR) and not Fangraphs (fWAR), because I've seen a lot with Fangraphs WAR numbers that I don't like.