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Post by bjb406 on Nov 14, 2014 23:13:27 GMT -5
I hate the concept of WAR, especially when used the way it often is as the 1 stat you look at to see how good a player is. There is no stat like that. WAR is somewhat useful for trying to compare in very rough terms the relative value of, say, a center fielder and a first basemen. When it is used to say, for instance, 'player A was better then player B this year because he had a slightly higher WAR', thats just ridiculous. No matter how you tweak the formula for how you calculate it, you are just using fuzzy math to dumb down the evaluation of players into 1 number and it just doesn't make sense. All of these supposedly advanced stats; FIP, WAR, etc., they can be useful for learning about a player's tendencies, like 'hey this guy is really good at limiting home runs and getting strike outs' or 'this guy pitches to contact and forces ground balls'. But if you are trying to use them to say 'this guy is better than that guy', that's not statistics, its just playing with numbers with no scientific justification for doing so.
anyway, rant over, tldr.
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ericmvan
Veteran
Supposed to be working on something more important
Posts: 8,923
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Post by ericmvan on Nov 15, 2014 20:10:38 GMT -5
Eric, I have two questions. The first relates to your feelings about fWAR. I'm pretty sure that you think it's worthless, but I sometimes think you might be having a MGL moment in which your comment seems extremely negative, but really you think fWAR's decent, you just want to clarify all of the things you think aren't good about it. Am I right that you think it's worthless? The second follows the first. So if I'm wrong and you don't think it's worthless, ignore this one. You have obviously thought about these things on a much deeper level than I ever will. There's a lot about fWAR that makes sense to me, but that's not the reason I assume it's useful. The reason I trust it's not worthless is because people like Tom Tango and many commenters on his site (guys who produce high-quality research) consistently refer to it and judge it as useful. Why do you think they would ignore the serious flaws you seem to see in it? Do they not see the flaws? Do they think it's good enough? I was going to reply that of course I don't think fWAR is worthless -- until I realized that I've never used it for anything at all! When I'm looking at value, I'm almost always interested in retrospective value, and to the extent that fWAR claims to do that by factoring out defense, those claims should be denied. Because you have also factored out the pitcher's ability or inability to reduce hard contact, and those abilities are real, and have been known to be real since I (and then Tom Tippett) demonstrated it, almost immediately after Voros published his initial findings. It's just throwing out too much baby with the DIPS bathwater -- at least several limbs' worth. So you shouldn't use fWAR to evaluate a trade or decide whether a player should be MVP. You use bWAR, because it tries to factor out the actual defensive support the pitcher had. The only thing fWAR is any good for is predicting what a pitcher's WAR might be next year, because it's a brute-force BABIP regression to the mean, and BABIP always regresses to the mean. But if I seriously want to know how a pitcher will pitch next year, I'm doing more than looking at simple metrics. |
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Post by ethanbein on Nov 15, 2014 23:15:26 GMT -5
When I'm looking at value, I'm almost always interested in retrospective value, and to the extent that fWAR claims to do that by factoring out defense, those claims should be denied. Because you have also factored out the pitcher's ability or inability to reduce hard contact, and those abilities are real, and have been known to be real since I (and then Tom Tippett) demonstrated it, almost immediately after Voros published his initial findings. It's just throwing out too much baby with the DIPS bathwater -- at least several limbs' worth. So you shouldn't use fWAR to evaluate a trade or decide whether a player should be MVP. You use bWAR, because it tries to factor out the actual defensive support the pitcher had.This just isn't true though. bWAR factors out the defense that a pitcher on that team received on an average day - but of course defenses don't play the same each day, and each pitcher on a staff does not receive equal defensive support. I can't find the link, but I know TangoTiger posted an analysis that MGL did where he took RA9 and adjusted it by the actual defense received by the pitchers, using raw UZR data that only he has access to, and the result explained most of the difference between RA9 and FIP (I'm not explaining it very well, maybe someone can find the link). Of course there is variation in the ability to reduce hard contact, and hopefully with some StatCast data we can see that a little better. But using average team defense to adjust pitcher RA9 is just much too blunt a tool to use. |
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Post by dewey1972 on Nov 16, 2014 21:51:34 GMT -5
I hate the concept of WAR, especially when used the way it often is as the 1 stat you look at to see how good a player is. There is no stat like that. WAR is somewhat useful for trying to compare in very rough terms the relative value of, say, a center fielder and a first basemen. When it is used to say, for instance, 'player A was better then player B this year because he had a slightly higher WAR', thats just ridiculous. No matter how you tweak the formula for how you calculate it, you are just using fuzzy math to dumb down the evaluation of players into 1 number and it just doesn't make sense. All of these supposedly advanced stats; FIP, WAR, etc., they can be useful for learning about a player's tendencies, like 'hey this guy is really good at limiting home runs and getting strike outs' or 'this guy pitches to contact and forces ground balls'. But if you are trying to use them to say 'this guy is better than that guy', that's not statistics, its just playing with numbers with no scientific justification for doing so. anyway, rant over, tldr. It's absolutely ridiculous if people use it that way. But smart people don't use it that way. They understand that WAR comes with error bars. But just because some people misuse it doesn't make it useless. It's a great place to start when evaluating players, before drilling down into the specific attributes of a player and seeing how WAR might under or over value them or in what ways we can expect them to improve or worsen in the future. |
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Post by dewey1972 on Nov 16, 2014 21:52:45 GMT -5
Eric, I have two questions. The first relates to your feelings about fWAR. I'm pretty sure that you think it's worthless, but I sometimes think you might be having a MGL moment in which your comment seems extremely negative, but really you think fWAR's decent, you just want to clarify all of the things you think aren't good about it. Am I right that you think it's worthless? The second follows the first. So if I'm wrong and you don't think it's worthless, ignore this one. You have obviously thought about these things on a much deeper level than I ever will. There's a lot about fWAR that makes sense to me, but that's not the reason I assume it's useful. The reason I trust it's not worthless is because people like Tom Tango and many commenters on his site (guys who produce high-quality research) consistently refer to it and judge it as useful. Why do you think they would ignore the serious flaws you seem to see in it? Do they not see the flaws? Do they think it's good enough? I was going to reply that of course I don't think fWAR is worthless -- until I realized that I've never used it for anything at all! When I'm looking at value, I'm almost always interested in retrospective value, and to the extent that fWAR claims to do that by factoring out defense, those claims should be denied. Because you have also factored out the pitcher's ability or inability to reduce hard contact, and those abilities are real, and have been known to be real since I (and then Tom Tippett) demonstrated it, almost immediately after Voros published his initial findings. It's just throwing out too much baby with the DIPS bathwater -- at least several limbs' worth. So you shouldn't use fWAR to evaluate a trade or decide whether a player should be MVP. You use bWAR, because it tries to factor out the actual defensive support the pitcher had. The only thing fWAR is any good for is predicting what a pitcher's WAR might be next year, because it's a brute-force BABIP regression to the mean, and BABIP always regresses to the mean. But if I seriously want to know how a pitcher will pitch next year, I'm doing more than looking at simple metrics. I'm really curious about your thoughts on the second question--why do well-respected sabermetricians use it? |
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