WAR and More (...what is it good for)

He has the 5th best OBP in the NL, and OBP is the single biggest component of offensive value. He's 19-for-23 on stolen bases, roughly 82% success rate, which is quite good. And he rates as one of the best defensive players in the game by just about every system out there.

Also, Fangraphs WAR has him fifth in the NL. Remember that there's no official or definitive version of WAR, and that all these numbers are likely to be revised years after the fact when Fangraphs/BR/BP tweak their formulas.

Ok I missed on-base. But even with that, his OPS is .802. Respectable but top-5 player? Much less top player? All I am saying is that any formula that puts Lorenzo Cain — 8 HRs 29 RBI .294 BA 53 runs scored — in the top-5 is a wonky formula. I don’t care how good his defense is, within normal human standards.

Would you takeCain over Arenado?

Would you takeCain over Arenado?

I mean this year.

I think I’ve pointed out like half a dozen times that Cain isn’t even leading Arenado by one of the two major versions of WAR. Chapman and Martinez are similarly close enough to be a wash. I’m not sure why this is causing you so much heartburn.

Harper's underlying skills and rate stats and long-term production record mean that I would rather have him than Span the rest of the season. But are you asking, like retroactively? Who would I rather have had from April through July/ Obviously if an inferior player out-produces a superior player for a period of time, I'd rather have had the superior production over that past period of time. But...so what? Worse players having periods of time where they outperform better ones isn't some newfangled statistical revolution stuff. That's gone on since the start of baseball and was reflected in traditional stats.

I've never quite understood how a mathematical formula with a dozen random variables and constants is less wonky than watching the game and reporting what happened.  I like baseball statistics ( I started a sports analytics group in grad school) and I think they play their part, but they get applied in ways that frustrate me sometimes.  Simply adding WAR up and using that as the sole source of comparison is one of them.  Take a more topical example, Cain and Martinez were free agents last year, here's their recent WAR stats.
                    Cain      Martinez
WAR (2015)   7.2         5.0
WAR (2016)   3.0         1.7
WAR (2017    5.3         4.2

Which one would you rather have?  More importantly, who got paid more?  Front offices know what these guys are worth beyond a single summary number and they have more analytic tools at their disposal to determine who should get paid.  Also, Cain signed first and I didn't hear one person anywhere say "OK, Cain got 5/$80 so that's the realistic ceiling for Martinez."  Everyone knows Martinez is more valuable than Cain, even if you can always write a number down to prove it.  I think WAR is great, but flawed and the absolute certainty that tends to be associated with it is frustrating.  It's a data point and generally a good one, but it's not the only data point.