Growing up a baseball fan in the 1990’s, I never heard the words “moneyball” or “sabermetrics.” We rooted for “traditional” statistics, hoping Todd Hundley would eclipse the Met and catcher records for single-season homeruns and Anthony Young would lose enough consecutive games to ensure his place among all-time goats. Fast forward to the present and one cannot help but notice how many intelligent members of the sports media not only include, but also focus on, new statistics, such as WAR (Wins Above Replacement), FIP (Fielding Independent Pitching), and UZR (Ultimate Zone Rating). The definition and scope of each of these variables, along with the many others, are well beyond the scope of this essay; however, the primary goal of each is to quantify that which had always been subjective: defense, speed, luck, and a player’s overall value. Specifically WAR, whose method of calculation has varying opinions (e.g. Fan Graph’s fWAR and Baseball Reference’s bWAR), attempts to understand “how much better a player is than what a team would typically have to replace that player,” measured in wins.
The debate over the use of these statistics, especially as replacements for the traditional ones, such as stolen bases, earned run average (ERA), and runs batted in (RBI), has waged on. While some from the “old-school” maintain that WAR, as the song indicates, is good for “absolutely nothing,” many mainstream media outlets have turned their attention to these decreasingly controversial statistics. For example, in the winter of 2012, the two frontrunners in the race for the American League’s Most Valuable Player, Miguel Cabrera and Mike Trout, embodied the two distinct schools of thought. At the time, the New York Times featured an article by Nate Silver explaining why Mike Trout, based on his overall value measured in WAR, should win. Conversely, Miguel Cabrera who had achieved the historic feat of winning the Triple Crown (leading the league in three traditional categories: homeruns, RBI’s, and batting average), was overrated based on superficial statistics.
