Posted by MikeT23 on 4/21/2014 10:52:00 AM (view original):
FWIW, SAAP is a decent stat. It's no shocker that a player who hits .300 with 23 homers is more valuable than a player who hits .237 with 9 homers. SAAP, as I think it should be called, simply tries to quantify how much better. But it discounts some of the things the old-timers hold dear(W, RBI, RS) because they aren't "individual" stats. Which isn't the worst thing on earth but the SAAP disciples openly mock those stats. So there's more pushback to SAAP than there should be.
The fail with WAR, or SAAP, or whatever you might want to call it, is that it attempts to boil performance down to a single number. Yet it ignores those attributes of a player that either cannot be measured at all by statistics, or are measured incompletely or inaccurately.
I make fun of folks like BL (in particular) because he places so much emphasis on WAR while giving lip service acknowledgement that "it's not perfect", yet he keeps going back to the number as an indisputable measure of a player.
WAR is a stat that should be looked at in conjunction with MANY OTHER factors and weighed appropriately. it should NOT be seen as the primary evaluating measure of a player's performance.