It appears the original tweet has been taken down, but this one is close enough:Raj clued me in to this. It started with Bruce Jenkins, columnist/math-fearer/schlub, who tweeted all the things he found bad about WAR (none of which were based on actual, you know, math). Naturally, his fellow Luddite, The CHB, promptly retweeted it.
My take: It's the "stick to tradition no matter how ineffective it is" approach. Take Cy Young. Since he threw 749 complete games, major league managers should go back to leaving their starting pitchers in the whole time. Obviously that's the path to success, and all these relievers are just mucking up everything, right? While we are at it, let's go back to the single/stolen base/swing at everything approach. And get rid of those damn seats and fences. People can stand, dammit.I've been big on stats since I was a little kid, but not WAR. Bill James calls it "not very impressive. They get so far into the data that they throw up their hands and take a wild guess." (cont.)— Bruce Jenkins (@Bruce_Jenkins1) December 27, 2017
The game changes as our understanding of it changes, and anyone who doesn't adapt gets left behind.
Likewise for WAR, WARP, VORP, and a host of other descriptors. Stats are just a means to describe what happened. They are a language, based on numbers. The language of the game evolves, as all languages do. Anyone want to read a gamer written in Elizabethan English? I didn't think so.
