Last September here, I wrote a post about my attempt to understand and appreciate the “new” baseball stat of WAR, or Wins Above Replacement. Here is a link to that article.

Now, after a year more of struggling to understand it and why it has become so widely accepted, here is how I am thinking about WAR these days..

It’s supposed to be this magical, all-knowing number that boils down the beautiful chaos that is baseball into a neat, tidy decimal. You see it everywhere now: “He’s a 5.7 WAR player!” “That utility guy is only 0.4 WAR.” 

It’s the metric that promises to settle all bar-stool arguments, a universal currency that lets you compare Mickey Mantle to Mickey Gasper.

The appeal is obvious. Everyone loves a shortcut. Why watch 162 games of unpredictable drama played when the wind is blowing in or out, or the humidity is high or low, when you can just check a spreadsheet and get the answer? But this is where the trouble begins. By trying to fit a season of homers, strikeouts, and just plain luck into a single number, is as absurd as thinking you can predict the weather.. It measures the “what”—the runs created, the runs prevented—but it completely misses the “so what?”

Was Kirk Gibson’s epic 1988 World Series home run just 0.1 WAR? Was David Ortiz’s October magic just a blip on a probability model? Was Willie Mays’s impossible catch in 1954 just a few percentage points of added win probability? To say yes is to confuse a calculation with a feeling. It’s like saying a great concert is just a series of sound waves—technically true, but it misses the spine-tingling, tear-jerking, life-altering experience of it all. The human/magical part of everything.

Oscar Wilde once said a cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. It seems to me that the biggest proponents of WAR can fall into the same trap. It’s not that WAR is useless. It’s merely a tool, one of dozens of helpful tools for understanding the game. But when these same data-freaks treat it like a divine prophecy, you lose sight of what makes baseball so special: the drama, the artistry, and the pure, unquantifiable electricity that keeps us all glued to our seats.

WAR can measure contribution. It cannot, however, measure SIGNIFICANCE. And if you ask me, it’s significance—the heart-stopping, joy-inducing, memory-making moments—that makes baseball so necessary.