Drooker: Converting baby boomers to sabermetrics
From SABR member Don Drooker at Mastersball on January 31, 2014:
On a previous visit, the effort was made to convince fans who were youngsters in the 50’s and 60’s that advanced metrics are really more telling than just the stats on the back of a baseball card. A good friend of mine, who was born in the 40’s and might be the world’s most avid Willie Mays fan, isn’t quite ready to convert. However, after realizing that WAR (Wins Above Replacement) showed the “Say Hey Kid” as one of the top five players in the game for 13 consecutive seasons, he said, “Willie for sure got screwed out of the MVP Award several times.”
So, now it’s time for the Baby Boomers who found their heroes in and around the 1970’s to feel better or worse about their favorites. To set the table, “Wins Above Replacement” is an attempt by the SABRmetric community to summarize a player’s total contribution to their team in one statistic. The value is expressed in a wins format, so we could determine that player “A” is worth 5 wins to the team over the course of a season. 8+ is usually MVP quality while 5+ is All-Star quality. Mike Trout has led all of baseball each of the last two seasons. We’ll use the top five WAR players from baseball-reference.com for each applicable year.
Read the full article here: http://mastersball.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3061:converting-baby-boomers-to-sabrmetrics&catid=966:roterissie-duck&Itemid=78
Originally published: January 31, 2014. Last Updated: January 31, 2014.