A lot of our readers have been intimidated by bgWAR, our measure of a player's overall value, and asked us about how it works. We had the same questions when we first heard about advanced stats. "How," we asked, "could some computer guys plug a bunch of mathematical numbers into some kind of mechanical Turk and find out how good players are?"
The Blangraphs editorial staff is more into stick-to-it-ive-ness than your fancy metrics.
For a long time, we trusted our eyes and hearts and ignored the numbers. It felt right, and we did fine that way. But as we looked at more and more players to compare Joe Blanton to, we needed to watch more and more games. We stayed up all night watching Mariners games to figure out whether Robinson Cano could equal Joe. We listened to the announcers' tones when they narrated Yovani Gallardo starts. There were 2340 games to watch, and eventually it was too much to keep it all straight. At this point, we realized we need a formula, and that the stats could help us as long as they were measuring all of the things that we saw when we watched.
If you are anything like us, you are skeptical when you see a complicated math formula, and we recognize that bgWAR looks just like one. The fact is that the bgWAR formula is not as complicated as it might seem, it has simply grown over time in a series of common-sense, logical steps. With each tweak and adjustment, the calculation of bgWAR got just a bit harder for the uninitiated reader to understand. Just like our wise scouts' knowledge grows over the decades until they can predict a player's entire career from just a single swing of the bat, our formula has been built up in a series of adjustments, additions, and alignments. And for the first time, here it is for everyone to see:
bgWAR:
Current season leader: Joe Blanton.
