In an age of baseball when it’s commonplace for six different members of a front office crew to pound statistics, logarithms, and even players’ reflexive reactions into extremely complex spreadsheets hoping for better results on the diamond, it’s easy to understand how a few tenths of a WAR point would be compelling enough to trade away one of the club’s most valued leaders.
After all, today’s sabermetric-driven analysis establishes an infinite number of parameters that actually draw conclusions from the formulas which gather data. The whole problem, however, is that there’s no subjectivity in this philosophy, never taking into consideration someone’s personality, leadership qualities, or an individual’s desire to compete.