Most of this primer has been focused on production, that is, considering what a player does for his team on the field. But, modern baseball (perhaps sadly), isn’t just about production. Instead, with vast differentials in team revenues, baseball analysis has incorporated another avenue of assessment: value.
Before diving in further on this topic, it’s important to clarify exactly why value matters. First, we start with the idea that teams want to win. If they didn’t want to win, they wouldn’t care about production, which is to say that they wouldn’t care about WAR.