Of all of the advanced metrics cited in modern day baseball conversations, perhaps none is referred to more frequently than Wins Above Replacement (WAR). This makes sense: WAR aims to consolidate a player’s entire performance into one concise number, making comparisons across the league as simple as quoting a single statistic.
Though the output is a clean, shiny number, the work that goes into WAR is a complex maze. There are dozens of components that go into the formula, and there are multiple official leaderboards that calculate WAR differently. It can be difficult to have a valid argument without knowing the whole story, yet many fans and writers struggle to completely grasp the metric.