2026 DETROIT TIGERS REGULAR SEASON THREAD

[Tiger337]

3 hours ago, monkeytargets39 said:

I think the problem with WAR isn’t that it’s a flawed statistic to look at—but that people want to assume that it’s a consistent and predictable way to evaluate a players future production.

The question shouldn’t be “what was his WAR last year?”  It should be “are his underlying metrics supporting the idea that his WAR is repeatable?”

I tend to agree.  I use it mostly to help describe what has happened in the past.  Some of the elements of the various WARs are indeed predictive of the future, but when you try to mix all the parts together, there are a lot of things that can change in the future.  For the future, it only works as baseline.

[casimir]

1 hour ago, theroundsquare said:

my knee hurts. so, also the fans 

Our eyes hurt from watching this month.

[chasfh]

8 hours ago, monkeytargets39 said:

I think the problem with WAR isn’t that it’s a flawed statistic to look at—but that people want to assume that it’s a consistent and predictable way to evaluate a players future production.

The question shouldn’t be “what was his WAR last year?”  It should be “are his underlying metrics supporting the idea that his WAR is repeatable?”

WAR can be useful for projecting future production since it tends to be process-oriented, whereas results can be skewed by luck, and sometimes a lot.

[chasfh]

4 hours ago, Tiger337 said:

I tend to agree.  I use it mostly to help describe what has happened in the past.  Some of the elements of the various WARs are indeed predictive of the future, but when you try to mix all the parts together, there are a lot of things that can change in the future.  For the future, it only works as baseline.

RA9-WAR is very good for describing what happened with pitchers, since it is results-oriented and doesn’t factor out BABIP or LOB. When I do backward-looking pitcher analysis, I typically use RA9-WAR instead of WAR.