When people really don’t like something, or, conversely, like something a lot, they tend to do silly things. Things like extending those feelings to anything remotely related to the thing they like or dislike.
“That really cool athlete drives a Mustang? Then I love Mustangs.”
“My nasty mother-in-law collects Precious Moments? Well, then Precious Moments are evil.”
Things like that.
Baseball fans are not immune to this habit. If a Red Sox fan detests the Yankees, then they will tend to detest anything related to the Yankees, from their players, to the fans, to their stadium, to the beer prices. And Yankee fans will defend their beer prices to the death, at least from complaints filed by Red Sox fans, because they love the Yankees. It’s inevitable.
That behavior extends to other things as well, like statistics.
“I think Player A sucks. If WAR shows that Player A might actually be better than I think he is, then WAR must be stupid.” Or the reverse. “I really like Player B. If WAR doesn’t show that Player B is as awesome as I think he is, then WAR must suck.”
For instance:
In this case, I’m guessing the proprietor of Hoosier Sports Cards of Sullivan, Indiana, is likely influenced by a couple of things. The first, obviously, is a distaste for either Mike Trout or WAR. More likely is a love of Frank Thomas or the White Sox. Sullivan, Indiana, is in a no-man’s-land for baseball, roughly equidistant from St. Louis, Chicago, and Cincinnati. Methinks I know which team and player from those cities Hoosier has decided to root for.
Regardless, this is a pretty classic case of allowing a like or dislike of one thing to cloud your judgment about something else. “WAR shows that Frank Thomas wasn’t as good as Mike Trout in their first eight full seasons*? Well, then WAR sucks and Frank Thomas is awesome and Mike Trout probably hates babies and kicks puppies.”
(*Note: Hoosier didn’t note the years these stats were from, but they clearly were not the career totals of each player. I played around with their careers a bit and figured out that Hoosier grabbed the stats from each player’s first eight full seasons. That’s 1991 to 1998 for Thomas and 2012 to 2019 for Trout.)
Rather than have this sort of visceral reaction, I would have hoped instead that dear Hoosier would have taken a few deep breaths, calmed down, maybe had a cocktail, and examined their own graphic for signs that they might be overreacting just a bit.
For instance, the same graphic shows that Trout had a better adjusted OPS than Thomas, 178 to 174. That’s not a big gap at all, but it does mean that Trout hit a bit better than Thomas did once his leagues and home ballparks were taken into account. Does that mean OPS+ sucks as a statistic, too?
The graphic also shows that Trout stole 196 bases to Thomas’ 25, an enormous gap that Hoosier simply ignores. Are stolen bases also stupid? The graphic doesn’t show that Thomas was successful in just 64% of his base stealing attempts while Trout was successful 84% of the time, but that’s probably relevant to note when evaluating the overall quality of their play on the field.
The graphic shows that Trout slugged the same as Thomas, and hit one more homer than Thomas hit despite 144 fewer plate appearances. That seems pretty relevant, too.
At the bottom of the graphic we see that lots and lots of people disagreed with Hoosier’s opinion. Trout was elected to the All-Star Game in each of his first eight seasons, while Thomas was elected to just five. That represents the collective opinions of millions of fans as well as those inside baseball who rounded out All-Star rosters after the fans picked the starters. Hoosier conveniently ignores that.
He also ignores the final line, which notes that Trout won three MVP awards in those eight seasons, one more than Thomas. That means the media that follows baseball and votes on postseason awards also preferred Trout to Thomas, particularly once we note something that isn’t in the graphic, which is that Trout also had four second-place MVP finishes in those seasons, and a fourth-place finish, too. In comparison, Thomas’ non-MVP seasons included two third-place MVP finishes, three eighth-place finishes, and one year when he didn’t get any MVP votes at all.
Notice that I haven’t defended WAR at all yet in drawing these comparisons. It would be a waste of time to do that, because Hoosier clearly already made up their mind about WAR before they ever created that graphic and wrote that tweet. There’s no point in trying to defend the usefulness of WAR to someone who is that determined to dislike it.
I will, however, note a couple of additional things that aren’t in Hoosier’s handy graphic. Like defense.
Defensive Runs, First Eight Full Seasons
Trout: +7
Thomas: -55
Then there’s base running.
Base Running Runs, First Eight Full Seasons
Trout: +33
Thomas: -2
Then there’s hitting into double plays.
Runs From Grounding Into Double Plays
Trout: +8
Thomas: -16
Then, of course, there were the next four seasons each played after the eight that Hoosier was focused on. Those tell us something, too.
They tell us that Thomas stayed much healthier, and that Trout lost most of a season’s-worth of games to Covid in 2020. They also tell us that Thomas stopped being recognized by the fans and his peers entirely, being selected to no All-Star games in those years, while Trout made three more. They tell us that Trout was a significantly better hitter than Thomas in their ninth-thru-thirteenth seasons, beating him in both raw OPS (.968 to .926) and adjusted OPS (163 to 136). Trout’s durability sagged in comparison to Thomas, and he didn’t run as much or play defense as well as he had, but overall he was still a better player than Thomas.
So, for their respective first thirteen seasons, Trout hit a bit better compared to his leagues than Thomas did, played better defense than Thomas, ran the bases better than Thomas, avoided double plays better than Thomas, was honored more by sportswriters than Thomas, and was elected to more All-Star Games by the fans and managers than Thomas. Someone looking at that with unbiased eyes would have to conclude that Trout was obviously better, and that maybe the folks who calculate WAR are onto something.
But Hoosier either loves Thomas so much or hates Trout (or WAR) so much that they’ve decided to draw the opposite conclusion, facts be damned.
Like I said, when people have strong feelings about something, they tend to do silly things.
The WAR hating is literally an industry—social media accounts post these mostly idiotic comparisons so one type of schmuck will roll their eyes and make the tired joke “WAR—what is good for? Absolutely nothing”, while another type of schmuck (hello, fellow traveler!) will take a deep breath and try to educate the first group of schmucks. All the OP is after is engagement.
What’s worse is the Reds fans that claim Tony Perez is better than Joey Votto. Not on better teams, a better player.