Pretty nice piece on sabermetrics from BCB

[David]

Here begins my introductory series on sabermeric concepts, which is going to use WAR (Wins Above Replacement) as a unifying framework. I plan to use WAR for a few reasons. For one, if you're just going to use one stat for both evaluating past player performance and valuing future player production, it should be WAR. Why does WAR have this prominence as the best single number to know about a player? I can answer this by defining the statistic. Simply put, WAR is the number of wins you'd expect a team to have added to its total due to the presence of a particular player, instead of a replacement from the minor league ranks. Thus, WAR is important for the exact same reason why many people are misled into thinking the W-L record of a pitcher it so important: WAR is measured in the same units as the ultimate measure of success... wins! I hope to talk about this later, but the difference between WAR and W-L records is that WAR succeeds in this goal whereas W-L records fail. W-L records represent a very poor attempt to attribute wins to a pitcher. WAR does this, too... only WAR does it much, much, much better, and more precisely than W-L records do and they have they have the tremendous advantage of being capable of awarding "wins" to position players and pitchers on an equal footing. In order to do this properly, WAR need to be all-encompassing; this necessitates the inclusion of many components. Thus, by framing things with WAR, I can also introduce all of you to a variety of tools and concepts currently adopted for use by much of the sabermetric community: linear weights, wOBA, UZR, FIP, EqBRR, replacement-level, positional adjustments, player valuation, forecasting systems, and, error and uncertainty. This article is the first in a series of 10 parts. (For now... maybe the series will end up being 11 parts? 8 parts? I'm honestly not sure yet... We'll see where this goes.) Anyways, this is Part I: Linear Weights. Jump below the fold to for an introduction to a very central gear in the WAR machine...

 

 

http://www.bleedcubbieblue.com/2010/1/17/1255925/uzr-error-fail-or-win-a-lesson-on#storyjump - The rest here

 

 

 

I'm sure a lot of people here know this stuff (in fact, I know they do) already, but I still found it a pretty interesting read.