Or it feels like a play on the "well, it's called the 'THEORY' of evolution"-argument. Just because some people act like it's set in stone doesn't negate it's value or mean that the people that use it correctly don't understand that it's not perfect. Not at all like that. The problem with war is it's attempt to quantify defense and baserunning. Hitting and pitching stats work because of what they measure, one on one matchups. Football stats don't work because of what it attempts to measure, and the same is true for defense in baseball. But everyone who should know that already knows that; WAR is used as the best metric of overall player value because that's what it is right now. It's not perfect and it's not set in stone, but it's the best available, and the caveats (especially in regards to defense) have been obvious from the get-go; it's very much an evolving thing. The article is just incredibly redundant. to me, the biggest thing hurting WAR's credibility among the common fans and media is that there are several versions of it that are sometimes at odds with each other. If there was just WAR, fine, but with bWAR and fWAR, etc., it muddles what should be a commonly used evaluator