I like what Wins Above Replacement attempts to do, if nothing else than for motivating us to try to think about how we would rate a whole player – hitting, defense and baserunning, in the case of a position player.
But it is just a formula, and though it is a helpful general guide, it should not be seen as definitive.
There is not even accepted computation with the main purveyors: Baseball Reference and Fangraphs often derive different results with the same player.
For example, Baseball Reference’s version liked Isiah Kiner-Falefa (3.0 WAR) and Josh Donaldson (2.3) more last season than the Fangraphs version, which had Kiner-Falefa at 1.3 and Donaldson at 1.6. Baseball Reference saw Kiner-Falefa in 2022 as somewhere between a solid starter and an above-average player and Donaldson as a solid starter while Fangraphs had both as role players with Kiner-Falefa bordering on less than that.
