Win Shares

Seriously. I keep reading this shit on excellent baseball websites about blah blah bull shit, and almost ALL writers I consider intelligent will come back to Win Shares as this be-all-end-all statistic. I read the fucking book Bill James wrote about it. It's total and complete bull shit. It was one of the most flawed things ever. The book was completely full of faulty logic, rounding errors, and generally made up shit. I bet you could count up the times James says "roughly", "approximately", and "we'll do X for now (then never change it)" and have a big ol' shit sandwich with them all. I need to go dig up my copy of it, read the formulation part, look online to see if he ever changed anything, and then create my own statistic. Fuck it. I'll do it right now.

The Howard Coefficient.

First off, everyone knows walks and home runs are pretty solid raw measures of how 'good' a hitter is. So let's start with this.

BB + HR

But wait! I'm emulating Bill James, so clearly, since you only get to first base on a walk, and get FOUR bases with a home run, lets arbitrarily divide BB by 4.

(BB/4) + HR

Now we need to factor in the other hits! Golly gee, dubbles and trippels count two!!! DIVIDES EM UP TOO!

(BB/4) + (2B/2) + (3B/3) + HR

To hell with singles. They're just walks for the showy prick. So now I guess we probably should put some stolen base crap in there. I remember My Hero (tm) Billy claimed that something like 70% (approximately of course) of all SB attempts were sucessful, so watch this fancy pantsy statistical jargon.

(BB/4) + (2B/2) + (3B/3) + HR + (SB/CS)**2

I totally just squared that. I think it looks better that way... makes me look all fancy. Now to factor in defence, the way I was inspired to see it was that an error always gives up a base or two to the other guys, so let's just assume here that all errors a player makes will just cancel out their walks and doubles, so now we have:

(3B/3) + HR + (SB/CS)**2

I like the way this is shaping up. Oh I forgot. The Grit Factor. If a player is white and short, he's "hard-nosed" and "a gamer". So let's add that. PS--Fuck triples.

HR + (SB/CS)**2 + Height*Skin (Skin = 1 if white, 0 otherwise [-1 if you're dark skinned {0 if you're dark skinned but you have a cool name like Yovani}])

Remember, I learned all this from baseball journalism! Erstad and Eckstein are pretty much my heroes. Did I say pretty much my heroes? I misspelled 'what I think about during sex'. Lastly, I run this formula through my Bull-Shit-Fuck-You-O'Meter, and here's what happens...

WIN SHARES IS AMATEUR FUCK YOU LAWL ROFFFFFL

Well fuck. Back to the drawing board again.