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  Jim Albright / the japanese insider

Jim Albright on Updates to the NPB Player Projections to MLB

I think the biggest change related to these projections is how the spread of analytics changes the landscape.  I think there's greater willingness to listen to this kind of stuff, but there's a lot of lousy analysis which doesn't understand the concepts behind it but tries to horn into the marketplace by using lots of numbers to contend with.  I'm sure people are getting more sophisticated in sorting the wheat-like analysis from the chaff-like stuff, but since it's a fairly new phenomenon, I think it's still a work in progress.  

I didn't do much with the gold standard of uber-stats fifteen years ago, win shares, in the Oh article because that information existed only in Bill James' book on the topic and a little later on his for pay website-and even then it wasn't updated anything like we're used to seeing today with Baseball-reference.com or its rivals in WAR.  WAR's free availability for years is a large part of why it supplanted win shares, and it has led to WAR being a common part of the baseball lexicon in a way win shares never was.  There's a lot more understanding of what a 5 WAR season or a 7 WAR season, etc means than there ever was of 15 or 20 win share seasons.  That level of acceptance and acceptance of WAR and WAA today means that when I add such an analysis to the article, it gives the large mass of people who are familiar and comfortable with WAR and WAA a better sense of what the projection means.  Hey, even though I was intimately familiar with the projection, I wasn't able to process how size of the effect that doing so much of this in the 60s as Oh did would affect how Oh compares to the greatest in the game.  I imagine others will have a similar reaction.