Originally Posted by Soylent Green:
Taking it a step further, none of these various WAR formulae take into account the "value" of the games in which the data is mined... so a meaningless Mariners v Indians late season tilt from 1984 (let alone a dozen or more of these a year x 20 or so years) impacts a guy's career totals the same as, say, a Tigers v Royals game with playoff implications that same August. It's the difference between formulas and the field.
That you think WAR doesn't implicitly account for this pretty much makes my original point. That Jim Beattie and Mark Langston had better seasons in 1984 than Jack Morris isn't an indictment of WAR, it's evidence that most of the rest of the Mariners weren't very good, and an awful lot of the Tigers' players were. If either of Morris or Langston had missed the 1984 season, the odds are that neither of their teams' fortunes would have changed. Given the option to replace Jim Slaton with either of them though, the Angels would definitely have been better off with Langston.