I’ve got one simplistic point to make here, and I’m going to make it. It’s not a simple point, but it is simplistic, and I want to make that clear from the beginning: I don’t understand Bill’s reasons for complicating Win Shares by introducing Loss Shares. If someone wants to tell me those reasons, I’m all ears.

One of the reasons I haven’t put a lot of effort into understanding the rationale for Loss Shares is that I just don’t like the process. The original, and very attractive, selling point behind Just Plain Win Shares was that it reduced a player’s complicated (often contradictory) annual stats to a two-digit number, and his complicated career stats to a three-digit number, holding constant throughout time, throughout leagues, throughout ballparks, throughout managers. Every stat was reduced to a two- or three-digit number: simplicity itself.

That said, it obviously did not pretend to settle every baseball argument ever. And Bill acknowledged that from the outset, saying that a guy who had 20 Win Shares was not clearly inferior to another player with 21 Win Shares. It could well be that he was better (or "had a better season") than someone with 22 Win Shares. It wasn’t Rocket Science and it didn’t pretend to be. On the other hand, if you were going to claim that the guy with 20 Win Shares had a better year than the guy with 22, you’d need to do some pretty fancy footwork to win that fight.  You’d need to sneak in a knockout punch, in other words, after losing most of the rounds up to that point. And there isn’t enough fancy footwork in all the gyms in China to show that a 20 Win Share season was better than someone else’s 30 Win Share season. So Win Shares had its limited purpose, and it served that purpose very well.

That’s how I understood Win Shares to operate, anyway. With the panoply of stats available to us, we often needed an accurate shorthand method of boiling down seasons and careers to two- or three-digit figures, and Bill came up with an ingenious system to do just that, objectively, with no built-in biases towards pitchers or fielders or hitters or Dead Ball Era players or contemporary players or pennant winners or cellar dwellers.

The charm of Win Shares, as I saw it, was that simplicity. And built into such concepts as "A 30-WS season is the entry level for MVP candidacy" was the understanding that some 30-Win Share seasons were better than others, or that a general range of Win Shares would lead to more accurate conclusions than simply using one Win Shares figure as the squelcher in any discussion about baseball.  The Win Shares system was enormously convenient, and it was perhaps Bill’s most important invention—Win Shares was certainly the subject of Bill’s most provocative book, and it persuaded me of many concepts that I approached initially with considerable skepticism. The "Win Shares" book made a believer out of me.

It had its own interesting history that old-time James fans will recall. I loved its flawed predecessor, Approximate Value, which also reduced a season to one or two digits. AV was a wholly invented number, practically arbitrary, whose one- or two-digit description of each season measured precisely nothing. Carl Yastrzemski was the first example Bill presented of AV: his good seasons were "20"s and his bad seasons were "14"s—or maybe they were "40"s and "25"s. Dudn’t matter, because they didn’t measure runs, or wins, or bases, or anything, really. AV was just a scale where higher numbers were better than lower numbers. Bill had a system, of course, measuring how players earned AV points, and it was crude but effective. (I think AV appeared in one of the early Abstracts sitting on my shelf—I could find out how it worked by getting off my chair and walking 15 feet, but that’s not important here. Obviously, AV had its weaknesses, but its strength was its simplicity.) I loved the concept.

Win Shares reinforced that concept by basing its numbers on something tangible: Wins. There are all sorts of quibbles, complaints, criticisms of Bill’s original Win Shares system, some of them by Bill himself, leading to his inclusion of "Loss Shares" that he has not yet fully rolled out.

For my money, I’d rather he didn’t roll it out at all, and simply make "Win Shares" as good as he can get it. If it is fatally and inherently flawed, then so be it. I’d rather read an explanation of exactly what Win Shares DOESN’T accomplish, and then to use it (or not use it) with that caveat, than to be exposed to a "WS and LS" system that complicates the thing I want simplified.

Simply put, Win Shares was designed to work at a glance: "Player X had 20 WS in 1982, but in 1983  he had 27 WS" summarizes neatly what I need to know about his surge, but "Player X went 20-7 in 1983 but in 1983 surged to 25-13" leaves me wondering if Player X got more playing time but played at the same level as before. Is 25-13 better than 20-7? Worse? How much better? How much worse?

In time, I might be able to answer such questions, but if I wanted to spend that time, there are loads of other ways to reach conclusions that require time and effort. I want a system that quantifies seasons at a glance. In seeking to fine-tune Win Shares by including Loss Shares, Bill has lost one crucial element: me. If I can’t follow a line of numbers and easily see upticks and downturns, I have lost my primary interest in Win Shares. I need a system that clarifies quantities, not one that complicates them.

Most quantitative systems have their flaws. I was just reading someone’s point about the 1966 AL leader in winning percentage, a more interesting topic than it might seem at first glance. The official leader in winning percentage was Dave Boswell, who went 12-5 for a .706 %. No one had a problem with this, not even Jim Nash, who went 12-1 for a .923 %.  We all accepted this because it makes sense to have a cut-off in winning percentage: no one wants the league leader every year to be some late-season middle-reliever call-up who goes 1-0.

But 1-0 is very dubiously better than 12-5.  Boswell’s 12-5 is better than 1-0 by exactly 11-5, so Boswell deserves his distinction over that 1-0 middle reliever. Applying the same logic to Nash, though, and Boswell’s distinction becomes the dubious one. 12-5 is clearly worse than 12-1, by a difference of 0-4.

The point of the guy who brought this up (wish I could remember where I read this, Facebook maybe?) was even more intriguing: the cutoff for winning percentage considerations was 16 decisions, a perfectly cromulent arbitrary number. Why not 18? Why not 14? Who knows? It was 16. But if you give Nash three more losses, and make him 12-4, then he leads the league in winning percentage. The same reasoning is applied to batting champeens—if we give someone who falls 43 plate appearances shy of the P.A. cut-off an additional ohfer-43 and he still leads the league in batting average, then he’s the champeen. Makes sense. So why not apply this reasoning to other quantitative issues where we use cutoffs for qualification?

Because we don’t, that’s why.

All stats are flawed somewhere. All stats fall far short of perfection in measuring the quantities they’re designed to measure, and no stat settles any issues once and for all. Some stats have gigantic holes in them, so much so that we can’t use them anymore at all, and most stats have small holes in them that we bear in mind whenever we use them. Often, we only slowly become aware of the holes, and always when we do, there are a few holdouts who insist on using such stats, holes and all, because they’re used to them.

A few months ago, I caught some flak on this site for pointing out a similar hole in the 1981 AL ERA title (explained here: https://sabr.org/research/choosing-among-winners-1981-al-era-title ), which has since been re-jiggered. We all do dumb stuff, and we correct it when we can, which isn’t always immediately or even quickly. Bill’s delay in rolling out his comprehensive Loss Shares system is probably due to some remaining glitches in that system. If somehow it works perfectly as designed, I’ll still resist using it because I won’t be able to tell which is better, 17-15 or 14-9, and that is what I go to Win Shares for.

You remember Orwell’s Animal Farm, right? The central idea was that the Farm began on sound, clear principles, mainly "All Animals Are Equal," but by the end that principle has been complicated, just a tad, into "Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others," turning an equitable system into a tyrannical one. A similar process is going on here: in reviewing Win Shares and finding it lacking in some way or another (a way I haven’t gotten a handle on yet), Bill is complicating it, just a tad, by including Loss Shares and with that inclusion, losing the entire beauty of Win Shares, its simplicity.

(LONG) POST-SCRIPT:

I was just about to send this article to be published, when Bill published his article asking what is a superstar. I thought: what a perfect use for Win Shares!

To take up his example, I decided to use Win Shares to figure out who was a superstar in 1920. Bill writes that in the period of

1915 to 1919 [, t]he two best position players in baseball are Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker; add in Walter Johnson and Pete Alexander, you’ve got four. 

              Then there is that Babe Ruth feller, and Shoeless Joe Jackson having his best years, and Honus Wagner is still playing, and Home Run Baker, and Rogers Hornsby, and Eddie Collins, who was clearly a better player than Rogers Hornsby in my opinion, and George Sisler, and about 40 other Hall of Famers who are active somewhere in that period.  There were six problems within this study, which made it impossible for me to finish and publish that research.  

              First, if you use a strictly rational approach to the issue of "Which X players in Year Y have the best claim to be considered superstars", then—even if you use multi-year measurements of performance—players pop on and drop off the list in ways that make no sense.   A player will be listed as a superstar in 1924, 1926 and 1929, but not listed in 1925, 1927 and 1928.   This is inconsistent, to borrow a phrase from Bill Clinton, with the meaning of the word "is".    Saying that a player did superstar-type things in 1924, 1926 and 1929—or in concentrations of years centering in 1924, 1926 and 1929—makes sense.   Saying that he IS a superstar in 1924 and 1926 but is not a superstar in 1925 makes no sense.  "Is" is not something you can take off and hang in the closet like a coat. 

Granting Bill his premise (he elaborates on his point), I decided to see how a quick-n-dirty study of the question of who was a superstar in the spring of 1920 might work according to Win Shares.

Here’s the q’n’d guidelines I worked up:

3x the most recent year in Win Shares (1919, in this case)

2x the next most recent year (1918)

1x the third most recent year (1917)

And in the AL the leaders in Win Shares are

That’s a total of 19 players with 25 or more Win Shares in 1919, about one per team on average. What this looks like at first glance is that Ruth is so far above everyone else, he’s the only superstar in the game at that point, and everyone else on the list is just a star. But that’s only one year. Let’s combine the two leagues into a single chart, ranking them in descending order, according to their Win Share totals in 1919, and make it multi-year:

It’s fairly clear who the biggest stars in baseball in the spring of 1920 are from this chart, Ruth and Cobb, the only two to score above 200. In third place is Walter Johnson, just ahead of Heine Groh. (Their names are in bold italics, above.) If you want to expand the definition of superstar beyond Bill’s four, you’d include Edd Roush, Tris Speaker, and Hippo Vaughn, but I’m not sure that gets you to a more accurate number of active superstars.

I’ve probably oversimplified the process of determining a superstar using Win Shares alone, but Bill’s four superstars in the 1915-1919 period are Cobb, Speaker, Alexander and Johnson. I suspect that if I extended my chart to include 1915 and 1916, I might draw the same conclusions, and if Bill restricted his study to 1917-1919 he might draw the same conclusions I just did. Certainly both sets of conclusions are similar, though the methodologies differ widely: for one thing, I’m looking at a very specific point in time, the winter of 1919-1920, to get to the question of "Who is a Superstar right now?" and Bill is looking at the entire 1915-1919 period, with the advantage of retrospect.

I find I don’t share Bill’s difficulty with players dropping off (and sometimes back on) the list of current superstars. "Is Miguel Cabrera still a superstar, or is he not?," he asks. "It’s not actually clear." I agree with that, but I don’t see a work-around for the superstar who no longer plays consistently at the high level that got him that designation. Perhaps we should grant a grace year to superstars who get injured, or join the Army, or get suspended, or spend a year in jail, or just have an off-year by their lofty standards. Maybe this grace period ought to last longer than one year. On my chart above, for example, some players get seriously screwed for over a year by World War I—Joe Jackson missed most of the 1918 season working in a Delaware shipyard building battleships, and Pete Alexander spent most of 1918 and part of 1919 serving in the war-- how do we account for such lapses? Whatever reasoning you use to create a Superstar List, you’re going to run into such problems, and often as not, the Pete Alexanders do not resume their superstar status. Is Willie Mays still a superstar in 1967, hitting 23 HRs and driving in 79 runs? It seems inevitable that at some point during Mays’ final 7 seasons, 1967-1973, batting .272, averaging 17 HRs and 57 RBIs during his declining years, the word "superstar" no longer applies, but when do you pull the plug on this Giant among Giants? After one off-year? Two? Five?

Similarly, you can call Mays a superstar when he breaks into MLB, but how fast do you want to make that call? From the perspective of 2018, Mays might have been a superstar from Day One, but in 1951 he had just pretty good slash numbers for a Rookie-of-the-Year (.274/20/68, just about his 1967-73 stats). If that’s a superstar, we’d have more of them than a freshman dorm room has cockroaches. He spent the next few years serving Uncle Sam, and had a terrific 1954, but—retrospect aside—one great season does not a superstar make. Unless we’re making the superstar designation in hindsight, you really can’t make even as super a superstar as Mays into one until maybe after the 1956 season, his third full (150+ games) season, and even there, you’ve got a slight hitch. Mays’ 1956 season was slightly below superstar status. In Win Shares, Mays’ 1956 shows the lowest figure (23 WS) he would accrue between 1954 and 1967, and by a very large margin. Is this really the point at which you want to anoint him a superstar? Maybe it’s an off-year, maybe it’s the start of a decline, maybe it’s Maybelline. Maybe you’d wait another year, maybe you’d wait two more years, which seems crazy but only in retrospect. In 1956, you’re just prudently making sure that Mays isn’t another early peaker like Vada Pinson or Bryce Harper.

How quickly do you want someone to prove he’s a superstar? And how long do you want him to retain that designation? Those are thorny questions to answer, however you choose to answer them. Unless you’re willing to retract the designation of "superstar" from a player who is no longer playing at that rarified level, it seems to me you’ve got to wait a while before bestowing it. And even then there are those who just stop producing in mid-career: what do you do with the Cesar Cedenos, the Dave Parkers, the Dale Murphys, the Ernie Bankses, the Duke Sniders, the Don Mattinglys? Seems to me, a year or two after you’ve finally decided that they’re among the elite of the elite in their late twenties, their value drops like an Acme anvil in their early thirties. Viewed cautiously enough, it’s hard to call someone a superstar before he’s put together four or five straight years of excellence, and it’s even harder to remain at anything close to that level for much longer. From a cautious perspective, you’d almost have to delay that designation until you’re sure it’s fully earned, and you’d have to retract it when it’s clearly no longer applicable.

If not, your only alternative is to bestow it freely on those who haven’t quite locked it down and to keep that label pinned on those who are no longer playing at the very top levels.

Anyway, I really didn’t want to go off on this tangent, just wanted to take advantage of Bill’s complicated, subtle, and somewhat subjective article on who exactly is a superstar to contrast what a very simple objective system like Win Shares might show us. I see superstardom as more tenuous, more fluid, more easily lost, more temporary, than Bill does, but mostly I think Win Shares could do a good job of identifying the top candidates. With a few flexible rules about eligibility, off- or lost-seasons, numerical cut-offs, it could go a long way towards defining who is and who isn’t a superstar.

Maybe Win Shares isn’t the ideal vehicle to drive this argument, but I think some objective system could get it started. I’ve long had the idea that we could take Bill’s "Pitcher Ranking" system, which tells us down to the finest digit, how each starter ranks every day of his career, and devise a similar ranking for each position, or maybe just for all batters and relief pitchers, and that would tell us, on a daily basis, who has achieved superstar status. Pitchers move slowly on the Rankings list, eliminating the problem of Johnnies-come-lately, and they move off it slowly, mitigating the problems of off-years and injuries.