Originally Posted by
Enscheff
I prefer fWAR for pitchers and hitters because UZR tends to not have those huge outlier defender-seasons like DRS does. Anytime a metric spits out a result stating that a player was an extreme outlier, either good or bad, we should be a bit skeptical.
I think it has to do with this quote, “Defensive Runs Saved uses a rolling one-year basis for the Plus/Minus system, while UZR uses several years of data to determine each play’s difficulty level.”
I haven’t dug into it much, but it seems to me using more data as your baseline would produce more stable results. It may very well be that one is better at grading infielders while the other is better at grading outfielders. It’s definitely something that would be interesting to investigate. At the end of the day, I think Statcast data from baseball savant will replace both, and we won’t have to worry about this debate anymore.
FG is just such a superior site overall for finding stats, leaderboards, splits and projections that I would probably reference fWAR even if I didn’t think UZR was superior.