Win Shares

From Wiki Gonzalez

Win Shares is a Bill James statistic that measures how many wins a player contributes to his team. It is split into Offensive, Defensive, and Pitching. The complete methodology is documented in Bill's book entitled, obviously enough, Win Shares (http://isbn.nu/1931584036).

The logic behind Win Shares is to break up a team's wins and assign credit to each player on the winning team for each win. For all players on a team, the sum of all the Win Shares must, by definition, be equal to 3 times the number of team wins. By this nature Win Shares are a counting statistic.

Unlike most sabermetrics inventions, it does not explicitly try to calculate an individual player's skill ("true talent") above and beyond his contribution to winning. In particular, great clutch hitting performances can earn a large number of Win Shares; first baseman Will Clark particularly benefits from this framework.

A number of people at BTF have latched onto Win Shares as the ultimate statistic, since it encompasses all aspects of the game. A number of other Primates remain skeptical of the rigor of Win Shares and feel that it is given a pass on serious criticism simply because it was developed by Bill James.

TangoTiger thinks the concept of Loss Shares (i.e. a player's contribution to losses) was incorrectly omitted/disregarded by Bill James and should be accounted for in any WS-based framework.