Maybe it's age, or maybe I just don't like it when being a sports fan turns into math homework, and I respect greatly anyone's ability to devise new paradigms through which to look at a sport. All of that having been said, I was wandering through Baseball Prospectus on the Intertoobz this afternoon and I saw some player or another being judged on something called WARP. I never had heard of this before, although I knew more than a few baseball players who were pretty warped. (Wade Boggs in the fleshpots of Anaheim leaps immediately to mind.) So, never wanting to be left behind, I went further into the 'toobz, and I found a definition of what WARP is: Wins Above Replacement Player. Apparently, it is an attempt to devise a metric by which to judge how many wins a player is good for by comparing that player to a fictitious "replacement player." OK, fine by me, but here is the entire explanation behind the WARP analysis and, I confess, I am completely lost in here somewhere, and don't even get me started on WARP2 and WARP3.

Oh, good, here's someone who can help me.




I canna give you no more, Captain. The dilithium crystals in his head are tapped out.