If you want some technical reading, pick up ESPN the magazine.I have finally pieced together what OPS and WHIP are, but I have no idea what the vaunted WAR is. Plus RBI is a practically valueless statistic, so they say.
Yeah, computers wrecked baseball stats.
I worked in the college sports business. It is incredible the stats they have to keep. It is so complicated that they have a hard time hiring work study kids to score games anymore.
You want to make a small fortune? Learn how to score collegiate volleyball. You will never be unemployed.
“Wins Above Replacement (WAR) is an attempt by the sabermetric baseball community to summarize a player’s total contributions to their team in one statistic. You should always use more than one metric at a time when evaluating players, but WAR is pretty darn all-inclusive and provides a handy reference point. WAR basically looks at a player and asks the question, “If this player got injured and their team had to replace them with a minor leaguer or someone from their bench, how much value would the team be losing?” This value is expressed in a wins format, so we could say that Player X is worth +6.3 wins to their team while Player Y is only worth +3.5 wins.”
http://www.fangraphs.com/library/misc/war/