The magic stat that tells you everything you need to know about every player through perfect statistical calculation in the game of baseball. What is it? It doesn’t exist, but it doesn’t have to. We have something that gives us what we need.

Wins Above Replacement (WAR) is the popular stat to attack1 when someone tries to write a hot take or bring up the long-dead war of stats vs. scouts. The en vogue way to describe WAR is an all encompassing stat attempting to break the game down to a single number. That may be the desire in the long run, but to properly use it in its current form you simply have to use it as a baseline. A number to help signal in yourself a desire to ask why and to do the work to figure that why out. Is that 0.2 difference in WAR significant?2

The WAR rankings on BaseballReference are not an unassailable list, so let’s use the stat in the fashion it should be used. In a series of posts, I’ll be looking at the top hitters on the WAR rankings, seeing at what places them there and if we should agree with it.

Troy Tulowitzki – #1 – 5.3 WAR (7/8/2014)

Troy Tulowitzki has quite a bit of bold on his Baseball Reference page for the 2014 season. Including currently leading the league in the intuitive triple slash. With a line of .349/.442/.602, the Colorado Rockies shortstop has a line that makes most designated hitters jealous.

With a slugging percentage of .602 (leading MLB) and an OPS+3 of 174 (leading MLB), it would be easy to assume that Tulo is probably near the top of the home run leader boards too. He’s currently 11th with a fantastic 18 already. The power isn’t prolific, 80-grade power however. He must just be hitting a lot of triples and doubles to make up for it, right? Tulowitzki is tied for 73rd in doubles with 17 and has just one triple. All are fantastically respectable numbers, but when you start to dive deeper, it shows that Tulowitzki is more a jack of all trades than a master of one.

Even if his placement atop the slugging percentage list isn’t because he is the best home run hitter in baseball, a shortstop that leads the league in slugging is a supremely valuable player. Take into consideration that the “average” shortstop this season has hit .254/.312/.375 with seven home runs and just a 1.3 0WAR.4 To get the type of production out of a position of such hitting scarcity as shortstop while still retaining a semblance of defense is what teams dream of. That’s what careers like Derek Jeter’s are made of; though the semblance of defense in that case can be debated.

Now, about that defense when it comes to Tulowitzki. Definitely the “weaker” part of his game when it comes to the toughest position to play in the game. This says more about his hitting prowess this season than any deficit on defense. Compared to his 4.6 0WAR, the 29-year-old has just a 1.2 dWAR.5 But hold on, this isn’t a one-to-one comparison with oWAR and dWAR. Whether it be because defensive statistics are imperfect and stats sites are waiting to give more credence to them in their systems or if this is an above my head math decision; one thing is true, 1.2 dWAR is fantastic. It puts Tulowitzki at 17th in baseball among all positions and 4th for shortstops.6

With the whole picture, or at least a good portion of it, having been examined; does leading baseball with 5.3 WAR make sense for Tulowitzki? Well that requires a comparison to the other players on WAR top ten so stay tuned. But as of now it is tough to find a problem with putting a player that is somewhere around the fourth best fielding shortstop and somewhere around the BEST hitter in baseball right now at the top of a value-based stat ranking.