Sometime soon, there is going to be a new version of Wins Above Replacement available, and its goal, aside from encapsulating a player’s value into one tidy number, is simple: Don’t be scary. The plan does not involve dumbing down the metric that serves as the flashpoint between those who yearn for a catch-all and those who lament it. On the contrary, as with almost everything it does, Major League Baseball Advanced Media wants to make it so smart people can’t help but like it.

BAM, as the company is known, is MLB’s greatest success story of the past quarter century, an investment of a couple million dollars from each team that blossomed into the largest tech outfit on the East Coast and the hub for much of the video that streams into American households and devices. Even the lowest-revenue franchises would sell for more than a billion dollars today in part because of their 1/30th stake in BAM.

Over-the-top video is far from their only product. Two years ago, BAM introduced Statcast, a system that married high-definition cameras and Doppler radar to track every movement on the field. Its intent wasn’t merely to provide teams with a treasure chest of data. BAM understood a very important point: With the power of its data, baseball could write its own narrative. All it needed were the right evangelists.

At 12:45 ET this afternoon, two of them will stand together and preach the gospel to the like-minded during a presentation at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, the industry’s pre-eminent gathering of data hounds. Daren Willman, 34, was so good at parsing Statcast data as a hobby that BAM hired him. He joined 35-year-old Mike Petriello, who serves as something of a public translator, explaining the whys of Statcast’s discoveries in print and on TV. And then there’s Tom Tango, which isn’t his real name. He cares not to provide his age, either. All that matters is he’s widely recognized as one of the greatest sabermetric minds of this generation, if not ever, and another get-together, the SABR Analytics Conference in Phoenix next week, will be his public unveiling after a couple decades of anonymity.

During their hourlong presentation, the three plan to run through a slew of ideas, including one that has percolated since for years: a Statcast-based WAR they hope can peel back the mystery of the metric using a data tree. WAR, for all its in-practice deficiencies, isn’t a particularly difficult concept to grasp: It places a value on measurable aspects of a player’s game and compares it to a theoretical Triple-A-quality replacement scrub.

BAM wants anyone interested to understand from whence its WAR came. So the idea is for a tree – one that allows a click or tap on the overall number, which then branches into components (offensive, defensive, baserunning, etc.) that show his overall value in each. From there comes a breakdown of more subcategories, and subs of subs, and on until piecing together WAR isn’t so daunting.

They’re also toying with the idea of an alternative presentation for their WAR. Even though the current one correlates quite strongly with overall victories in a season when adding up individual WAR contributions from each team, BAM’s audience is different than the B-R/FanGraphs niche. BAM could, for example, judge players on a 1-to-100 scale using the same criteria as another would for WAR.

“There’s an argument to be made for putting out an extra scale,” Petriello said.

“What will make our version of WAR intriguing,” Willman said, “is the way we’re going to make it accessible.”

Not just with WAR, Tango said, but all of Statcast: “We’re in the third inning.”

The first and second have been voluminous. Last year, Statcast tracked 1,435,241 pitches, followed 328,405 balls in play and spit out 53,380,301 metrics – a fraction of its capabilities. Statcast cameras track players at 30 frames per second and assign each an X/Y coordinate relative to his place on the field. On a day with a full slate of games, the system produces 21 million X/Y coordinates for player positioning alone. Over the course of a full season, that’s 4 billion data points.

When asked why they created Statcast, BAM CEO Bob Bowman said it was “our Six Million Dollar Man theory, which is that if we can do this, we should.” They’ve done it, and they could be on the cusp of something revolutionary. Statcast isn’t here just to help the world understand the game better.

Story continues