Anyone that has read and watched “Moneyball” knows that Peter Brand was really Paul DePodesta. One of the things he said is that teams shouldn’t be trying to buy players, but should be buying wins. In order to buy wins you have to buy runs. Obviously, that book was set in the early 2000s. Our level of understanding has grown a lot since then.
Back then, they couldn’t give a rip about defense and base running. What we know now is that all of those things work in concert to determine the overall value of a player. This stuff gets baked into WAR and while WAR is a good number overall, we sometimes don’t have a good grip of the components of it.