During the game on Wednesday night Brian Anderson and Dewayne Staats started discussing Blake Snell’s season and where he ranked by WAR and there being different WAR calculations.
Anderson and Staats admitted they were unaware of the differences and how they are calculated. This is ok and something that many people don’t understand including some who throw around the numbers on a daily basis.
The three most commonly used WAR are provided by Fangraphs (fWAR), Baseball Reference (bWAR), and Baseball Prospectus (WARP).
For position players there usually isn’t a wide gap between the three metrics, because the offensive contributions of players are similar, although they use different defensive metrics.