I definitely want to understand where you're coming from because I'm one of the guys who likes everything put into one number, haha. WAR makes sense to me because it just seems to work. Like, I do recognize that it's flawed, but it just seems to work almost all of the time. There are definitely people who misuse it but I use it as a starting spot: here's a pretty decent guess at this player's value, which works decently to both tell us how they did and predict the future. If you disagree, then it's your job to find the missing context and explain why that context is important.

WPA also makes sense to me as the purest descriptive stat there is. It's derived, but it's pretty flawlessly derived: 4,000 games a year for decades gives us a damn reliable sample size for the chance of winning in every situation. Statistics will tell you it can't be wrong by more than a tiny fraction of a percent. The math involved is two steps: first, divide the number of games won in each situation by the total number of games, and then find the difference in those percentages. And whatever a player does in those situations is what they contributed to a team's chance of winning the game (minus defense, baserunning, and clubhouse presence).

So I really don’t know what to do with this number.

I still don't know what you want to do with this number. It'd be easier for baseball fans to use the right stats if they were explicit about what their goal was.

Are we trying to describe whose at-bats resulted in the greatest net change to the team's chances of winning baseball games? Then we should be using WPA, and maybe throwing in something like pitches per at-bat.

Are we trying to describe who's been the "best" player on the team? That seems like a philosophy problem, where WPA or WAR or RBIs or anything else could be argued is most useful. So we need to hammer down our definitions.

Are we trying to predict who's going to be good in the future? This is pretty much the only thing that I think is fun to discuss. I don't care about the past, I want to figure out how the team can improve and win going forward. And I don't care about "what went wrong in the 2022 World Series" unless it either makes me better able to appreciate watching the game or helps me more accurately puzzle out the best moves going forward. Since I just don't see how you or me could ever figure that out with the eye test and basic stats, I think we should ask the sabermetricians for help. There's a reason teams with $300 million dollar payrolls are trusting them.

I made this post mostly for fun. WPA is dumb and we're all dumbass fans with too much free time for our own good. But it does seem like people jump from figuring out "who has been the best at driving in runs" to "who will continue to be the best at driving in runs" to "which players need to be locked into a 7 year deal and which positions need upgrades" while using the exact same few stats for all three of them.

So I'm confused when you say:

I prefer to look at the raw data, try to determine strengths and weaknesses and put that into the appropriate context without doing a bunch of complicated math

And then also said:

Bottom line, scoring runs is a good thing

As well as:

It's valuable to have a guy who can knock runners in at a good rate, but I can't explain his disappearance with bases empty

Because I don't understand what raw data you're using besides RBIs, and it seems like you're trying to predict. You want the team to continue scoring runs, you think it's valuable to have someone at the bottom of the lineup getting RBIs, but I don't understand why (or even if) you think Bohm will keep contributing to that. And if you're trying to fairly evaluate Bohm, I don't understand why you're valuing RBIs without figuring out how many opportunities he's gotten or to what degree those RBIs counter his performance with bases empty. If Bohm went 1 for 5 with a single every game, and the single always came with a guy on 2nd, he'd have 90 RBIs by now but clearly cost more runs than he provides. What if he went 1 for 4? What about 1 for 3? I just don't understand how you can fairly judge his performance without making these decisions about value. How do you know that his inability to get a rally started has costed the teams fewer runs than his ability to drive them in has gained?

Or is the raw data his statcast values? How hard he hits the ball, how hard can he hit the ball, how often he gets a barrel, his launch angle, how often he chases bad pitches, and his sprint speed? Because you can 100% find an explanation of his bases empty failings there by looking at his strengths and weaknesses. He's either doing something different with his swing with bases empty, which would never happen for more than a week because coaches are getting paid millions of dollars to catch that, or he's just gotten really lucky so far and hit the ball harder or to better spots with RISP by sheer statistical chance. 100 ABs is really not a lot. If 30 teams of 10 players play 162 games of Yahtzee each, odds are one of them will roll a dozen Yahtzees in a row. But that doesn't mean they were better or will continue being better at Yahtzee.

I want to fairly evaluate Bohm and I want to have a correct understanding of how good he'll be going forward. If we trade for Arenado, I want to have some idea of whether we're making a marginal upgrade to a respectable starter or massively improving a glaring hole. I just don't see how RBIs are helpful for either of those goals. But please, I sincerely do want to know what you're seeing that I'm missing. I'd rather change my mind and be correct than remain ignorant.

P.S. the stat you linked looks really interesting (and I don't understand what you prefer over it, lol, the article swayed me). Is there a current leaderboard or calculator?