Poster child for the problems with WAR

These are Adam Dunn's 2004-2010 seasons.  While I think that the 2004 season is his best and 2006 was his worst in this time period**, he was generally a model of consistency.  Unfortunately, while WAR and the human eye agree about his 2004 season, I can't wrap my head around the idea that 2009 was his worst NL season and 2010 was his third best.

GP	AB	H	2B	3B	HR	BB	SO	SB	CS	AVG	OBP	SLG	OPS	WAR
161	568	151	34	0	46	108	195	6	1	0.266	0.388	0.569	0.957	4.4
160	543	134	35	2	40	114	168	4	2	0.247	0.387	0.54	0.927	2.6
160	561	131	24	0	40	112	194	7	0	0.234	0.365	0.49	0.855	0.1
152	522	138	27	2	40	101	165	9	2	0.264	0.386	0.554	0.94	1.2
158	517	122	23	0	40	122	164	2	1	0.236	0.386	0.513	0.899	0.6
159	546	146	29	0	38	116	177	0	1	0.267	0.398	0.529	0.927	-0.6
158	558	145	36	2	38	77	199	0	1	0.26	0.356	0.536	0.892	2.2

Looking at Dunn's Player Value -- Batters table on baseball-reference.com, the problem is the vagaries of DWAR.  The OWAR rankings of his seasons fairly closely follow OPS (I'm assuming any slight differences are due to the fact that what constitutes a "good" OPS changed slightly from season to season), and thus the wild variation in DWAR, which is due more to the small-sample nature of defensive statistics than any actual change in performance, dominates the year-to-year differences in WAR.

OWAR	DWAR
4.8	-1.2
4	-2.3
1.9	-2.4
3.7	-3.2
3	-3.2
3.7	-5.2
3.4	-2.1

While WAR isn't simply OWAR + DWAR, DWAR clearly plays an important role in devaluing WAR as an estimate of player worth in a given year, and I'd rather look at OWAR.  But if OWAR closely follows OPS over the course of a generation of players, then I'd rather simply look at OPS, which is more intuitive and immediately evident from the seasonal stats.

** I want to be absolutely, positively clear that we're talking about 2004-2010, and not looking at his 2011 season, which was arguably the worst all-time.