Quite the opposite, in sports a win is a win and the rest matters only as a tiebreaker, you'll start the next game from 0:0 anyway; however, in a war every little detail absolutely matters, if you could have won with a bit less casualties, or a day earlier, or with more devastation to your enemy before the next battle, or with less atrocities to your enemy making easier to reconcile afterwards - all of that could have been a meaningful improvement over a simple win.

As Clausewitz stated, war is the continuation of politics by other means. Whether an outcome should be considered a "win" isn't decided by military factors (e.g. manpower lost or who flees the battlefield) but rather by the political outcomes, how much the battle helped to achieve the political goals.

>Quite the opposite, in sports a win is a win and the rest matters only as a tiebreaker, you'll start the next game from 0:0 anyway

If you're in a baseball game starting a series and your starting pitcher went 8 innings while the opponent went 4 (below average) you will have the upper hand in the rest of the series. The opponent will work his bullpen more and potentially his players having to rely on their offense heavily as the bullpen exhausts. Getting starting pitch counts high to exhaust or to exhaust a bullpen is a known strategy in baseball and it carries over multiple games. It's not a simple "you'll start the next game from 0:0 anyway".

You can deal an incredible amount of damage to an opposing team by winning a game by one run (especially extra innings) and have the upper hand the rest of the series. You'll actually see managers put in position players to not kill their bullpen if they are losing a game by a significant amount (9+ runs). The original comment actually has the opposite damage effect in baseball.

The "a win is a win" comment is in the context of WAR which is what we're talking about. As the season ends and approaches 162 games WAR is a good (but not perfect) metric on measuring a player's worth and amortizing situations like the one above across a season.

This is incorrect:

"is in the context of WAR which is what we're talking about"

From the context, you mean Wins Above Replacement, and the point of my original comment is that this technique should not be applied to war. It gives distorted results.

As I pointed out, Hannibal's record would end up getting under-weighted, if you only look at wins. In war, it matters how much you win by.

Another example, Germany would have had (even more) difficulty fighting a two front war, in World War I, if the Battle of Tannenberg had been less decisive. Merely winning that battle, by a small margin, would have meant a much faster German loss of the war.

What I’m saying is your original comparison to basketball and points makes no sense for damage inflicted and WAR.