Fun With WAR

Today’s technology and knowledge provides us with so many amazing statistics to analyze baseball. These sabermetrics have greatly affected the game, some say for the better but some say for the worse… I will let you guys make your own choices on which side to take.

Fangraphs provides us with probably one of the most interesting sabermetrics, the WAR statistic. WAR stands for Wins Above Replacement and it shows the total value of a player. I’m not going to get into how they figure this out and where they get it from but it is a pretty amazing stat that is always interesting to see. It is a fun way to compare players all throughout history especially when Hall of Fame talks start up.

I decided to have some fun with the technology over at Fangraphs and put together some graphs comparing the Mariners top 4 players in a variety of hitting categories. Yes many of the players appear more than once but that shows who some of the top Mariners are in franchise history. The rankings are from mlb.com.The following graphs I used were based on the players Cumulative WAR by age.

First up are the players with the most hits in the Franchise.

1. Edgar Martinez: 2,247 (Green)
2. Ichiro Suzuki: 2,244 (Blue)
3. Ken Griffey JR: 1843 (Purple)
4. Jay Buhner: 1255 (Orange)

The top 4 highest averages with the organization:

1. Ichiro Suzuki: .331 (Purple)
2. Edgar Martinez: .312 (Green)
3. Alex Rodriguez: .309 (Orange)
4. Phil Bradley: .301 (Blue)

Most Homeruns:

1. Ken Griffey JR: 417 (Blue)
2. Edgar Martinez: 309 (Green)
3. Jay Buhner: 307 (Purple)
4. Alex Rodriguez: 189 (Orange)

Most RBI:

1. Edgar Martinez: 1261 (Blue)
2. Ken Griffey JR: 1216 (Purple)
3. Jay Buhner: 951 (Orange)
4. Alvin Davis: 667 (Green)