Modern Stats Show Bonds, Mays Among 5 Most Valuable MLB Players Ever
SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) - The Bay Area is the epicenter of the sabermetrics boom, thanks largely to the Billy Beane 'Moneyball' movement in Oakland. However, the one of the most popular stats in modern baseball - Wins Above Replacement - suggests that two of the all-time greats played across the bay in San Francisco.
CBS Sports baseball writer Matt Snyder applied the measurement - commonly known as WAR - to the game's all-time greats and found, among position players, that only Yankees great Babe Ruth provided more value to his team than Barry Bonds and Willie Mays gave their teams. Essentially, WAR combines fielding, hitting and baserunning statistics to determine how many more games a team won because of that player relative to an average player who could have replaced them. As Snyder points out, this measurement is not standardized, and has some critics as a result.
Still, using two different tabulations, Snyder determined that Bonds provided the Giants and his prior team, the Pirates, a combined 162 or 164 additional wins over the course of his career. That's just a shade behind the 168.4 Ruth provided during his days as a player. His number jumps to 183 if you count years as a pitcher in Boston.
Mays provided 150 or so wins, just ahead of Hall of Famers Ty Cobb, Hank Aaron and Honus Wagner.
When pitchers are added to the ranking, greats Cy Young and Walter Johnson actually push Bonds and Mays down to third and fourth overall.
The complete rankings (and a better explanation of WAR) are available from CBS Sports.