W-L: 75-87 (5th place in NL Central)
Pythagorean W-L (pW-pL): 73-89
Payroll: $124.9 million (2nd in NL)
R/G: 4.23 (10th in NL)
ERA: 4.24 (13th in NL)
Defense Efficiency Ratio (DER): .679 (12th in NL)
Team MVPs: Geovany Soto, Carlos Marmol, Ryan Dempster
Team LVPs: Derrek Lee, Aramis Ramirez
Defensive Stars: Marlon Byrd, Alfonso Soriano, Derrek Lee
I started with a simple question: What team has had the best center fielders (or catchers, or shortstops) in its history? The following is my best answer to the question. See the first post in the series for a full explanation.
The best center fielders by team:
Lloyd Moseby, Devon White, Jose Cruz, Jr., Vernon Wells
Nothing spectacular here, but a lot of consistently good work.
I started with a simple question: What team has had the best left fielders (or catchers, or shortstops) in its history? The following is my best answer to the question. See the first post in the series for a full explanation.
Carl Crawford
I started with a simple question: What team has had the best third basemen (or catchers, or shortstops) in its history? The following is my best answer to the question. See the first post in the series for a full explanation.
Jimmy Austin, Harlond Clift, George Kell, Brooks Robinson, Doug DeCinces, Cal Ripken, Melvin Mora
I started with a simple question: What team has had the best first basemen (or catchers, or shortstops) in its history? The following is my best answer to the question. See first post for full explanation.
George McBride, Roger Peckinpaugh, Joe Cronin, Cecil Travis, Pete Runnels, Zoilo Versalles, Leo Cardenas, Roy Smalley, Greg Gagne, Cristian Guzman
I started with a simple question: What team has had the best first basemen (or catchers, or shortstops) in its history? The following is my best answer to the question. See Previous Post for full explanation.
Bobby Knoop, Sandy Alomar, Jerry Remy, Bobby Grich, Gary DiSarcina, Adam Kennedy, Howie Kendrick
The question I started with here was: Which team has had the best first basemen over its history? So, with the help of Baseball-Reference.com, I decided to try to answer that question.
First of all, two caveats in this “study.” One is that I wasn’t interested so much in a collection of names as a collective contribution. In other words, I’m not going to highly rank a team like the Mets that has had a lot of Hall-of-Famers – when they were past their prime. I’m more interested in production than name recognition.
Secondly, I decided to weigh my rankings to give some credit to expansion franchises. The Giants and Cardinals have a lot of great players in their histories, but that’s partly because they’ve been around for 100-plus seasons. So a franchise’s age is taken into account when looking at a list of players.
So who had the best first basemen of all time? Here’s my own personal Top 10, in reverse order. Note that the players listed under each team are just some of the highlights in team history.
