Background: I was looking at the WAR leaders for the last ten years on B-R.com and while it was no surprise that Albert Pujols was atop the leaderboard (83.8 WAR), it was a surprise just how far ahead he was from his next closest competitor, Alex Rodriguez (64.8 WAR). I was fooling around with some ways to chart this and quickly realized that I needed another metric to get to what I was looking for. So I took the top ten WAR for the last ten years and added OPS+, another balanced statistic that is good to use to compare across a range of years.
The left axis is the WAR and the bottom axis is the OPS+. The first number after the player’s name is their OPS+, followed by their WAR.
The size of each bubble corresponds to the WAR totals (though admittedly, using the OPS+ would have generated a bigger difference in the bubble sizes, something I noticed after the fact). Bonds’ “bubble” is by far and away the rightmost bubble due to his prodigious power and his WAR total would have rivaled Pujols’ had he played for the entire duration of this ten year slice. Bonds’ WAR over his last ten years, 1998-2007, was 77.7 (ARod was second at 76.2, for comparison’s sake).
Click chart to maximize.
* H/T to my man, Brad, for making this chart all the more legible.
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Jason Rosenberg is the founder and lead writer of the ESPN-affiliated SweetSpot Network site, It’s About The Money. You can follow him on Twitter and on Facebook.
