SEATTLE, USA: Amid a sea of legs from teammates, Seattle Mariners wide receiver Dan Wilson displays Barry Bonds’ foul ball he caught sliding down the Seattle dugout step during of the third inning against the San Francisco Giants in Seattle WA, June 11, 1999. Seattle won 7-3. AFP PHOTO Dan Levine (Photo credit should read DAN LEVINE/AFP via Getty Images)
Without any baseball activity, we all have a bit more free time. Sure, we can chat with Baseball America about their prospect rankings, how they got it right (#1 farm system overall) and some wrong (Kirby not in the top 100) . We can also harass MLB Pipeline to get theirs out. You can skim through MLB trade rumors all you want…but not much active is happening. So what should Mariners fans do in the meantime?
Well… how about pulling every season of Mariners history from Fangraphs, adjusting the players to fit in one position (or UTIL if they really were), everything combine and take a look at where players line up WAR wise throughout the history of the Mariners franchise.
Yeah, that’s what I went ahead and did. It took a while, but I’m glad I have this document now, because it’s so much fun to watch. Especially when you see random names there that you completely forgot about.
So I will go through and watch the top players at each position based on FanGraphs WAR. I usually use Baseball-Reference, but Fangraphs makes it easy to extract franchise numbers. I’ll also be using WRC+, which stands for Weighted Runs Created, which you can get a solid explanation of from the Fangraphs themselves.
I thought about starting with the pitchers since they are “1” on the scorecard, but moved them to the end so I could save the best for last. We’ll go around the rest of the field in scorecard order, which means we start with the receivers.
There was a good fight for 5th place, and I thought it was interesting that Omar Narvaez almost got there. Even though he didn’t stay in Seattle very long, he still had an fWAR of 1.9. There are guys from the old days, like Bob Kearney, Bob Stinson and Tom Lampkin, but the Mariners just haven’t had that many great receivers in their history. So let’s jump in and see who takes the #5 spot.
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