Your Team's Worst Best Player, Part III: The East

By Bill

So here it is: the final day of the week, and the final installment of my series looking at the worst players (by career WAR) to be the best player each franchise has ever had at the position. I did the west divisions on Monday, and the central on Wednesday, so today, of course, we're tackling the East.

Quick reminders: I'm using Fangraphs' WAR grid to come up with these, and I'm adding 20% to catchers' WAR to avoid having the list be completely dominated by catchers. Here goes:

NL East
Braves: second base, Bobby Lowe (21 WAR)
At every other position, the Braves have a player who put up at least 10 WAR more than Lowe, who played for the Boston Beaneaters from 1890-1900 and never had more than 2.8 WAR in a season. The Braves have had decent second basemen for very short periods (Marcus Giles for a couple years, Davey Johnson for three of 'em, Martin Prado for the last couple, Eddie Stanky for two) and bad second basemen for long periods (Mark Lemke, Glenn Hubbard). They've never had a good one who stayed around, and Dan Uggla probably doesn't figure to be the first.

Your Team's Worst Best Player, Part II: The Central

By Bill

Time to continue my look at each franchise's worst position (at least at the top) -- in other words, the player from each franchise who would be the "weak link" of that franchise's all-time lineup -- using Fangraphs' WAR Grids. Part I, covering the AL and NL West, is here, along with a fuller explanation of the rules and methods. This time, I'll just dive on in:

NL Central
Cubs: center field, Hack Wilson (37 WAR)
He was only a Cub for six years, but the sad thing is that those six years pretty much made his entire career (bracketed by about 9 WAR in parts of seven seasons with the Dodgers, Giants and Phillies), and sadder enen than that is that for those six years, he found himself in the Hall of Fame. He was very good in five of his six Cubs years, but that's just not nearly enough. He's in, of course, because of the year he had in the offense-crazy 1930 season, batting .356 with 56 homers and a record 191 RBI.

Your Team's Worst Best Player, Part I: The West

By Bill

Have you seen FanGraphs' WAR Grid? It's a fascinating and still fairly recent creation that has all sorts of interesting uses. One thing it can do (ignoring the awesome horizontal depictions of WAR by seasonal age, which is really the whole point) is easily give you WAR leaderboards that can be limited by team, position, time period, or any combination of the three.

So I was looking through the positional grids by team. Here's the list of Braves right fielders, for instance. And I started to look around and determine what each team's weakest position is -- of the players atop the WAR list at each position for the franchise's entire history, who accumulated the fewest with the team?

And having thought something like that, of course, I'm required to write it up. So I'll cover the whole league this week, in three parts: the AL and NL West today, the Central on Wednesday, and the East on Friday. The idea is that for many of these teams, you'll look and think "they've been around for [number] years and they've seriously never had a better [position] than [forgettable player]??!" Something like that.

A couple things: first, catchers get much less opportunity to accumulate any stat, including WAR, than any other player. I'm adding 20% to all catchers' WARs, to avoid having it become a "Your Team's Best Catcher" list. Second, the WAR Grid puts the same player in multiple positions; Darin Erstad, for example, shows up as both the Angels' top 1B and top CF. If that happens, I count only his primary position with the team, and use the #2 player at the secondary position (I'd be surprised if this actually makes a difference).

All that said, here we go with the western teams: