Atlanta Braves: All-time WAR leaders

With Opening Day inching closer, let’s look at some of the all-time greats that have played for the Atlanta Braves and how each of them rank throughout the franchise’s history, starting with WAR.

Many of us are certainly aware of the likes of Aaron, Jones, Smoltz and many more household names that have been stitched on the back of an Atlanta Braves uniform. All of these players have contributed to this world-class organization.

It can be interesting to periodically re-familiarize yourself with your favorite teams’ WAR leaderboard, as it can give you a compelling perspective on just how good former players were, while also providing a tool to compare the players that are playing for the team now with those of a different era. Sometimes you will be surprised to see a few active players that are actually on pace to one day enter the ranks of these historic players.

The Stat

The growing popularity in advanced statistics and ever-so-complicated rate-type stats that help give fans and front offices a better idea of just how good a player is have taken Major League Baseball by storm over the years. With this current trend the most popular stat of them all was born, WAR (wins-above-replacement).

It would take an entirely separate article to explain the guts of WAR, and I’m not even sure I could properly explain it and its importance. In summary, WAR is unique and very helpful because it takes a player’s entire overall stat sheet and does a lot of fancy formulating to create a nice and even single number.

In terms of WAR, any number above zero is translated as “above replacement-level”. This means exactly what it sounds like – better than a bench player or a player down in Triple-A.

Fangraphs does come job of explaining:

"Wins Above Replacement (WAR) is an attempt by the sabermetric baseball community to summarize a player’s total contributions to their team in one statistic."

Baseball has come a long way since the days of gloating over a high batting average and high RBI totals. Baseball stats are a very different animal now.

The modern-day front office is a lot more knowledgeable about just how good their players are. Wins-above-replacement, or WAR, provides general managers with a somewhat standardized way of formulating value for their players.

Teams are run more like a corporation or business, with a focus on assessing value and return on investments. This has done several things to the way a major league roster is put together, as nowadays there is more of an objective way to determine the real worth of a player’s stats.

The Braves made a statement and a commitment to analytics when they hired GM Alex Anthopoulos back in November of 2017.  Anthopoulos spent six seasons as the Toronto Blue Jays General Manager but spent two seasons employed by the analytically-inclined Los Angeles Dodgers.

In Los Angeles, Anthopoulos gained a lot of knowledge on how to structure a roster using advanced metrics as a tool. His experience with the Dodgers assisted him in making multiple savvy transactions when he arrived in Atlanta.

Since we now have this handy stat to determine just how great players are, let’s look at how our individual Atlanta Braves rank all-time regarding WAR totals.