After a long delay, my countdown of the best players at each position in Atlanta Braves Franchise history is back with Dale Murphy.
For those joining the Atlanta Braves Franchise’s best player series late, I began by working my way around positions using custom searches on Fangraphs and building a spreadsheet that included weighted and plus-stats.
- wOBA – if you care about determining how well a player contributes to run-scoring, wOBA is a more accurate representation of that contribution than OPS
- wRC+ – If you want a rate statistic for hitters that weights each offensive action and controls for league and park effects, wRC+ is for you.
- AVG+
- OBP+
- SLG+
- Rbaser – The number of runs better or worse than the average player for all baserunning events; SB, CS, PB, WP, Defensive indifference
I looked at every player in terms of his contribution to the franchise, impact on the team at the time, and its overall success. If you missed some of the posts, I’ve provided links.
I started with the infield, listing my top five at each position.
When I reached the outfield, I found that players moved around too much to decide who went where, and settled on a top ten list of all outfielders. Here are links to the list so far.
- 10 – Sid Gordon
- 9 – Rico Carty
- 8 – Billy Hamilton
- 7 – Davis Justice
- 6 – Hugh Duffy
- 5 – Tommy Holmes
- 4 – Wally Berger
Coming in at number three on the list is an all-time Atlanta Braves favorite, Dale Murphy, Most fans know some of Murphy’s story, but it’s worth retelling. I was in England for all of Murph’s career with Atlanta, so I’m going to rely for details on multiple posts on the SABR website. I’ll identify them as I go, but much of the data overlaps between posts. I encourage you to take the time to read all of them