Phillies History: Top Five Seasons by a Phillie According to WAR

The advent of wins above replacement allow us to take a look back on the best seasons for any player in a Phillies uniform. We’ll look at the best five seasons in Phillies history according to WAR.

The Phillies have played 131 seasons in their long, storied history. Numerous players have come and gone. Some were great; many were not.

For a majority of baseball’s life, there was never one, end-all, be-all statistic that could wrap up how good a player was in one nice little package. Batting average and OPS for hitters and ERA and win-loss records for pitchers were the main stats used to determine a player’s effectiveness. Even then, comparing how valuable a pitcher was compared to a hitter was near-impossible to do because there was no stat that could evenly compare the two.

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• Phillies History on August 23: Eric Bruntlett records historic triple play
• Remembering Vin Scully: Dodgers voice’s first game was against Phillies
• Phillies in hot water for inviting Pete Rose to 1980 World Series celebration

Wins above replacement has slowly but surely started to take over the baseball world in the last several years. Alex Remington of Yahoo!’s Big League Stew explains that WAR is “a single number that attempts to quantify a player’s worth by looking at his offense, defense (or pitching), defensive position, and the context of the year and league.” In many ways, it has done just that, helping to define the “valuable” in “Most Valuable Player”.

Fangraphs, with their extensive database of baseball statistics, has retroactively calculated the WAR for nearly every season in MLB history. I will use their version of WAR in these rankings.