“WAR” stands for “Wins Above Replacement,” a statistic that measures a player’s worth to his team, as compared to freely available talent (like in Triple-A, for example).
It uses batting, baserunning, AND fielding to come up with a number that is supposed to correlate to wins. Therefore, the higher the number, the better. (I would love to be able to calculate this for the Valley League, but there. is. no. way. It’s far too complicated.) Per season, 8+ WAR would equal an MVP season, 5+ an All-Star season, 0-2 Sub, below 0 replacement level.
So, according to baseball-reference.com, here are the highest totals of WAR for former Valley Leaguers since the 2006 draft:
| 1 | Jason Kipnis | Covington ’06-7 | 20.1 |
| 2 | Dan Murphy | Luray ’05 | 17.1 |
| 3 | Jon Jay | Staunton ’04 | 12.0 |
| 4 | Yonder Alonso | Luray ’06 | 5.9 |
| 5 | Collin Cowgill | Covington ’05 | 4.3 |
| 6 | Cory Spangenberg | Winchester ’10 | 2.7 |
| 7 | Ryan Schimpf | Luray ’08 | 1.8 |
| 8 | Tommy La Stella | Haymarket ’09 | 0.7 |
| 9 | Joey Butler | New Market ’06 | 0.5 |
| 10 | Eddy Rodriguez | Luray ’06-07 | 0.2 |
| Mac Williamson | Harrisonburg ’11 | 0.2 |
Brett Gardner Watch: 30.3 career WAR- would be first!
Interesting that Murphy comes in 2nd- I would guess that this is because of his fielding and baserunning. One new name here- Eddy Rodriguez, who hit a home run in his very brief major league stint.
That finishes up the career major league totals. Coming up next, we’ll begin our season best totals for hitters!
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