WAR. What is it good for in baseball?

Wins above replacement — or WAR — is an attempt to summarize a player’s contributions to his team, taking into account the player’s offense, defense and base running.

As FanGraphs puts it, “WAR offers an estimate to answer the question, ‘If this player got injured and their team had to replace them with a freely available minor leaguer, how much value would the team be losing?’ This value is expressed in a wins format, so we could say that Player X is worth 6.3 wins to their team while Player Y is only worth 3.5 wins, which means it is highly likely that Player X has been more valuable than Player Y.”

With that in mind, who are the greatest position players of all time, according to WAR?

1. Barry Bonds, 162.8

2. Babe Ruth, 162.1

3. Willie Mays, 156.4

4. Hank Aaron, 143.0

5. Stan Musial, 128.2

6. Rogers Hornsby, 127.0

7. Ted Williams, 123.1

8. Alex Rodriguez, 117.8

9. Lou Gehrig, 112.4

10. Rickey Henderson, 111.1

11. Mickey Mantle, 110.3

12. Mel Ott, 107.8

13. Frank Robinson, 107.3

14. Mike Schmidt, 106.8

15. Joe Morgan, 100.6

And the greatest pitchers

1. Cy Young, 170.0

2. Walter Johnson, 152.6

3. Roger Clemens, 139.0

4. Grover Cleveland Alexander, 117.1

5. Kid Nichols, 116.6

6. Lefty Grove, 112.5

7. Tom Seaver, 106.3

8. Greg Maddux, 104.9

9. Randy Johnson, 103.6

10. Christy Mathewson, 97.7

11. Phil Niekro, 97.2

12. Bert Blyleven, 96.6

13. Gaylord Perry, 93.4

14. Warren Spahn, 92.6

15. Tim Keefe, 88.8