Colorado Rockies Countdown: Top Five First Basemen

25 years of Major League baseball in the Rocky Mountains is nearly upon us. In celebration, Rox Pile is taking a journey through Colorado Rockies history and taking a look at the best players at every position. Our next stop? First base.

In our last countdown, we featured the Rockies’ greatest backstops, which left something to be desired to say in the least. Evaluating the club’s first basemen made for a much more aesthetically pleasing countdown. Even a fair weather fan can probably guess who tops our list. Heck, he or she might even be able to nail the top two spots, but the other three spots are a crapshoot.

To compile our rankings, we used Fangraphs‘ list for career Wins Above Replacement (fWAR), which serves as a great guideline for positional players. The fWAR statistic allows one to evaluate a player’s contribution over time with a specific team. Therefore, fWAR allows us to completely negate what a player has done in their career outside of the Centennial State.

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Also as a general rule, this list consists of players that have at least 500 plate appearances with the club. The 500 PA rule approximates to about 1.5 years of service time and gives a large enough sample size for accurate evaluation. As an added stipulation, the players on our list needed to have played a majority of their innings in the field at the position being evaluated.

The “majority rule” keeps guys like Jerald Clark (1993, fWAR 1.3), and John Vander Wal (1994-1998, fWAR 1.8) off of our list. Although both played first base, Clark and Vander Wal played a majority of their innings in the outfield and at first, so it wouldn’t be fair to call them simply first basemen.

Without further ado, here is Rox Pile’s list of the top five first basemen to ever sport purple pinstripes. Let us know in the comments section what you think!

Next: Show Me The Rankings!