Colorado Rockies Countdown: Top Five Third 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? Third base.

In our last countdown, we featured the Colorado Rockies’ greatest second basemen, which is not a traditionally sexy offensive position, and although the club does have a unique combination of power and speed at the two bag, we are moving onto a much more offensively productive position in third base.

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 while not wearing the purple and black.

Also as a general rule, this list consists of players that have at least 500 plate appearances with the club. The 500 PA rule 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. In reference to third base, this ‘majority rule’ didn’t prevent anyone from making it into our rankings.

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

Next: Show Me The Rankings!