Colorado Rockies Countdown: Top Five Shortstops

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? Shortstop.

In our last countdown, we featured the Colorado Rockies’ greatest third basemen, which featured some of the more offensively talented Rockies to ever sport the uniform. Moving over to short, we see the offensive production drop off quite a bit (especially in the power department); which is understandable considering shortstop is traditionally considered a defense-first position. Before the arrival of Cal Ripken Jr., shortstops were generally small and considered offensive liabilities, more like Ozzie Smith. The Rockies are no different as only one player in club history has posted a positive offense runs above average score.

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. Interesting enough, current Rockies shortstop Trevor Story has based an fWAR of 1.7, which would have been good enough for fourth on our list, but because of the PA limit, he was left out of our evaluation.

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

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