A while ago I wrote a little Python code that used career data from Baseball-Reference Play Index (the best $36/year a number-loving baseball fan can spend) to answer the question: given a pair of teams, which player contributed the most to both teams? My metric for this is
(WAR for team 1 * WAR for team 2)
in order to privilege players who balanced their contributions to both teams.
So who was the greatest Royal/Met? In retrospect, this should have been obvious. How many of the top 5 can you guess?
- Carlos Beltran (777.1)
- Bret Saberhagen (473.3)
- David Cone (271.1)
- Kevin Appier (165.6)
- Kevin McReynolds (29.8)
- Rick Reed (24.8)
- Gregg Jefferies (13.4)
According to b-ref, there are actually only 24 players in major league history who have played for both the Royals and the Mets. If anybody can name 5 not on this list I’ll be truly impressed.
Quomodocumque 
One is Jose Lima. But I looked it up yesterday.
Reblogged this on Stats in the Wild.
[…] question. Which player in baseball history was the best combined Cub/Indian? My methodology, as it was last year, is to draw the top 200 position players and pitchers from each team by Wins Above Replacement, […]