Yankees: 5 Players You’d Never Believe Led New York in WAR for a Full Season

The Yankees have a rich history, but these leaders in WAR for a full season will blow your mind.

When you go through the history of the New York Yankees and look through the list of WAR leaders for a full season, you find the usual suspects: Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Ron Guidry, Don Mattingly, Alex Rodriguez, Derek Jeter. No surprises there.

But dig deeper and you wouldn’t believe some of those who managed to lead the way for the Bombers for an entire campaign, regardless if they made the playoffs or not. We’d like to think at least a majority of these former Yankees who led the team in this category will surprise you.

We’d also bet you don’t know who at least one of these players are.

5. Elliott Maddox

The Yankees endured a brutal stretch from 1965-1975 in which they didn’t sniff the postseason. After losing back-to-back World Series in 1963 and 1964, they didn’t get back to the playoffs until 1976, which featured another loss in the Fall Classic. As you can imagine, over that 11-year stretch, there were a couple of top performers you don’t exactly remember all that well. Among them was Elliott Maddox, who played for New York from 1974-1976. In 1974, he led the Yanks in WAR with a 5.4 mark and finished eighth in the AL MVP voting after slashing .303/.395/.386 with 75 runs scored, 3 home runs and 45 RBI in 137 games. It was the only year in his 11 MLB seasons that he played in more than 130 games and he hit career marks in just about every major category. This roster had Thurman Munson, Graig Nettles, Bobby Murcer, Lou Piniella, Sparky Lyle and Mel Stottlemyre, so it wasn’t exactly a bunch of slouches Maddox outplayed.

3. Spud Chandler

The 1943 New York Yankees won the division with a 98-56 record and then defeated the Cardinals in the World Series to avenge their loss to St. Louis the year prior in the Fall Classic. However, the team was missing some notable names — such as Joe DiMaggio, Phil Rizzuto and Red Ruffing — with the United States entering World War II two years prior and a number of players enlisting in the military. So that paved the way for our guy Spud Chandler to log a career year. He won the MVP award (the only Yankee pitcher in history to do so) behind a 20-4 record, 1.64 ERA and 0.99 WHIP in 30 starts. He led the Yankees with a 7.3 WAR and led the league in wins, ERA, WHIP, ERA+, complete games (20!!!), shutouts (5!) and FIP. He twirled two complete games in the World Series — both wins — and allowed just one earned run on 17 hits and three walks. It was his age-35 season and his best by far, but did pitch admirably in his age-38 and -39 seasons before his career came to an end (he enlisted in the Army for almost the entirety of the two years following his MVP campaign). Most Yankee fans surely aren’t aware of the circumstances surrounding some of these 1940s teams.

2. Tommy Henrich

Things were back to normal later in the decade, which makes Tommy Henrich‘s accomplishment that much more impressive. The former Yankees outfielder led the team in WAR in 1947 (5.1) and helped the team win its first World Series since Chandler did so in ’43. Henrich was among those who enlisted in the Army and missed the WS triumph four years earlier. He was out of baseball from 1943-1945, but returned in 1946 and got back to his All-Star form in ’47, slashing .287/.372/.485 with 109 runs scored, a league-leading 13 triples, 16 homers and 98 RBI in 142 games. Henrich was a rock solid Yankee, logging five All-Star seasons and finishing sixth in the MVP voting twice. But what makes his performance so unique in ’47 was the fact he outperformed DiMaggio, Rizzuto, Snuffy Stirnweiss (who was coming off three consecutive tremendous campaigns), George McQuinn and Billy Johnson. Henrich continued his incredible play by hitting .323/.364/.484 with two runs scored, one homer and five RBI in the WS win over the Brooklyn Dodgers. That was one of his four championship victories with the Yankees and it was by far his biggest contribution — in his age-34 season!

1. Dellin Betances

Now a member of the New York Mets, Dellin Betances was among the most feared Yankees relievers for years, and managed to be the best of all for two of them. After a dominant 2014 in which he finished third in the Rookie of the Year voting, the New York City kid followed that up with an equally lights-out campaign in 2015. He went 6-4 with a 1.50 ERA, 1.01 WHIP, 131 strikeouts and nine saves in 74 games (84 innings). He led the team in WAR with a 3.9 mark, which is incredible considering he wasn’t even the closer — every year Mariano Rivera eclipsed 3.9 in WAR, he had at least 39 saves (with the exception of 1995, when he somehow pitched 107.2 innings in 61 games in relief). And this was a playoff team! The Yanks made the Wild Card Game, though infamously lost to Dallas Keuchel and the Houston Astros and Yankee Stadium. It wasn’t exactly the best Yankees roster, but we still had guys like Brian McCann, Mark Teixeira, Alex Rodriguez, Masahiro Tanaka and Andrew Miller leading the way. Betances was statistically more valuable than all of them given how he plowed through the competition each and every time he stepped on the mound. He held opponents to a .115 batting average with runners in scoring position; a .174 average in “late and close” situations; and a .181 average in “high leverage” situations. Let’s hope he bounces back in 2020 and returns to the Yankees in 2021…