Following up on DJL44’s recent post on the best Twins of all time, I thought I’d share a similar list I’d created taking a similar, but slightly different approach.  Rankings are after the jump. 

I was inspired by Jay Jaffe’s fabulous JAWS system (JAWS=Jaffe WArp Score, here’s his latest article: http://baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=10070), which evaluates ballplayers’ hall-of-fame merits by adding the sum of their career WARP score to their WARP score for their 7 peak years.  This way a player gets points for having a long, productive career, but then effectively gets double points for their most dominant years.  I suppose it’s a touch arbitrary, but at the same time there is just something that feels exactly right about it to me.  Anyone familiar with the ins and outs of Bert Blyleven’s hall-of-fame case has probably run into JAWS.

So I created a similar measure for the best Twins of all time.  Of course, players only get credit for production they contributed as Twins.  (And no, I’m sorry, time as a Washington Senator doesn’t count.)  For scoring, I used the average of WAR and WARP3 as a rough way of balancing out those systems’ respective strengths and weaknesses.  And since careers with a single team are generally shorter than baseball careers in general, I used a peak of 5 years instead of 7.  Again, sort of arbitrary, but it feels about right to me.

Oh, and I called it TWRPS, for Twins WAR/WARP Score.  (I know, I should have come up with some way to call it GRTTY or SCRPY or PUNTO or something.) 

Like JAWS, I thought TWRPS would be a nice way to evaluate Twins worthy of the Twins Hall of Fame.  I’d be interested to hear what the TwinkieTowners think about the most over- and under-appreciated Twins.  Also fun is to look at who on the current Twins has a shot at the Twins Hall or of surpassing some of the best Twins of all time.  (Mauer vs. Carew?  Morneau vs. Hrbek?)

It was all very educational for me.  (Really, Roy Smalley was good?)  I followed the Twins 87 and 91 World Series teams as a young, somewhat fickle Twins fan, but otherwise didn’t tune in for much Twins action until the mid 00s.  I’d be curious to know what some of the Twins old-timers feel about the rankings.

In addition to the total TWRPS score, I added columns for years as a Twin, major awards the players accumulated as a Twin, hall-of-fame status, and separate columns for career and peak WAR/WARP3 score.