San Francisco Giants: Top 10 Center Fielders in Franchise History

No. 7: Fred Snodgrass, 13.5 WAR

Snodgrass is our first Dead Ball Era player, bucking the trend of 19th century players. Snodgrass again was not a significant power threat (11 home runs in 9 career seasons), like many of his time. He did get on base at a high clip though, and was quite the base-stealer as well. Sometimes, stolen base numbers can be a little inflated when you look at 19th century ballplayers, as the stolen base statistic included going first to third, second to home, first to home, on plays as well.

The stat had been somewhat whittled down by the time Snodgrass came into the league, but the current version of stolen bases scoring and ruling didn’t come into effect until 1950. So his WAR might be slightly inflated because of that. As I get that out of the way, we take a look at Snodgrass’ numbers.

He stole 198 bases for the Giants, with his top year being 1911 where he stole a total of 51 bases (within that stat category at least). His career slash line is relatively impressive, but he is one of those curious cases of the slugging percentage being lower than his on base percentage. A career slash-line of .275/.367/.359/.725 is nice. How did he pull off such a high on-base percentage? A total of 386 career walks will definitely do that.

Overall, Snodgrass was the typical “dead-ball era” player. A lot of walks, a lot of stolen bases as a way to manufacture runs. Snodgrass had a very good career and easily has a rightful place on this list.