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Wilfredo Lee/Associated Press

What Were the Requirements for Inclusion?

The first step to putting this project together was deciding where to draw the line for inclusion. After all, it wouldn't be fair to call a player who only spent one or two seasons with a team the best hitter in that franchise's history.

So I asked myself a simple question: Which all-time great hitter spent the shortest amount of time with a team but still played there long enough to be historically associated with that team?

My immediate answer: Frank Robinson with the Baltimore Orioles.

Robinson spent six seasons and tallied 3,492 plate appearances with Baltimore. So there's our requirement for inclusion: 3,492 plate appearances.

What is Off162?

This is important, so pay attention.

Rather than taking a subjective approach to this list, I decided to attack it from a statistical standpoint. But what statistic best tells the story of a player's isolated offensive contributions in his era and deals with different sample sizes?

The answer proved to be a spin on the "Offense" value metric at FanGraphs, which is defined as follows:

"Offense (Off) is a statistic that combines a position player's total context-neutral value at the plate and on the bases. Off is a combination of our park adjusted batting runs above average and our base running runs above average and credits a player for the quality and quantity of their total offensive performance during a given period of time."

It's a great gauge of overall offensive value, but since it's a cumulative stat, the next item on the to-do list was to find a way to break it down further to allow for comparing players who spent different lengths of time with a team.

That part was pretty easy. We simply divided a player's Off by the number of games he played with the team to give us his Off per game and then multiplied that by 162 to put it into a full-season context.