A Career with One Club, Retiring with Another

In the comments of my post from earlier today, reader Mike1L asked about the best players who played with one franchise for their entire careers, but finished up with a new team.  While it would be very time consuming to create another team-by-team list, we can easily create a list of career leaders. Here are the players with with highest WAR that played for a single team for every season  but the last season of their careers.



First the position players: (For complete stats and an expanded list, click here.)

Rk	Player	WAR/pos	Tm
1	Ron Santo	66.4	CHC-CHW
2	Yogi Berra	61.9	NYY-NYM
3	Dwight Evans	61.8	BOS-BAL
4	Harmon Killebrew	61.1	WSH-MIN-KCR
5	Zack Wheat	57.8	BRO-PHA
6	Hank Greenberg	56.8	DET-PIT
7	Sam Rice	51.1	WSH-CLE
8	Gabby Hartnett	50.3	CHC-NYG
9	Ed McKean	40.0	CLE-CLV-STL
10	Tommy Holmes	32.6	BSN-BRO
11	Mark Belanger	32.5	BAL-LAD
12	John Valentin	30.9	BOS-NYM

Provided by Baseball-Reference.com: View Play Index Tool Used
Generated 12/13/2011.

Here are the pitching leaders:

Rk	Player	WAR	Tm
1	Warren Spahn	93.4	BSN-MLN-NYM-SFG
2	Christy Mathewson	87.7	NYG-CIN
3	John Smoltz	63.9	ATL-BOS-STL
4	Ed Walsh	54.8	CHW-BSN
5	Bob Friend	48.9	PIT-NYY-NYM
6	Lefty Gomez	43.0	NYY-WSH
7	Noodles Hahn	39.6	CIN-NYY
8	Harry Brecheen	38.8	STL-SLB
9	Larry Dierker	38.1	HOU-STL
10	Chris Short	35.5	PHI-MIL
11	Mark Gubicza	34.8	KCR-ANA
12	Jim Maloney	34.7	CIN-CAL
13	Guy Hecker	30.7	LOU-PIT

Provided by Baseball-Reference.com: View Play Index Tool Used
Generated 12/13/2011.

These lists range from very good players to superstars, but even the lower players on these lists are easily associated with their main clubs. (When you say Noodles, I say Cincinnati.) It's fun to try to remember where they finished their careers.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that I only included retired players for obvious reasons.