A full list of 10+ WAR seasons across MLB since 2000

Though WAR may still be a relatively new metric in terms of baseball statistics, amassing 10 wins above replacement in a single season remains a gargantuan achievement that is far from a guarantee to happen every season.

If there’s one thing that sticks out to me when thinking about how much baseball has changed over the course of my 30-year lifetime, it would have to be the drastic rethinking of which statistics accurately depict a player’s performance and what matters to fans and front offices alike.

I’m old enough to grow up being taught that the most important stats in baseball were the ones that were always front-and-center – wins, ERA, walks and strikeouts for pitchers, while batting average, RBI and hits were paramount for position players.

Defense was also primarily an afterthought – surely taken advantage of if a player had natural ability, but not at all something that teams would be as vigilant as they are today about. Extremely poor fielders were routinely hidden in left field and first base, oftentimes negating whatever strength they would bring with the bat.

Thanks to the legacy of the 2002 “Moneyball” Oakland Athletics, advanced metrics, or sabermetrics (named after SABR, the Society of American Baseball Research) became commonplace in baseball, with one comprehensive statistic that evaluates a player’s overall value soaring above all within the following decade.

Despite there notably being two different ways to calculate the stat, Wins Above Replacement has become not only the preeminent way to evaluate today’s talent, it has also become the most important statistic to many writers who vote on the Baseball Hall of Fame ballot each year – with WAR oftentimes helping to shed new light on a player’s value that was perhaps obscured by the prevalence of counting stats.

The stat measures a given player’s total contribution to a team’s win total at the end of the season by comparing one’s performance to that of a “replacement-level” player – i.e. a generic AAAA-level player that is always available either within a team’s farm system or on the open market.

Since I’m using Baseball Reference’s WAR calculations, I’ll also reference their breakdown for the kind of value that corresponds with certain WAR totals. Reserve players typically are expected to amass between 0-2 WAR each season, while totals above 2 WAR are that of a usual starter.

Players who post 5 or more WAR are likely All-Stars who are either very solid all-around players or superstars on one side of the field, while a season of 8 or more WAR is enough to win an MVP in most seasons.

This makes cracking double-digits in WAR an incredibly impressive feat for a single-season – one that signals unfettered dominance throughout the course of MLB’s grueling six-month, 162-game campaign.

While most seasons of 10+ WAR occurred in the sport’s early days when pitchers pitched much, much more than they do today, there still have been a handful of double-digit WAR seasons since the turn of the century.

Since the 2000 season, there have been 13 total individual seasons that have seen a player reach at least 10 WAR – averaging out to an even rate of once every two years thus far.

Here’s a full list of the times a player has reached the milestone in the last 26 years – a list that still has yet to include Shohei Ohtani:

1. Barry Bonds, San Francisco Giants: 11.8 WAR, 2001
2. Barry Bonds, San Francisco Giants: 11.7 WAR, 2002
3. Pedro Martinez, Boston Red Sox: 11.7 WAR, 2000
4. Aaron Judge, New York Yankees: 10.9 WAR, 2024
5. Aaron Judge, New York Yankees: 10.8 WAR, 2022
6. Mookie Betts, Boston Red Sox: 10.7 WAR, 2018
7. Barry Bonds, San Francisco Giants: 10.6 WAR, 2004
8. Randy Johnson, Arizona Diamondbacks: 10.5 WAR, 2002
9. Mike Trout, Los Angeles Angels: 10.5 WAR, 2012
10. Zack Greinke, Kansas City Royals: 10.4 WAR, 2009
11. Alex Rodriguez, Seattle Mariners: 10.4 WAR, 2000
12. Mike Trout, Los Angeles Angels: 10.4 WAR, 2016
13. Sammy Sosa, Chicago Cubs: 10.2 WAR, 2001