San Diego Padres all-time best starting lineup based on WAR

The San Diego Padres may have only recently gotten a lot of national attention, but they have a long and storied history of having really talented players on their roster. Sure, they don't have the catalog of players to look through that teams like the Yankees and Red Sox do, but there has been a lot of talent in that locker room over the years.

There are no shortage of arguments over what the best Padres team of all time would look like as a result. Some fans just have their personal favorites they would want to fold in while others would look at peak seasons of all-time, etc. There are a lot of ways to do this sort of thing and there are no "wrong answers" here unless your team doesn't have Tony Gwynn on it.

Here is the San Diego's all-time best lineup based on WAR

However, we decided to take a look at an all-time Padres lineup based solely on career bWAR. For the record, we would take the Padres' current 2023 lineup over this one any day. The criteria for a player being eligible at each position is that they had to play at least 25% of their time with the Padres playing at said position to add some variety to the list and to prevent weird "this guy played one game at catcher so he is our catcher" issues.

This list is also based on the bWAR they accumulated with the Padres, so guys like Ozzie Smith won't be making an appearance here along with other guys who made cameo appearances with the team. We also chose bWAR because the index for this sort of thing is easy to navigate and not a value judgment regarding bWAR vs. fWAR.

Lets take a look at the Padres all-time best lineup by WAR listed by position.