Saber Bomb: Ranking The Top 50 MLB Players

Saber Bombs are MLB FanHouse's introduction to sabermetrics, those new and sometimes unwieldy metrics that are changing the way we think about baseball. Each post highlights a specific stat, player, team or media member either embodying that understanding, or missing the boat completely.

Over at Sports Illustrated today, Nate Silver of Baseball Prospectus fame dropped their top 50 MLB MVPs. Essentially, they were seeking to answer the question: "If you were building a team from scratch, which players would you want to build your team around?"

Here's some of the method to their madness:

These rankings take advantage of several proprietary Baseball Prospectus tools, including our PECOTA projection system, which produces five-year projections for each player based on his historical comparables. Brian McCann could be the next Johnny Bench, for example -- or he could be the next Dave Nilsson. However, we are by no means slave to the numbers, as this sort of list necessarily requires us to lean heavily on our instincts and scouting impressions.

Albert Pujols ranks No. 1 on the list. Some other notables: Dice-K is No. 19, Ryan Zimmerman is a surprisingly high No. 11 and A-Rod a surprising low No. 10. (Although, Silver has a good explanation as to why A-Rod ranks there.)

I suggest you check the list out if you get a chance. If you don't, BP will rank you last on its "Top One Million Cool People List." And, I'm telling you, that's not something you want on your resumé. It's a real career killer.