The Giants and Pirates franchises are among the oldest in the majors. One link they have is Barry Bonds, who accumulated 50.1 Wins Above Replacement (“WAR”, baseball-reference version) for the Bucs and 112.3 WAR for San Francisco. That 50.1 WAR is not the highest career WAR total accumulated for a team that was not the player’s highest-WAR team. Some bigger numbers are after the jump

Among everyday players, Tris Speaker and Eddie Collins accumulated even more WAR for their “second-best” teams than Bonds did. Baseball-reference’s WAR formula gives Speaker 74.2 WAR for the Indians and 55.4 WAR for the Red Sox. Collins tops even Speaker and Bonds in this respect, with 66.6 WAR for the White Sox and 57.3 WAR for the Athletics.

As for pitching WAR, one guy shoots well past all the everyday players in terms of WAR for a team that was not the team for whom he had his most WAR, while a couple of other pitchers had very high pitcher WAR numbers in this category but not up to level of the “second best franchise” WAR numbers of Collins, Speaker and Bonds. Cy Young had 81.6 WAR for Cleveland in the 19th century NL and then 66.2 WAR for Boston in the then-new American League. He’d have been a great pitcher even if he’d achieved only one of those. Lefty Grove had 65.2 WAR for the Athletics and 44.7 WAR for the Red Sox. Grover Cleveland Alexander (will there someday be a pitcher named Ronald Reagan Havermeyer or William Jefferson Clinton Smith?) had 60.3 WAR for the Phillies and 41.8 WAR for the Cubs.