If you take the numbers at face value, where does A-Rod rank all-time?

Regardless of how you feel about A-Rod, he's been one of the most productive players in baseball history

Alex Rodriguez on Friday will play his final game for the Yankees. Since he's 41 and struggling, Friday will also very likely occasion his final big-league game. As such, now's a fitting time to take stock of his career value. We also took the occasion to take stock of the best players in MLB history, ranking from Babe Ruth at top through A-Rod.

Obviously, A-Rod's history of performance-enhancing drug use will color your assessments of his value, but let's lay aside those considerations for now. After all, none of us has any idea to what extent PED use affects a player's statistical outputs, other than saying, "It probably does to some unknown extent." Besides, this, our internet is full of places at which you thunder your value judgments.

Now, a quick walking tour of some key career indicators for A-Rod, with all-time rank in parentheses ...

Plate appearances	OPS+	WAR	Offensive WAR	JAWS
12,198 (15th)	140 (76th)	117.9 (16th)	115.0 (13th)	91.0 (11th)

Now, a quick rundown of the possibly unfamiliar measures you see above ...

• OPS+ is a player's OPS -- i.e., his on-base percentage added to his percentage -- adjusted to reflect league and home ballpark conditions. It's scaled so that 100 is league-average. Every point above or below 100 constitutes one percentage point above or below the league average. In A-Rod's case, his OPS+ of 140 indicates that his park-adjusted OPS was 40 percent better than the league average over the course of his career.
• WAR is Wins Above Replacement, and it's the number of theoretical wins that a player contributes over and above what can be expected from an emergency"replacement-level" player -- i.e., the waiver claim, the bench player, the minor-league veteran call-up, that sort of thing. You can read a deeper explanation of WAR here.
• Offensive WAR is WAR for position players with the defensive component removed. Said defensive component is without question the weak link in terms of knowable accuracy, which by extension makes Offensive WAR a very sound measure of overall value at the plate and on the bases. As you can see, the vast majority of A-Rod's WAR came via offensive events, which means there's less uncertainty surrounding his overall value.
• JAWS is the WAR-based measure of a player's Hall of Fame worthiness developed by Jay Jaffe and available at Baseball-Reference. We're not concerned with A-Rod's Hall worthiness in this particularly piece, but JAWS does a good job of combining a player's overall amassed career value with his peak value -- i.e., how much value he provided in his very best seasons. JAWS uses WAR to arrive at its hybrid assessments. A-Rod of course had a terrific peak (in related matters, he won three MVPs and finished in the top 10 in the MVP balloting a total of 10 times).

As you can see, A-Rod ranks quite high in the measures above. That OPS+ figure is, yes, "merely" 76th all-time, but bear in mind that A-Rod spent the plurality of his defensive innings at the premium position of shortstop. Putting up those kinds of numbers while at shortstop and then spending another 10,000 or so innings at the semi-premium position of third base makes a player even more valuable. Basically, A-Rod hit like a Hall of Fame first baseman but did so while manning far more demanding positions for almost his entire career.

Speaking of positional scarcity and the value that flows from it, let's indulge in a hypothetical. When A-Rod was traded to the Yankees prior to the 2004 season, he moved off shortstop in deference to the defensively inferior Derek Jeter. A-Rod was going into his age-28 season at the time and had won the previous two AL Gold Gloves at the position of shortstop. Still and yet, he transitioned to third, where he was a fielding asset for many years to come. Still, if merit had carried the day, A-Rod would've been installed as the Yankee shortstop. That would've increased his WAR total. (WAR is adjusted to reflect positional standards.) So if A-Rod remains a shortstop for as along as he should've been a shortstop, we're probably talking about a top-10 WAR all-time.

If you're someone who prioritizes the sheer mass of offensive counting stats, then you can argue A-Rod is a top-10 player. After all, he ranks fourth in home runs, sixth in extra-base hits, sixth in total bases, 15th in times on base, and 20th in hits. Throw in his defensive value across the years and his 329 steals at an 81 percent success rate, and, yes, you can argue he's a top-10 player. Let him have a normal shortstop life cycle, and we're talking about a top-10 player.

That said, our best measures of career value and the simple reality of A-Rod's defensive lifespan put him outside the top 10. As long as the topic is backward-looking assessments of value, it's worth noting that A-Rod for his career did not fare well in clutch situations, at least relative to his performance in non-clutch situations. This is almost certainly just One of Those Things and not reflective of some kind of inner weakness or some such nonsense. However, it is a statistical reality and should play a role in our reflections.

On balance, I see no reason to depart from how WAR pegs his value. There's no such thing as absolute precision in these matters, so I'd put A-Rod in the 15th to 20th range in terms of the greatest players in major-league history. Care to disagree? Lucky for you, this is the internet.