Musial is an all time great and underappreciated. Williams was a better player.

I agree with the above statement.

bb-ref leaderboard

Rank Player Adj. Batting Wins Bats
1. Babe Ruth ... 129.87
2. Barry Bonds. 122.33
3. Ty Cobb ...... 109.88
4. Ted Williams. 109.83
5. Stan Musial .... 93.95

Fifth all time. Take that, ye foolish all-century team voters.

Williams was a better player.

Yes, but not by as much as I thought.

BB-Ref WAR has them almost exactly equal for their careers. Of course Williams missed a lot more time for the war(s, almost 5 years to Musial's 1, which puts him well ahead.

But, it's closer than I would have thought off the top of my head.

Yes, Stan Musial, as great as he was, and he's undeniably top-tier, inner circle, is no Ted Williams, especially when you consider he had 3000 more at bats (or, if you prefer, more PAs) than Williams, yet it is demeaning to Musial's memory for all discussion and commemoration to always devolve to this comparison with his almost exact, and mythic, contemporary. Musial was super-great and that he wasn't elected, but had to be selected, for the all-century team tells you something--about the quality of the electorate.

One of my favorite anecdotes in Ted Williams's My Turn At Bat recounts how at the 1960 World Series while he was watching the game people would hand him programs and scorecards to autograph. He was doing it all rather casually and inattentively until:

I'll never forget, we were in Pittsburgh, sitting in a box near the field, and a woman in the next box reached over with a program and said, "Excuse me, Ted, would you mind signing this?"
"Certainly," without looking up.
"You know," she said, "you're one of my favorite players."
"Oh, is that right?"
"Yes. I'm Stan Musial's mother."
I told her she ought to be signing my program.

Not only a gracious compliment to Musial's mother, but an implicit homage, if you like, to the great Musial himself.

Yes, Stan Musial, as great as he was, and he's undeniably top-tier, inner circle, is no Ted Williams, especially when you consider he had 3000 more at bats (or, if you prefer, more PAs) than Williams, yet it is demeaning to Musial's memory for all discussion and commemoration to always devolve to this comparison with his almost exact, and mythic, contemporary.

Agree. It's like introducing all discussions of Williams with; "While he wasn't as goos as Babe Ruth..."

Musial is an all time great and underappreciated.

Musial was every bit as appreciated as Williams during their careers. Too bad John Updike didn't live in St. Louis, but Musial's relative lack of current appreciation says far more about historical amnesia than anything else.

Williams was a better player hitter.

These two concepts are not necessarily synonymous, and you can't resolve them simply by posting a few statistics. You could have put a cigar store Indian in that postage stamp sized LF in Fenway Park and you'd scarcely have noticed the difference.

"Williams was a better -player- hitter."

In the final analysis, it's all the same. There's an interesting discussion there, but I don't know how to really follow through on it without engaging in what I so righteously deplored two posts ago, so I guess I'll do that Best Little Whorehouse in Texas sidestep by quoting the Stan "the Boy" Taylor chant:

Stan, Stan,
he's our boy,
if he can't do it,
no one...
will.

Instead of (or in addition to) comparing Musial to Williams, why not throw DiMaggio in there? Then you can say something like:

Musial is an all time great and underappreciated, but he was better than DiMaggio.

Musial has one of the best names and nicknames.

Musial is an all time great and underappreciated, but he was better than DiMaggio.

Amazing how much better Musials peak years are, whether you look at his best 3 , best 5, or best 10 seasons.....and then you look at the longevity. Amazing

Musial is an all time great and underappreciated, but he was better than DiMaggio.

That DiMaggio is overrated (and worse than Musial) is a great myth perpetrated by people who just use OPS+ and ignore everything else.

First, DiMaggio was held to be a superior defensive CF (though not a patch on his brother, of course). Musial...was not a CF.
(I am aware that historical defensive stats are less than glowing w/r/t DiMaggio's defense: I trust those stats very little in the face of near-universal contemporary praise for Dimaggio's defense.)

Second, Dimaggio's already-short career was eviscerated by the war. DiMaggio lost 3 seasons of what would've been a 16 season career; in contrast, Musial lost 1 season of what would've been a 23 season career. That doesn't account for all the "counting stat" difference, but it closes the gap substantially.

Third, DiMaggio was a dead-pull hitter playing in the worst right-handed hitting park in MLB. And this was in the reserve era, when he couldn't switch teams to escape Death Alley. Simply doubling DiMaggio's away statistics, which underrates DiMaggio b/c nearly all hitters perform better at home, results in the following career line:

333/405/610, 426 HR.


In sum: in a neutral park, at peak, DiMaggio was a better player than Musial. In a neutral park, during their "prime" (aka shoulder years to the peak), DiMaggio was the better player.

Musial only wins out through longevity, which, while not unimportant, is not what most people think of when they say a player was "better" than another player.

Instead of (or in addition to) comparing Musial to Williams, why not throw DiMaggio in there? Then you can say something like:

Musial is an all time great and underappreciated, but he was better than DiMaggio.

During their concurrent peaks, Dimaggio was seen by the vast majority of his contemporaries as the best player (obviously not hitter) of the three, and arguments abounded about Musial vs Williams. There was little or no appreciation for the value of walks back then, far more appreciation for all-around skills, a big appreciation of the handicap posed by Death Valley (which really was Death Valley in the 40's), and as always, too much attention paid to personalities.

With the passage of time, offensive skills are far more emphasized to the relative detriment of all-around skills, the value of walks and OBP are now seen as far more important than they were then, the reality of Death Valley in lowering Dimaggio's value is forgotten or minimized, and Dimaggio's personal flaws are now out in the open, while Williams is seen more as a rebel spirit than as a self-centered grouch. It's impossible to separate evaluations from biases, because everyone wants to claim that their biases are the only objective ones.

I will say this about Joe D.: like with his great successor Mantle, too much of the negative criticism seems to have its roots in personality and things that are tangential at best to actual playing. In the NBHA James comments that some people raised objections to his ranking Mantle so high. His reply was along the lines of too many people make too damn much of his alcoholism and not enough about what he did on the field. Same with Joe in a different way: too much is made of the fact that he was something of an surly, aloof prima don who went to great pains post-career to nurture and groom his legend along certain prescribed contours and not enough is made of the fact that he was a great great all-around player who was terribly hurt by the park he played in.

I will say this about Joe D.: like with his great successor Mantle, too much of the negative criticism seems to have its roots in personality and things that are tangential at best to actual playing. In the NBHA James comments that some people raised objections to his ranking Mantle so high. His reply was along the lines of too many people make too damn much of his alcoholism and not enough about what he did on the field. Same with Joe in a different way: too much is made of the fact that he was something of an surly, aloof prima don who went to great pains post-career to nurture and groom his legend along certain prescribed contours and not enough is made of the fact that he was a great great all-around player who was terribly hurt by the park he played in.

And of course the irony is that while neither of those two went back in a time machine and retroactively changed their behaviors, our reaction to their personalities has dramatically shifted in the past 60 years.** It's as if Dimaggio and Williams represent two giant ink blots in some sort of a collective Rorschach test, where we read into them whatever our inner self demands.

**Aided, of course, by the Cramer book. Whereas Williams' famous temper was always right out there in the open, Dimaggio's night life was then seen mostly as sitting around chatting with Toots Shor and various subjects of a Walter Winchell column.

One more thing I wanted to note: In DiMaggio's peak offensive year, 1939, he hit .413/.486/.769 on the road.

Yes, it's 1939. But that's Barry Bonds numbers, coming out of a plus-defense CF who was also a superb baserunner.

If you ever wonder why there's a Joe DiMaggio mythology, there's your answer.

If Musial's a Donora Greyhound, what's Ken Griffey Jr.?

Sure, but in 1939 DiMag only had 518 PAs. That means his WAR was 8.9 (not even his best season), while Musial's best was 11.5.

Well, with all due respect, there have been things that have come out about both that wasn't part of mainstream lore back then. Williams was not Ty Cobb--indeed, it's probable that Ty Cobb wasn't Ty Cobb, but, still, no book like Teammates has been written about Cobb, or DiMaggio or Musial, for that matter)--and the personal criticisms made of him were exaggerated and distorted, when not just downright dishonest misstatements, by a few select, obviously biased, writers. And, yes, some negative aspects of DiMaggio's behavior were whitewashed and there was a tendency to view them only a certain positive light.

For instance, I don't see Ted Williams as mandating that he be introduced at public events as "the greatest living hitter". His attitude was more like, hey, if you didn't know or appreciate that, you're an idiot, and #### you. Which, as a response in light of some dunderheaded criticisms made of his approach to hitting, I find refreshing. And I don't see Musial (I guess some comparison is unavoidable) standing up for Mudcat Grant at that New Orleans hotel, when the bellboy wouldn't allow him to retrieve the Black players luggage that had mistakenly been sent to the White players' hotel, like Williams did or in the way Williams stood up for him:

[Let me talk about] Ted Williams. Some of the white players, man, they could not put up with this, but were afraid to say something. Even today some of the white players need closure because they know they should have said something and didn’t say anything. But Ted Williams did. We were in New Orleans, one of the most segregated cities there was at that time. What they did with us, we played the Boston Red Sox in an exhibition game; this was during spring training. So you flew in on the airplane, and then after you come through the airport, the white players and all of the bags [for both white and black players] went on the bus and went to the white hotel. We could not ride in a white cab so they put us outside of the airport into some grassy areas where we waited for black cabs to come and pick us up. Sometimes it would be an hour; sometimes it would be two hours that we had to wait there. Now the cab would pick us up and we would go to the black hotel or motel or bed-and-breakfast. And the bags would be over at the white hotel. Now the Boston Red Sox had been sued to get black players on the time. They had two black players, Pumpsie Green and Earl Wilson. Me and Vic Power were the only two black players on the Cleveland Indians. So four black players couldn’t merge onto a hotel. If you did, it created some problems. The four of us couldn’t go, so we pulled straws. For the first time ever I lost the pool. Now I've got to go to the hotel. And I did. I went over to the hotel. You had to pay the black cab driver four times as much to drive to the white hotel because it was dangerous. So I get out of the cab and this guy walked up to me and he said, What are you doing here? I said, Well actually, I’ve come to get those bags. I The bags were still sitting in the lobby. He said, You ain't got no bags here. I And I said, Those bags belong to the colored baseball players. I He said, That is a likely story. You ain’t coming in here. I So Ted Williams and this is three hours later Ted Williams was coming back from dinner. So he saw me Ted Williams and the trainer. Ted said, Hay, how ya doing? I said, Well Ted, I'm not doing too good. You know I can't stay here. I He said, It's a shame you can’t stay here. I said, And our bags are sitting right over there. But this bellman won't let me go and get the bags. I So Ted said, Mud, you know, the bellman is right. You shouldn’t be going over there to get them bags. HE should be going over there to get them bags. I Ted then said [to the bellman], That's right, boy. Go over there and get them bags! I {crowd erupts in laughter}

Mud on Williams

And I don't see either DiMaggio or Musial (or any other player) delivering that Hall of Fame induction speech. Or telling off a President of the United States in the '50's, then manning up and apologizing without giving alibis. Ted Williams was a super great player, but he always clearly impresses you as someone who would not have lived his life except along heroic lines. Whatever he was doing, he wouldn't quit until, sword in one hand, the severed Medusa's head hung dripping in blood from his other arm.

Good post, Morty, but I think you're preaching to the choir here. There aren't too many Dave Egan fans on BTF, and no other newly inducted Hall of Famer would have had the imagination to raise the Negro Leagues issue the way that Williams did. He could be an opinionated SOB who often talked through his butt about things other than hitting, fishing, and flying a plane, but you never got the sense that he was some pre-packaged commodity programmed by his agent or PR man. For that rare trait among superstar athletes we should be forever grateful.

Of course Musial was inducted after Williams so he couldn't have delivered the "Negro Leaguers to the Hall of Fame" speech but merely echoed it. And rather than credit Williams, shouldn't we credit Bowie Kuhn who got the job done over the objections of people who said "10 years is 10 years..although Bowie stumbled along the way as he was wont to do?

One thing about Williams vs Musial is Williams has these tidbits you can mention. Hit a home run in his last at bat. Last to hit .400 Hit a game winning home run in the All Star game when it meant something to fans. Never won a World series (Musial won three). Had the label of "hit .200 in the 10 biggest games of his career". Musial? Equal number of hits at home vs road doesn't cut it.

Stan Musial is so underappreciated that his threads are taken over by Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio.

# of players with a higher career BA AND more TB than Stan Musial =
# of players with a higher career OBP AND more TB than Stan Musial =
# of players with a higher career SLG AND more TB than Stan Musial =
# of players who were born before 2000 BC .. OR .. who can bench press Mt Rushmore

If Musial's a Donora Greyhound, what's Ken Griffey Jr.?

A damned fine baseball player who (probably) should have retired several years ago :-)

#13 First of all you don't get to wave away parks that a player is uniquely unsuited for. A better way to put a player into a neutral context is to weight his home stats at 1/8 rather than 1/2. (I'd argue that this is the wrong way to approach things. It matters that he played half of his games in a park he was poorly suited for -- though I'd settle for DiMaggio at home)

Second, Strip the longevity out of it and compare apples to apples. Musial hit .340/.426/.580 (OPS+ of 168) through age 36 (in more playing time). And then gave the Cardinals 2646 PAs of .294/.380/.479 (OPS+ of 124) -- in a stronger league than DiMaggio played in (and in a lower offensive context -- though of course OPS+ covers that)

Yes. There's the war years complicating matters. Musial played in a weak league and the balata ball held down his raw offensive totals. We could just ignore those years but it won't substantially change the evaluation. Musial was the better offensive player. He did play a bit of center as well but it would be silly to regard him as being in the same league as DiMaggio defensively.

If Musial's a Donora Greyhound, what's Ken Griffey Jr.?

This?

Stan Musial is certainly not underappreciated in St Louis. He is a living legend and would probably win the title of most important St Louisan in the 20th Century. I had no idea he was underappreciated elsewhere. I thought the title of this article must be a joke. I guess it's not.

That means his WAR was 8.9 (not even his best season), while Musial's best was 11.5.

OK, but doesn't WAR treat park factors as equal for LHB and RHB? Clearly Yankee Stadium prior to the renovation was not equal for both. What would DiMaggio's WAR be if they had different park factors for LHB and RHB? You could argue that this is irrelevant for the purposes of determining who was more valuable, but I'd argue it's relevant if you want to determine who was "better". Of course there's also the issue of league strength.

Of course Musial was inducted after Williams so he couldn't have delivered the "Negro Leaguers to the Hall of Fame" speech but merely echoed it.

Well, he didn't deliver a Pumpsie Green press conference speech either.

#28 WAR is value based so no separate park factors. From the point of view of value to the Yankees it matters that DiMaggio was not particularly well suited to the park.

EDIT: Re-reading your post I see you've specifically addressed this. Worth noting that we're far more confident of our ability to adjust for value than our ability to adjust for the impact on a specific player. Dan has done a ton of work on this -- as have others -- and the adjustments for a player changing parks are basically only a tick better than simply using the value adjustments.

doesn't WAR treat park factors as equal for LHB and RHB? Clearly Yankee Stadium prior to the renovation was not equal for both. What would DiMaggio's WAR be if they had different park factors for LHB and RHB?

Judge for yourself: 344' in the RF power alley vs 402' in LF, and 407' vs 457' for the RF vs LF bleachers. They didn't call it Death Valley for nothing, and it wreaked havoc on Dimaggio's home numbers.

OK, but doesn't WAR treat park factors as equal for LHB and RHB? Clearly Yankee Stadium prior to the renovation was not equal for both. What would DiMaggio's WAR be if they had different park factors for LHB and RHB? You could argue that this is irrelevant for the purposes of determining who was more valuable, but I'd argue it's relevant if you want to determine who was "better". Of course there's also the issue of league strength.

I believe it does treat them equally, which understates DiMag's value/performance somewhat. I seriously doubt the effect is as large as 2.6 WAR.

AROM's WAR does take league strength into account. He has the 1948 NL as stronger than the 1939 AL.

it wreaked havoc on Dimaggio's home numbers.

I'd phrase it differently. What it did was make it easier to catch fly balls to left and left-center. Line drives would have been rewarded. The impact would depend on the type of hitter.

I think there's some confusion about defense here. Joe DiMaggio was much better than just a plus center fielder. He happened to be playing at the same time as his brothers, Barney McCoskey, and Terry Moore, but he's right up there with them, just at the bottom of that very distinguished pile.

Musial, when he came up, was a center fielder by trade. He had burner speed and a fine glove. But he was on the same team as Terry Moore, the established NL CF Gold Glove of the era. So Stan only played center one full season and parts of others. But it is clear that he could do it, and would have made the logjam of HoF caliber CFs in the 1950s even worse to deal with than it is.

Williams was a decent defender, but no center fielder (if I read the sources right, the Cardinals passed on Ted at a tryout camp, because he didn't run fast enough or throw hard enough for them. Branch Rickey's methods had their advantages, but only signing 5-tool kids will cost you Williams and Yogi Berra.) However, the impact of Ted's enormous OBP is so great that he was clearly a better player than either Joe or Stan. Barry Bonds, maybe not. Barry had the same defensive skills as Musial, and would have made about the same quality CF, in my opinion.

The biggest complaint about Joe D's career, when comparing him to the inner-circle HoF/HoM guys, is lack of career length, even after adding the war years back in. Joe retired just as soon as he started to lose ground. This may be admirable, but it will keep you from being equal to guys who played several more seasons. Comparing his seasons actually played to another player's is missing the point.

Take it from a guy who lives in St. Louis - Stan didn't do his visibility thing any favors by insisting that he get to play harmonica at baseball gatherings. Stan is OK on the harmonica, for a 90-year-old man who was not a career musician. But he should not have quit his day job in 1942. After the first time you see him play, the novelty has worn off, and you realize that this is embarrassing. Stan gets short shrift in public notice because of that harmonica cost. Kind of sad, one of the very very few things about Stan that is sad.

One of the few other sad things is that Stan's rankings will take a hit when, as will inevitably occur, we get lefty-righty ballpark effect splits for his ballpark. The park in question favored lefty hitters, and favored them hitting doubles, which is Stan's feature stat. It had a short right field that had a screen that worked much like Fenway's Green Monster. So Stan set a doubles record, but never won the Triple Crown because he couldn't lead the league in homers in that park.

- Brock Hanke

Musial was the better offensive player. He did play a bit of center as well but it would be silly to regard him as being in the same league as DiMaggio defensively.

I'm not denying that Musial was the better offensive player. I'm arguing that its -much- closer than you think, if you're comparing them in a neutral context. And if you factor in the other stuff that DiMaggio did really freakin' well and that we're really bad at measuring retrospectively- playing a very good CF, and superlative baserunning- then it's entirely possible that DiMaggio WAS a better player, peak/prime, than Musial.

What annoyed me was the "nyuknyuk silly plebs who think DiMaggio was better" tone of the posts upthread. Maybe Musial was better, maybe he wasn't, but its well within the margin of error. Curiously, DiMaggio was a much better player than the sabermetrically-oriented fan tends to give him credit for.

Comparing Williams and Musial is like comparing the Spitfire and the Mustang. There is no loser in this contest...

In the late 60s, one of my favorite books was the Information Please Almanac, which was probably the gateway drug to my subsequent Macmillan Encyclopedia and B-Ref addictions. Its baseball section had all kinds of leaderboards and stats, things like the WP/LP and scores of every World Series game ever. I remember that in the '68 and '69 editions they had the lifetime stats of both Williams and Musial, baseball-card style. I guess they were put in when they retired and no editor had thought yet to take them out. They seemed an obvious pair of contemporaries, and at least from that one indicator, thought of in the 1960s as equally great.

#35 - there were two "posts upthread" of your #13 that refer to DiMaggio, and mine was one of them. So where, exactly, is the "nyuknyuk silly plebs" part?

"There was never a day when I was as good as Joe DiMaggio at his best. Joe was the best, the very best I ever saw."

--Stan Musial

# of players with a higher career BA AND more TB than Stan Musial =
# of players with a higher career OBP AND more TB than Stan Musial =
# of players with a higher career SLG AND more TB than Stan Musial =
# of players who were born before 2000 BC .. OR .. who can bench press Mt Rushmore

# of players with more TB than Musial = Aaron.

An equation like that is not particularly illustrative if the subject is really, really high up the leadeboard in the qualifying category.

# of players with a higher BA AND more hits than Pete Rose
# of pitchers with a lower ERA AND more strikeouts than Randy Johnson
# of players with more hits AND more walks than Rickey Henderson

#38:
"Amazing how much better Musials peak years are, whether you look at his best 3 , best 5, or best 10 seasons.....and then you look at the longevity. Amazing"

The biggest complaint about Joe D's career, when comparing him to the inner-circle HoF/HoM guys, is lack of career length, even after adding the war years back in. Joe retired just as soon as he started to lose ground. This may be admirable, but it will keep you from being equal to guys who played several more seasons.

I've always suspected that sabermetrics has slightly overrated players like Mickey Mantle and Dick Allen because of their relatively gaudy career OPS+ numbers, which are as high as they are because they both retired early, and underrated Willie Mays and Yaz because they played well into their 40s and thus lowered their career averages. Another comparison: Richie Ashburn (retired at 35) vs. Pete Rose (retired at 45)...

#41: if you meant one post, please say "post" instead of "posts". Especially when mine is the other one.

#42 Not by anybody who's paying attention. You'll see a lot of discussion about "decline phase" or more informally comparing the players through similar age or similar PAs. At least when the discussion is about rate stats.

"There was never a day when I was as good as Joe DiMaggio at his best. Joe was the best, the very best I ever saw."

--Stan Musial

Until he saw Willie Mays.... "Stan Musial, all-time great of the St. Louis Cardinals made this statement about Willie Mays of the Giants, in the late 1950s.

'Willie ranks with DiMaggio as the best I ever saw. He's a perfect ball player, too. Mays can beat a ball club with his bat, his glove, his arm and his legs. He has stolen more bases than any other home run hitter who has ever lived and hit more homers than any base stealer, past or present.

The guy plays with a contagious enthusiasm. Why he can run better and faster, looking back over his shoulder to see where the ball is, than most players can digging for the next base with head down."

The Pacific Coast League valued walks and OBP
before MSM knew the game better
like 70 plus years or so

DiMaggio OPS home/road) .937/1.015

Musial OPS home/road) 1.009/.944

So DiMaggio out hit Musial in road games. Some of that could be due to Musial playing longer than DiMaggio. But if we only look at Musial up through 1957, a similar age to Dimaggio, Musial has about a .984 road OPS (that is just a simple average of his yearly road OPS not counting his very first year when he did not play much). That still puts DiMaggio ahead.

Cyril, unadjusted OPS isn't a very good measure. From 1942 through 1957, Musial had 107.9 oWAR. DiMag had a career total of 83.6. Even if you gave DiMag 2 more years for WWII, he couldn't catch Musial's offensive performance. If DiMag had an advantage, it had to be on defense.

I agree that the career WAR gap between the two would be pretty tough to close. I thought it was useful to look at the road stats because as people mentioned above, DiMaggio might be hurt by park adjustments because of Yankee Stadium's asymmetry

Cyril, unadjusted OPS isn't a very good measure. From 1942 through 1957, Musial had 107.9 oWAR. DiMag had a career total of 83.6. Even if you gave DiMag 2 more years for WWII, he couldn't catch Musial's offensive performance. If DiMag had an advantage, it had to be on defense.

But if you took out Musial's 18.0 WAR against the crippled NL of 1943-44, when Dimaggio was in the military, you'd bring the margin down to the point where they'd be but 6 points apart, surely within a margin of error, and that's not adjusting for the marked RHB disadvantage of Yankee Stadium, which WAR doesn't compute.

I still see these three players pretty much as they were seen at the time:

As hitters, it was Williams by a fairly wide margin over Dimaggio and Musial; and as overall players, it was Dimaggio by a narrow margin over Musial, with Williams kept within Musial's range by his hitting advantage. As has been noted many times, both Williams and Musial themselves agreed with this assessment, and nobody ever accused Ted Williams of false modesty when it came to his own baseball talent.

Of course this is purely on peak performance skills, not career value, in which Dimaggio trails badly.

Not 6 points, 6.3 WAR. That's actually quite a lot -- it's better than Joey Votto's season this year.

I'm prepared to believe that DiMag had a higher peak value due to defensive superiority, but the defensive numbers we have available don't show it. Musial had an obvious career value advantage.

Maybe not the place for this discussion, but shouldn't DiMaggio bear some of the blame for being a dead pull hitter with a home stadium that punished such players? No one put a gun to his head and told him he wasn't allowed to go the other way. In similar vein, if Musial was able to take advantage of his home park's idiosyncrasies, doesn't he deserve credit for being able to do so?

Not 6 points, 6.3 WAR. That's actually quite a lot -- it's better than Joey Votto's season this year.

Except that that's about 0.5 per season, which given the non-counting by WAR of the Death Valley factor makes it a dead heat at the very worst.

-----------------

Maybe not the place for this discussion, but shouldn't DiMaggio bear some of the blame for being a dead pull hitter with a home stadium that punished such players? No one put a gun to his head and told him he wasn't allowed to go the other way.

Easier said than done for most players, and at the time Dimaggio was first signed by the Yankees, the Yanks were the only team who weren't scared off by his PCL injury. But it is nice to speculate if he could have learned to modify his swing the way that A-Rod has or that Bonds did, or as Elston Howard or Moose Skowron did on other Yankee teams from a slightly later era. Or if Tom Yawkey had decided to take a gamble on him after the 1935 season---imagine a Dimaggio-Williams-Foxx combination back in the 1939-40 period, when Foxx still had it.

Each of the three, comparing their 7 best years.

Except that that's about 0.5 per season, which given the non-counting by WAR of the Death Valley factor makes it a dead heat at the very worst.

Or it's the equivalent of an entire extra season at near-MVP level quality.

Why does everyone keep posting WAR, when we know that it (a) doesn't account for the giant RHB penalty at Yankee Stadium and (b) is, at best, a crude measure of defense in DiMaggio's time?

No one is disputing that Musial has more WAR than DiMaggio during his peak and prime; what some of us is arguing is that the stuff that WAR doesn't measure makes DiMaggio bettter.

Posting WAR 5 times doesn't make it a more comprehensive stat.

I love the serendipity of Pujols following Musial, many years later.

Look at their careers - just one spectacular season after another, but the player is so noncontroversial that sometimes it's not fully appreciated by everyone.

Pujols was starting to be called El Hombre, which is kind of a cool play on Stan the Man.
But from what I've seen, he has rejected it because he said only Stan is the Man. Respect for elders, and maybe realizing that he's only halfway home yet.

Stan had a career .417 OBP, so it's ok to talk just about AVG, for fun.

His consecutive annual finishes in the NL batting race (space for a missed 1945, he qualifed for all the others)

3rd
1st
2nd

1st
5th
1st
2nd
1st
1st
1st
3rd
4th
3rd
4th
1st
3rd

In that "dreadful" 5th place, he was 2 pts out of 3rd

That's a lot of "Olympic medals"

Stan didn't do his visibility thing any favors by insisting that he get to play harmonica at baseball gatherings. Stan is OK on the harmonica, for a 90-year-old man who was not a career musician. But he should not have quit his day job in 1942. After the first time you see him play, the novelty has worn off, and you realize that this is embarrassing. Stan gets short shrift in public notice because of that harmonica cost. Kind of sad, one of the very very few things about Stan that is sad.

I'm sorry, what?

Never saw him pitch.

RE: Comment 58 - Apparently, you're not from St. Louis. About a decade (or more) ago, Stan took up the harmonica, or at least went public with it. Now, pretty much every time you see Stan, he take at least some time to play. He's not bad for his age, but he's not a professional musician. No one would gather in groups to see him play if he weren't Stan Musial, baseball legend. I imagine he doesn't play at things like the Hall of Fame inductions, but it's a constant here in his home town where no one will complain. I'm serious. This really happens. A lot.

BTW, Albert Pujols objects VERY strongly to being called "El Hombre." He thinks it insults Stan, and I imagine he thinks it insults him as well. He should get a chance to develop his own nickname, He's at least THAT good.

One interesting thing about Stan's testimonials to Joe D. and Willie. All three of them have, as their greatest offensive "weakness", a lack of walks for their power. I don't mean that they didn't take any walks, but they take few compared to Mantle and Williams. Since they did have the power to leverage into walks like Ted and Mickey did, you have to count that as a comparative weakness. Of course, if you're comparing them to normal mortals, this doesn't appear to happen. But at their level of play, they actually have a weak spot there. And sure enough. so does Pujols. By comparison to Bonds, or Ted, or Mickey. Not compared to normal hitters. And, in that group of four with Stan, Willie and Joe, Albert does have the least speed, by a considerable amount. On the other hand, he is even more consistent than any of the other three and, I think, dominates his league a bit more. After all, Stan had Willie to compete with, and Joe had Ted. But there's no one really comparable to Albert right now, that I see.

- Brock

On the other hand, (Albert Pujols) is even more consistent than any of the other three and, I think, dominates his league a bit more.

Albert's already 32nd all-time in the Gray Ink test -- and IMHO, regular top-five offensive category finishes in a 16-team league is a much more impressive achievement than Stan or Willie or Ted or Joe finishing in the top five in an 8-team league.

Albert's already 32nd all-time in the Gray Ink test -- and IMHO, regular top-five offensive category finishes in a 16-team league is a much more impressive achievement than Stan or Willie or Ted or Joe finishing in the top five in an 8-team league.

Not to mention that the overwhelmingly larger reach of today's talent pool makes Pujols' accomplishments even the more impressive. There was no one remotely on the level of Albert Pujols for Joe or Ted (or Mickey) to compete against in the American League of their day.

Why does everyone keep posting WAR, when we know that it (a) doesn't account for the giant RHB penalty at Yankee Stadium and (b) is, at best, a crude measure of defense in DiMaggio's time?

My last reference to WAR involved only the offensive measure, so your point (b) doesn't matter. The reason I used WAR is that it does things OPS doesn't: it accounts for playing time and strength of league. Those are, IMO, far more significant for this discussion than the park effect.

Cyril you're also smart enough to know that counting road stats alone is silly. ((Road stats*7)+home stats)/8 (for an 8 team league) is the right way to look at a player in a park neutral context.

All I had time to do right now was get Musial's simple average home OPS from 42-57. It was 1.027. Then using my numbers from before and using your formula, I get 1.005 for DiMaggio and .989 for Musial. Later, if I have time, I will do it again and use total data, not a simple average for Musial.