I get the vague sense that there's a logical fallacy in every paragraph of TFA. But the conclusion – that Pujols and Williams are/were good baseball players – is indisputable.

Ever heard of PP? I had not.

Here's "Plate Production", from TFA and the author's earlier post:

Last week I did a post on Albert Pujols. ... Again, I’m going to reference Plate Production – a stat that combines the positive and negative contributions a player has accumulated. This stat is a whole number and can be accumulated on a game, season or career basis. The more games (at bats) and the better the player, the higher the number. It’s not a ratio, it’s cumulative.

From
http://uponfurtherreview.kansascity.com/?q=node/2462

PP = Total Bases + Hit by pitch + Walks + Steals + RBI + Runs – Outs - Caught Stealing - Double Plays Hit Into. Plate Production is a cumulative stat – meaning the more games a player plays, the higher his totals are likely to be. It’s not like OPS, for example, which is a ratio – meaning you could have just as good an OPS whether you played 162 games or 81 games or 40 games.

What's the point of comparing players from two different eras without adjusting for (or acknowledging) differences in run scoring environments (whether on a rate or sum basis)?

yeah, we need a new metric that measures batting. As my grandmother said, like I need a hole in the head.

How about this: take the WILLIAMS DECADE of the 1940s. Find Ted's WORST year. Find how many players in the WHOLE DECADE had single years that were better batting seasons than Ted's worst. Use OWP or WAR or GPA or LW or whatever. Can you even come up with 5?

When Pujols gets anywhere near this good, let's talk.

How about this: take the WILLIAMS DECADE of the 1940s. Find Ted's WORST year. Find how many players in the WHOLE DECADE had single years that were better batting seasons than Ted's worst. Use OWP or WAR or GPA or LW or whatever. Can you even come up with 5?

When Pujols gets anywhere near this good, let's talk.

How about this: Find any year where Williams faced the same sort of competition that Pujols has. Williams is among the greatest hitters of all time, but his entire career was spent in virtually an all-white (and in the 50's, quite inferior) American league. He'd be a great hitter today, but he wouldn't dominate the leaderboards the way he did then. This is but one more example of the limitations of raw statistics and context-lacking rankings.

If you want to say that Williams dominated his league to a much greater extent than Pujols, fine. No argument there, since the numbers don't lie.

But if you try to take it beyond that, you're on much slipperier ground.

I tried to estimate how Ruth and Cobb would have been affect by integration. Here is the link

http://cybermetric.blogspot.com/2009/04/how-many-home-runs-would-ruth-have-hit.html

How Many Home Runs Would Ruth Have Hit If Baseball Had Been Integrated In His Era?

I would like to see other people try to come up with some estimates

How about this: Find any year where Williams faced the same sort of competition that Pujols has. Williams is among the greatest hitters of all time, but his entire career was spent in virtually an all-white (and in the 50's, quite inferior) American league. He'd be a great hitter today, but he wouldn't dominate the leaderboards the way he did then.

Maybe. Or maybe he'd hit like Barry Bonds.

I've pointed out before that the impact of the segregated competition on hitters' raw numbers was likely slight because, for whatever reasons including at least some institutional racism, very few African American players (esp. great ones) were pitchers. Had he been in the NL, Williams would have had to face Don Newcombe and a handful of mediocre guys in the 50s -- tougher but not dramatically so (assuming equal quality of white pitching talent). I don't see any reason to think the quality of pitching was substantially higher in the NL during the 50s. Even into the 60s and 70s there were only a handful of dominant African-American pitchers and not until the 60s that you start to see the rise of Latin American pitchers. It's theoretically possible that an integrated MLB of the 30s and 40s would have had more top black pitchers but given the way things went in the 50s and 60s I think that's unlikely.

To the extent Williams benefited greatly from the slow integration of the AL, it was in contextual stats like OPS+ because he was being compared to a lower-quality hitter. But if we use Musial as a comparison (roughly parallel careers), Williams' OPS was 140 points higher. A quick and dirty estimate based on no change in Williams' raw stats gives me a 199 career OPS+ had he been in the NL -- actually higher than his 190 in the AL. You've got to ding the AL about 15% in overall batter quality to get him down to Pujols' 171 OPS+ and another 10% on top of that to get him down to Musial.

Oh crap, I forgot to adjust for Fenway. By neutralized stats, Williams loses 30 points of raw OPS while Musial loses only 9 and Albert loses 16. So shave off somewhere around 2.5-5% off those numbers above.