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1. Jolly Old St. Neck Wound, Moral IdiotI also may be the only person who doesn't like the idea of changing the wording on Robinson's plaque, especially since it ran counter to his own stated wishes. Not that there's anything wrong with the new wording, and not that it doesn't convey the whole truth better than the original text, but IMO Robinson's essence at the time was captured to perfection by the headline over the story in The Sporting News that covered his first game in the Majors.
That headline read, Debut 'Just Another Game' to Jackie. I'm lucky enough to own a two decade postwar run of The Sporting News, and that's by far my favorite issue of them all.
Tom Selleck? David Lander?
Jack Klugman. It's always Jack Klugman.
Ron Howard? Tim Robbins? Billy Crystal? Tex Ritter?
Tex Ritter!?! And that's when I woke up...
Maddux
Ruth
Wagner
Williams
And had Musial been on the list I'd have taken him over Ted W.
Gibson
Wagner
Mays
Ruth
Markie Post. Case closed.
Wagner
Gibson
Bonds
Johnson
Not that these choices aren't perfectly defensible (I had Ruth, Gibson and Wagner myself), but imagine answering a similar question for football players and deciding upon George Gipp, Red Grange, Don Hutson, Bronko Nagurski and Ernie Nevers over everyone who's been active since World War II.
To me what this says is just how much harder it is to stand out above the crowd today----Imagine if A-Rod could have faced the pitching staff of the 1927 St. Louis Browns! (which BTW included Ernie Nevers)
Bummer - I'd kill to read that book.
I came back to comment because it occured to me that it was odd that the vote wass limited to 5 players. A HOF ballot allows 10 votes. If you do this, the break between Wagner and Gehrig (10 and 11) is fairly sharp.
I understand it's limited to five because that was the number of the first class, but that seems odd given that as much MLB has been played after that date as before and "our" half doesn't include the early, primitive days of post-Civil War play.
So, for my two cents: Ruth, Williams, Mays, Aaron, Johnson, Jackie, Young, Cobb, Bonds, Wagner.
I feel a lot better about this first class than any with five.
Well, it depends. Before or after being hit 137 times by pitches without wearing any padding or helmet?
I might have voted for Satchel Paige if he were a choice...
I dunno, since even without any character clause that would disqualify him outright, in Bonds's case it would depend on whether or not you allowed for some sort of a steroid discount. If you projected his pre-juicing numbers the way Szym did here a few weeks ago, he's inner circle HOF but probably not in the first 5 or 10. But if you just accept his actual numbers at face value then he's right up there with Ruth, and clearly above anyone else. Obviously this is still quite subjective on many levels.
I'm with Andy. Consider: From 1952 through 1962 Mantle was 5th in adjusted OPS+ once, 2nd twice, 1st 8X, but we don't see him on many ballots. Like pre-2000 Barry, the Mick's obviously inner circle but not in the chase for the top 5, probably not even top 10.
If this poll was done a year ago, I wonder if that would be different...
Today, the players from 50 and 60 years ago are now old enough to be considered "safe". Give it another 40 or 50 years and the players from the 90s and 00s will take their place beside the older greats.
I still think that the slight "overrating" of the old timers is much more because the lack of comparable competition in the Good Old Days made it much easier for the best players to stand out.
I think most of us instinctively know that Babe Ruth, while he very well might have been just as great now as he was when he played, would never have dominated those leaderboards today to anywhere near the extent that he did in his heyday. And yet in spite of that somewhat suppressed recognition, we still see him as the top player ever.
Whereas Bonds, who even in his pre-steroids career was putting up those numbers that Gonfalon cites, doesn't get the same recognition, because while he led the pack all those times, he never quite towered over everyone else the way Ruth did for much of his early career. Call it a Pioneer Bonus, and it's real.
Now you're back into peak value vs. career value, and if you think that steroids arguments will never end....
There is no way that Aaron's peak tops Mantle's. But there is also no way that Mantle's career tops Aaron's.
And yet some players, such as Koufax, were so dominant at their peaks that we seem to let them be the exceptions to all of our general rules. It would be an interesting exercise to have a pair of auxiliary HOFs: One for the Koufaxes with short but transcendent careers, and another for the Suttons and the Blylevens, who had immense value for much longer careers, but who nobody would ever see as transcendent talents.
anyone know why that is? did they use some inefficient swimming technique?
Probably should've gone with Williams instead of Bonds, but I guess I'm feeling defense oriented today.
former swimmer here - combination of a lot of things: technique, body type (the best swimmers today are a LOT taller than even the Mark Spitzes of the past), and training are the obvious ones. But there are plenty of environmental factors at work - the pools and the suits. Lane lines (that separate the swimmers) that reduce turbulance created by a swimmer from spilling into the other lane didn't really exist until maybe 20 years ago, and I can't imagine Weismuller was swimming in pools that were heated to a proper temperature for competition (I can't remember what it is, but its somewhere around 75 degrees). And suits that reduce drag (take a look at the full-body suits the Olympians are all wearing) are a much more recent invention - maybe 10 years. While these inventions don't contribute as much as the overall athletic developments, they play a factor.
very true. Those pictures of Spitz always make me laugh - forget the body hair and the 'stache, the guy had hair almost down to his shoulders! 30 years ago swimmers were supposed to look like Rollie Fingers, now they look like the tall guy from Night Court.
I probably should have chosen between Cobb and Wagner and made room for a more modern player or a pitcher, but 5 is an impossibly small number. I kind of think that it's OK to bias the "first class" to older players, because they are legendary, larger-than-life types. They are easier to honor because all rooting interests have faded into the distant past and people just admire their greatness. To me, the first five is different from the five greatest ever, which was one reason I considered Jackie. Ruth, Mays, Cobb, and Wagner are four that have been considered the greatest players ever at one time and are still in the conversation today. Aaron was my other choice because of his prominence in the record books and his overall class. The only one I'd like to make room for is Cy Young. But if I were commissioner appointing five guys, there's no way Cobb would be there. It would be Ruth, Mays, Aaron, Young/Wagner, and Robinson.
And if you make a list of the 10 or 20 or whatever greatest pitchers ever, that list is just dominated by dead ball era guys and modern era guys. Statistics misleading us, or just the odd way talent was distributed? A little of both, I'm sure, but the latter is in play.
The problem with that explanation is that if the talent pool happened to be much bigger now than in was in previous eras (which it is), it would have been much easier for players of earlier eras to stand out. And in what other sport would the thought even be considered that the best players were nearly all from 50 to 100 years ago, in the sense that if you brought them into the league today, they'd dominate (and put up numbers) as they did back then?
Of course we can say that Ruth was the "greatest" player ever, because he dominated his era like no other player (not to mention that he could pitch a little), but can anyone even imagine what a Pujols, a Bonds or an A-Rod might have done against the sort of pitching that Babe Ruth faced once he got below the level of the Groves (who got held out against the Yankees disproportionately to begin with) and the Johnsons, and the handful of better pitchers beneath them? Can you imagine what they'd do in an era where relief pitching was scarcely even known, let alone used with any real knowledge of how best to utilize it?
This isn't to pull a reverse stunt of that moron who claimed that Ruth would have hit 900 home runs (or whatever it was) if he'd played today. But I think it's not much of a stretch to say that with any of those three guys around, Ruth might very well not have won nearly so many leaderboard titles. I'll still say that he's the greatest ever, but it's only in a relative (to his era) sense that I'd honestly say it.
I find this an unconvincing argument that a guy that played 70 years ago can't be the best player in the sport's history.
That parachute doesn't open. Albert Pujols dropped into the 1920s would have to play under 1920s conditions, in 1920s parks, with 1920s equipment and 1920s standards of conditioning and medical care. It's patently impossible to 'imagine' the differences.
I'm not sure who you're referring to or why you feel like you have to call him a moron, but... why the hell couldn't he have hit 900 playing in the 1990s/2000s, with modern equipment, in modern parks, with modern standards of conditioning and medicare care, and modern steroids? Home runs are significantly more commonplace now than they were during Babe Ruth's time; it's batting average that was most notably sky-high then. I don't see where it's unreasonable to think if Babe Ruth came around during modern times he might have hit .310 instead of .340 on his career, but with 850 or 900 home runs instead of 700. But the point is, we don't know.
And the fact that our technology and medicine is far beyond any other point in history... that doesn't mean our athletes are more naturally talented than athletes of the past. At some point over the past 120 years, one man came of age with more natural-born ability to play baseball successfully than any other man. I think Babe Ruth (along with Barry Bonds, Willie Mays, Oscar Charleston, Ty Cobb, some others) is as reasonable a candidate as anybody to hold that distinction. But we'll never know who it really was. The best we can do is judge people against their peers, and nobody dominated his peers more than Babe Ruth.
The slider. The splitter. 95+ mph relief specialists. Black/Latin/Asian pitchers. Similar to Pujols in the 20s, the Babe would be dealing with a lot of differences. I agree with you there's no way of knowing for sure, but I think George Herman Ruth would've raked in any era.
If all you mean is that there's no formula that can "prove" any of this, then sure. And if you're merely comparing Ruth to his contemporaries, then yes, he's unquestionably the best of all time. But if you're seriously trying to argue that simply due to randomness, the "best" players were those who played 50 to 80 years ago, you're wilfully ignoring the question of the relative talent pools, both in terms of quantity (population growth)and quality (worldwide search as opposed to searching white America).
Of course all players going from one era to the other would have to adapt. But I think it'd be a hell of a lot easier to adjust to trains and an all day game schedule than it would be to adjust to the slider, the cut fastball, jet lag, and facing Billy Wagner or Mariano Rivera instead of a tired starter in the ninth inning. And do you seriously think that Babe Ruth, with his personality, would have taken better care of himself now than he did then? Yeah, he would have lifted weights, maybe, but it's just as likely that he might have been wasted by drugs or booze, and with no friendly press around to keep things quiet and confidential.
And again, even if he kept himself in shape, instead of going up against Gehrig and Foxx, he'd face a multitude of players who could give him a run for his money, with new ones popping up each year. The only reason some of these guys aren't household names is because there are so many teams and four time zones, and for anyone other than the purest of baseball geeks it's impossible to keep track of all of them. But there's absolutely no way that Babe Ruth could dominate the game today the way he could back in the day when he would outhomer each of the other seven teams in the American League. Unless you think he'd be hitting 200 home runs a year.
But this does not mean he wouldn't yet be the best player in the world today, or that he wouldn't qualify as the best player of all time.
Babe Ruth would quite thoroughly enjoy the whip-handled bats, the much smaller parks, the juiced ball (compared to the 1920s), and the pitchers not being allowed to pitch inside that characterize modern baseball.
What other sport has been played professionally for 140 years, has been mature (i.e., no major rule changes) for more than a century, and was relatively as popular, with as intense a following, 100 years ago other than baseball? It's sui generis.
But if you're seriously trying to argue that simply due to randomness, the "best" players were those who played 50 to 80 years ago, you're willfully ignoring the question of the relative talent pools, both in terms of quantity (population growth)and quality (worldwide search as opposed to searching white America).
But there are other factors, otherwise 1.2 billion Chinese and 1.1 billion Indians would dominate every Olympic event.
The modern whip-handled bat is tailor-made for swinging as hard as humanly possible, producing strikeouts and mammoth home runs. I guarantee you Babe Ruth would be all over it.
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