|
|
Baseball Primer Newsblog— The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand
Saturday, January 26, 2013
I’ll start with the All-Dead Team. Talk about a hard OF to crack! We’ll certainly carry five OFers on the 25-man roster, and I’d think that the selections have been easy: Williams starts in LF, Ruth of course in RF, and then pick ‘em from Cobb, Mantle, and Speaker. Does Musial displace one of them? Yikes! That’s a tough call. By the way, just as a shortcut, that group of six count for six of the top twenty all-time in baseball-reference’s WAR list.
So that’s my roster:
Dickey, Cochrane
Gehrig, Hornsby, Collins, J. Robinson, Wagner, G. Davis, Mathews
T. Williams, Cobb, Speaker, Mantle, Ruth, Musial
|
Support BBTF
Thanks to cardsfanboy for his generous support.
You must be logged in to view your Bookmarks.
Hot Topics
Newsblog: Jim Caple, former ESPN, national MLB writer, dies at 61 (7 - 1:39am, Oct 04)Last: the Hugh Jorgan returnsNewsblog: Witt becomes first Royal in 30-30 club: 'No one like him' (13 - 1:14am, Oct 04)Last: The Yankee ClapperNewsblog: Former Dodgers star Trevor Bauer settles lawsuit with woman who first accused him of sexual assault (12 - 12:57am, Oct 04)Last: Dr. PooksNewsblog: Curve honor 'worst baseball player of all time' (62 - 11:49pm, Oct 03)Last: Pat Rapper's Delight (as quoted on MLB Network)Hall of Merit: Reranking Pitchers 1893-1923: Ballot (7 - 11:44pm, Oct 03)Last: Rob_WoodNewsblog: OMNICHATTER for the October Postseason 2023 (78 - 11:02pm, Oct 03)Last: Tom and Shivs couples counselorNewsblog: OT - NBA Off-Pre-Early Thread for the end of 2023 (153 - 10:59pm, Oct 03)Last:  Tom and Shivs couples counselorNewsblog: Miami Marlins’ Luis Arraez runs away with NL batting title, makes MLB history in process (13 - 6:28pm, Oct 03)Last: Cris ENewsblog: Mets fire Buck Showalter after disappointing season (36 - 5:35pm, Oct 03)Last: sunday silence (again)Newsblog: Mariners' Cal Raleigh apologizes for calling out team after season-ending loss (11 - 4:56pm, Oct 03)Last: bookbookNewsblog: Appreciating 4 all-time legends as they play their (potential) final games (48 - 4:43pm, Oct 03)Last: Walt DavisNewsblog: Inside Colorado’s three decades of mediocre baseball (6 - 3:23pm, Oct 03)Last: Tom NawrockiNewsblog: Phil Nevin out as Angels manager after missing playoffs again with Shohei Ohtani, Mike Trout (13 - 3:03pm, Oct 03)Last: Walt DavisSox Therapy: RIP Tim Wakefield (19 - 2:54pm, Oct 03)Last: Jay SeaverNewsblog: OT Soccer - World Cup Final/European Leagues Start (137 - 2:01pm, Oct 03)Last:  AuntBea odeurs de parfum de distance sociale
|
|
Reader Comments and Retorts
Go to end of page
Statements posted here are those of our readers and do not represent the BaseballThinkFactory. Names are provided by the poster and are not verified. We ask that posters follow our submission policy. Please report any inappropriate comments.
God: "Are you kidding? I've got the greatest ballplayers of all time up here!"
Devil: "That's okay... I've got all the umpires."
Ned Flanders: Hey listen, I did a favor for you!
I think it's delightful that even in death, someone is keeping Josh Gibson out of the mix.
#notdelightfulatall
White guilt is the individual or collective guilt often said to be felt by some white people for the racist treatment of people of color by whites both historically and presently.
As Howie points out, the shortage of RH power can be easily remedied while at the same time massively upgrading the catcher position.
Too bad none of the later black players of that era got to compete in the majors, too, because then we could actually tell pretty well whether the top players were similarly skilled. Oh, wait....
He based the list off picking a WAR list from BBref.
But why limit yourself?
Can't speak for that guy, but it's funny that many people scoff condescendingly at religious folks but treat WAR as a sacrament.
Nothing funny at all. WAR is based on logic, religion is totally illogical.
Bernstein's never scoffed at religious folks, as far I know, so this just reads as a pointlessly ####-stirring non sequitur. (And hey look, you caught some fish trolling that hook.)
Anyway, Bernstein's just playing around on a blog. I do think he's missing major concerns in evaluating and comparing old-time ballplayers, in part because he didn't engage enough with what WAR is and how it works. That's a perfectly fair critique, there's no reason to lard unrelated political rhetoric on top of it.
C - Gibson, Cochrane
1B - Gehrig, Foxx
2B - Hornsby, Collins, Lajoie
SS - Wagner, Davis
3B - Mathews
RF - Ruth
CF - Speaker, Cobb, Mantle
LF - Williams, Musial
P - Johnson, Mathewson, Alexander, Young, Nichols, Spahn, Feller, Paige, Grove
The third catcher is Foxx. Davis, Hornsby and Wagner all played a decent amount of 3B, Cobb and Musial both played a lot of RF, and Ted played RF his rookie year. Hornsby would be the emergency SS. This staff only needs 9 pitchers, with Ruth as the 10th pitcher if needed.
This team could bat all LHers aganst Righties, and could bat 7 RHers against lefties if they used Lajoie at 2B, Hornsby at 3B and Davis in the OF.
Without Foxx you have no 3rd catcher.
From the article:
So he agrees.
In addition:
JB observes the high holy days, so I don't know the level of his devotion, but he's at least conversant with a major religion.
The problem with putting Gibson on the list is that you'd better consider other players, too. Oscar Charleston, for starters, who hasn't been mentioned in this thread. Personally, I don't feel qualified to evaluate all Negro League players fairly, which is why I stick to MLB only when making such lists. Obviously I know Gibson was better than Dickey and Cochrane. But putting only him on strikes me as tokenism.
And then there's Japan...
Also, Charleston's numbers, while great, do not show him to have been quite the equal of his rough contemporaries Speaker and Cobb. He belongs on a lot of lists, but not necessarily this one. I considered Charleston as well before commenting about Gibson, but my evaluation was that he's a bit short.
Smokey Joe Williams and Satchel Paige both deserve slots on the pitching staff of this team.
Now that would be fun, aside from the umpiring issue.
HEAVEN
C Roy Campanella
1B Lou Gehrig
2B Charlie Gehringer
3B Eddie Mathews
SS Honus Wagner
OF Babe Ruth
OF Oscar Charleston
OF Stan Musial
P Satchel Paige
HELL
C Pierzynski's alive, so ... Thurman Munson?
1B Hal Chase
2B Rogers Hornsby
3B John McGraw
SS Leo Durocher
OF Joe Jackson
OF Ty Cobb
OF [kept warm for Pete Rose]
P Carl Mays
Reading about Gibson in John Holway's books, years ago, I did wonder about this. I saw him as about Joe DiMaggio at the plate, but rather ordinary behind it. In reading more as analysis has improved, I imagine he was a somewhat better hitter than DiMaggio, and a better catcher than I thought – IOW by all likelihood both a better hitter and better catcher than Mike Piazza. (Others know a lot more about this than I do and can correct my impressions.)
So it may be a question of era. Piazza himself would have been moved off catcher if he'd played in some eras when catchers were pure defenders. Conversely, translate Gibson into the Piazza's era, and sure, he'd have stayed at catcher; why not? In and just before Gibson's own day, some superb hitters stayed at catcher: Cochrane, Hartnett, Dickey. Was Gibson that much inferior to them defensively? Probably not, is the picture I'm developing; at least, not a butcher. If Ernie Lombardi could catch in those days, then certainly Gibson.
Given the array of doubtful athletes who remained at catcher in the big leagues during this period, I don't see Gibson as a particular outlier.
Not sure how serious this is, but just in case, they're referring to the 1890s SS, not the Astros' 1980s 1B, who as far as I know is very much alive.
On second thought, the shortstop's name is George, so I'm not sure what you're getting at.
So it's a problem that you should consider ALL players in the ALL-time ALL-dead Team?
What about Dihigo?
EDIT: Cap Anson might be a good option on the "Hell" team.
As Bill James said, I'd rather misrank the great Negro Leaguers then to exclude them all over again.
I think Gibson and Paige clearly belong on the team. Charelston certainly is close, and may in fact have been better than Speaker. He seems to have been like a Speaker with more HR power, but probably playing in a weaker league than the AL or the NL.
If he wasn't already the best SS, Wagner may be the best utility man. At various times he was a regular at RF, 3B and 1B, and played almost all his games in CF as a rookie.
Everyone (who cares enough to have an opinion) thinks they know more about the quality of individual white players pre-integration than black players, but do they? Evaluating the white players of that era runs you into the exact same problem as evaluating the black players: they played in a segregated league, so their statistics were not compiled against all of the best available players.
Look at the 1901 Pirates page on BB-Ref. Wagner played in every game for the Pirates that year (140) but isn't listed as a starter, because somebody else played at least a little bit more at all nine positions.
QFT I
QFT II.
Not to mention that when the Negro League players of the time competed with the Major Leaguers, they more than held their own. And if you take a look at the offensive leaderboards of the only league (the NL) that made a real attempt to integrate in the 1947-65 era, you'll see that it's dominated way disproportionately by African American players.
Humor detector at the shop this week, Delorians?
also funny are responses that remove the "Can't speak for that guy," from my sentence.
I'll concede that I could/should have worded the rest of the sentence differently to avoid risk of unneeded tangent, though the intended point about WAR worship in general stands.
And maybe the parsers can concede that it's not cool to repost only part of someone else's sentence, particularly if it makes the point being made somewhat irrelevant...
I really don't know how you can say that so definitively. He may have been, but "among the greatest" is about the most I think one can say with certainty.
I mean we've got 1987 PAs spread over 16 years against competition of uncertain quality. Do we even know if he could have physically held up to catching 130-140 games a year like Bench and Berra did?
Basically, if Gibson wasn't the greatest catcher of his time, then no one in the Negro Leagues in the 30s and 40s - whom he consistently out-hit - was more than a very marginal Hall of Famer. The conversions required to knock Gibson down to the level of Dickey and Cochrane would take his peers out of the Hall altogether.
I can see an era-based case for either Bench or Piazza as the greatest ever. But without very heavy timelining, it just doesn't work.
C: Carter
1B: Porter
2B: Uribe
SS: Belanger
3B: Caminiti
LF: Stargell
CF: Puckett
RF: Bobby Bonds
SP: Joe Niekro, Flanagan, Perez, Kile, Splittorff, (
Fidrych, Lima :-) )RP: Quisenberry, McGraw, Beck, Howe
I guess so. With Glenn being obviously underqualified for this team, and the article referencing George, i don't see the humor in the original post.
That's a different question. I'd agree he was almost certainly better than Dickey and Cochrane.
I can see an era-based case for either Bench or Piazza as the greatest ever. But without very heavy timelining, it just doesn't work.
Honest question. How do we have any idea about how the quality of pitching Gibson faced compares to that Bench or Berra faced? The guys who pitched in the games vs. MLBers would have been the elite of the NeL pitchers.
With all of the exhibition and winter games Gibson played in other countries he probably caught more games in some years than any major league catcher ever did.
Was he catching in those games, or playing 1B?
"But there are stats!" is mainly what it comes down to.
In reality there is a substantial fuzz factor in any comparison between eras. All we really know about Ty Cobb is he dominated the times and conditions he played in. Those "real" numbers don't tell us how he would fare in another context. But the numbers were recorded, so people fool themselves into thinking they can apply factor X to Cobb's stats and have an excellent approximation of what Cobb would do in a "neutral" context (disregarding that there is no such thing as a neutral context.) It's all hogwash.
In 1933 he hit .467 with 55 home runs in 137 games against all levels of competition. His lifetime batting average is said to be higher than .350, with other sources putting it as high as .384, the best in Negro league history.
The Baseball Hall of Fame maintains he hit "almost 800" homers in his 17-year career against Negro league and independent baseball opposition. His lifetime batting average, according to the Hall's official data, was .359. It was reported that he won nine home run titles and four batting championships playing for the Crawfords and the Grays. It is also believed that Gibson hit a home run in a Negro league game at Yankee Stadium that struck two feet from the top of the wall circling the center field bleachers, about 580 feet (180 m) from home plate. Although it has never been conclusively proven, Chicago American Giants infielder Jack Marshall said Gibson slugged one over the third deck next to the left field bullpen in 1934 for the only fair ball hit out of Yankee Stadium. Washington Senators owner Clark Griffith once said that Gibson hit more home runs into Griffith Stadium's distant left field bleachers than the entire American League.
He primarily caught, but he also spent some time in the outfield when he was younger, just like Gary Carter and Johnny Bench.
Griffith exaggerated, but not by that much. In 1943, in perhaps his most amazing slugging exhibition, Gibson hit 10 home runs in 40 games at Griffith Stadium, while the Senators hit 9 in 77 games, and the rest of the American League hit another 14. In 1945, Gibson hit "at least" 4 home runs in Griffith, but the second place Nats only hit 1 all year, and the entire rest of the AL only added another 6. (Source: Brad Snyder, Beyond The Shadow Of The Senators, p. 171 and p. 227; Macmillan Baseball Encyclopedia, 1996 ed., pp. 660-661)
if anyone cares, i did a "conversion" on josh gibson to estimate what his mlb stats would be, i basically got mike piazza's stats but with more triples. so i guess gibson was a piazza-like hitting catcher before piazza.
That sounds fair.
that said, i think paige would have won 300 games and had an era right around 3 and i think gibson would have had 400+ hr.
Gibson's ten may all have been to LF while some of the others might have been hit to RF.
Davis was a much better career player than Jennings, plus he was a regular CFer and 3Bman before he went to SS. He could be the team's 3Bman against LHers. Jennings was the best player in baseball for 2-3 years, but he was only great for like 5 years.
We could also go with Arky Vaughan, although he's another LH hitter.
1B: Porter
2B: Uribe
SS: Belanger
3B: Caminiti
LF: Stargell
CF: Puckett
RF: Bobby Bonds
Porter's WAR is heavily driven by being a C. He loses about 1.5 wins a season at 1B. Surely better to put Stargell at 1B (800 starts spread throughout his career) with Murcer in the OF. Murcer/Puckett/Bonds in the OF (and Cowens on the bench) would cover a lot of ground too. Against tough righties, you could get Porter, Milner, Stargell and Murcer all in the lineup.
EDIT: And how did Ruth end up on the heaven team? I'm glad to know the Lord doesn't get worked up about whorin' and drinkin' but I'd still think he'd make Ruth wait an eon or two just like the roiders. Or is the Big Guy willing to look the other way as long as Ruth hits some dingers?
EDIT 2: What era is our all-time team playing in? I'm not buying this 9/10-man pitching staff and, even if I was in a 9-10 staff era, I think I might still find room for Hoyt Wilhelm. His career ERA+ is the same as Walter Johnson's.
Gibson's ten may all have been to LF while some of the others might have been hit to RF.
Good point, and in fact that's almost certainly true, since the RF wall was only 320' down the line.
To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, sex and beer are God's way of letting us know he loves us and wants us to be happy.
* Yes, I've seen that Next Generation episode. I thought Picard's case was kinda weak and he only won because Ryker was tanking it. Next you'll be telling me there's a Cylon god.
Starters:
C - Josh Gibson
1B - Lou Gehrig
2B - Eddie Collins
3B - Eddie Mathews
SS - Honus Wagner
LF - Ted Williams
CF - Willie Mays
RF - Babe Ruth
Bench:
C - Buck Ewing
1B - Jimmy Foxx
2B - Rogers Hornsby
3B - Home Run Baker
SS - Pop Lloyd
LF - Stan Musial
CF - Ty Cobb
RF - Hank Aaron
UT - Martin Dihigo
Starters (NOT in any order):
Walter Johnson
Lefty Grove
Pete Alexander
Cy Young
Satchel Paige
Closer:
Hoyt Wilhelm (I think he's dead)
Bullpen:
Kid Nichols
Smokey Joe Williams
That's 25, if I counted right. Hardest decision - Pop Lloyd or George Wright. If I read the sources right, which I may not have, Oscar Charleston, after several years of great great CF, got fat and ended up as a first baseman. I don't know how many years he was which player, or even if he got fat and played 1B at all, really. Dihigo is the emergency catcher. If you try to make a lineup of the starters, Eddie Mathews bats 8th. - Brock Hanke
RF - Hank Aaron
Sorry Brock, they're only pining for the fjords.
C: Carter
1B: Porter
2B: Uribe
SS: Belanger
3B: Caminiti
LF: Stargell
CF: Puckett
RF: Bobby Bonds
SP: Joe Niekro, Flanagan, Perez, Kile, Splittorff, Lima
RP: Quisenberry, McGraw, Beck, Howe
I started to compile a list, but stopped when I realized I was including too many from my home team (Astros) and that therefore I must be forgetting too many others for the list to be worth posting. Turns out, the only Astro I had that Bob M didn't is RP Dave Smith (instead of Howe)
---
The NeL issue is unfortunate. Yes, ideally we would always try to rank NeL players into these lists but it's tough because of the lack of data - at least data that's easily accessible and placed as best as possible into context. What makes WAR the go-to stat is that it's easy to use on b-r, and Jonathan recognizes that.
I agree with Snapper on Gibson. I've been involved in a lot of Gibson discussions over the years, and in my opinion "among the greatest catchers ever" is about the best we can do. The question should not be an emotional one, but too often it is. Ironically, I actually think it would be unfair to the greatest MLB catchers to rank him above them on the basis of fragmentary data and barnstorming.
I agree with Snapper on Gibson. I've been involved in a lot of Gibson discussions over the years, and in my opinion "among the greatest catchers ever" is about the best we can do. The question should not be an emotional one, but too often it is. Ironically, I actually think it would be unfair to the greatest MLB catchers to rank him above them on the basis of fragmentary data and barnstorming.
There's nothing unreasonable about that position, as long as you apply the same terminology"---among the greatest outfielders ever"---to Jim Crow Major Leaguers like Ruth and Cobb, rather than omitting the qualifiers only for the Major Leaguers. Since both the Major Leaguers and the Negro Leaguers were playing against obviously restricted competition, that seems about the best we can do. You know damn well that there's no way (for instance) to prove that Ty Cobb was greater than Oscar Charleston, not in the same way you can prove that Barry Bonds was greater than Ken Griffey Jr.
Of course there are two ways out of the bind: The simplest would be to state that your "all-time best" lists are restricted to Major Leaguers only, and don't make any pretense of making any claims beyond that, unless you want to exclude all players from the Jim Crow era, both black and white.
The other would be to let yourself go beyond knowable numbers, take a deep breath, and admit evidence that can't be proven with any mathematical certainty. This is admittedly a messier way to compile a list, but with all evidence considered it might just turn out a team that really is the all-time best, even if no two people might agree with it.
The problem is that assuming things are linear like that isn't necessarily safe. Different environments can cause the transition to affect different players in different ways. The same is true for the jump from AAA to MLB, but the difference is that other than raw quality, the environments between those two levels are quite similar. Not sure that can be said about the Negro Leagues vs MLB.
Obviously though Gibson was a major superstar and deserves to be recognized as such.
Position players two a decade:
1890s = Delahanty, Jennings
1900s = Wagner, Bresnahan (needed him here for a backup C)
1910s = Cobb, Pop Lloyd
1920s = Ruth, Hornsby
1930s = Gehrig, Gibson
1940s = Williams (I suppose this is where Musial would be)
1950s = Mantle, Jackie (or Eddie Mathews it's a very tough call)
So that would be:
C - Gibson
1B - Gehrig
2B - Hornsby
3B - Jackie
SS - Wagner
OF - Williams
OF - Cobb
OF - Ruth
C - Bresnahan
IF - Jennings
IF - Lloyd
OF - Mantle
OF - Delahanty
You could, if you like, get rid of Bresnahan and add Gary Carter. But I always thought Bresnahan has gotten underrated because of the reality of how often Catchers could reasonably play back then.
The 1880s guys are hard because of the vastly different nature of the game but maybe you could also get rid of Bresnahan and add Buck Ewing.
1960s = Mays, Aaron
1970s = Bench, Morgan, Carew
1980s = Schmidt, Henderson, Ripken
1990s = Bonds, ARod, Griffey
2000s = Pujols, Mauer
C - Bench
1B - Pujols
2B - Morgan
3B - Schmidt
SS - ARod
OF - Bonds
OF - Mays
OF - Aaron
The team might need an extra lefty hitter as there are only two in that lineup. I guess you could replace Aaron with Griffey (or throw him out and add Yaz) and Mauer would play for Bench a lot against righties.
C - Mauer
IF - Carew
IF - Ripken
OF - Henderson
OF - Griffey
Andy, I don't see it as an equally reciprocal situation. For one player (Cobb) we have lots of evidence; for the other player (Charleston) we have less evidence. That's simply the way it is, and no amount of hand waving will change that.
It may be that the greatest baseball player ever was a wheat farmer in Iowa in 1932. But since she never played against MLB competition, we don't have enough evidence to say, and we can rank Ruth ahead of her with reasonable certainty.
Andy, I don't see it as an equally reciprocal situation. For one player (Cobb) we have lots of evidence; for the other player (Charleston) we have less evidence. That's simply the way it is, and no amount of hand waving will change that.
Concur. For Charleston we have 3000 NeML PAs, for Cobb we have 13,000 MLB PAs. For Gibson we have 1570 NeML PAs for Ruth we have 10,600 MLB PAs.
The first 162 game schedule in the Majors wasn't until 1961 (AL) and 1962 (NL). But never mind that, because Mickey Cochrane never even played 140 games in a season, and played 130 or more only six times. And in the only nine years Bill Dickey was even eligible for the batting title, he averaged 127 games. Between regular games and exhibition games, including some days he played three games in a row in different towns, Gibson would've easily beaten that.
Cochrane and Dickey also traveled in first class accommodations and ate on a regular schedule. Gibson traveled in beat up buses and cars, and stayed in run down hotels and rooming houses. If you'd dropped Cochrane or Dickey into that sort of environment, I'd love to see how they would've handled it.
Whether Gibson was better than Bench or Piazza, we'll never know, because they played in different eras under radically different conditions. We can argue the points in favor of any of them, but with no definitive answer.
-----------------------------------------
You know damn well that there's no way (for instance) to prove that Ty Cobb was greater than Oscar Charleston, not in the same way you can prove that Barry Bonds was greater than Ken Griffey Jr.
Andy, I don't see it as an equally reciprocal situation. For one player (Cobb) we have lots of evidence; for the other player (Charleston) we have less evidence. That's simply the way it is, and no amount of hand waving will change that.
That completely misses the point. Of course we have more evidence of Cobb's records against white Major Leaguers than we have of Charleston's records in the Negro Leagues. But all that speaks to is Cobb's relative standing within the Major Leagues. It doesn't address how either might have performed in a mixed league against equal competition.
It may be that the greatest baseball player ever was a wheat farmer in Iowa in 1932. But since she never played against MLB competition, we don't have enough evidence to say, and we can rank Ruth ahead of her with reasonable certainty.
It doesn't speak too well of your confidence in your own argument that you'd compare Oscar Charleston to a hypothetical woman as a way of making a point, but then your comparisons are always colorful if nothing else.
Is it really likely that the best players in a league drawing from 10-12% of the population are going to be better than the best players in a league drawing from the other 90%?
So it doesn't seem likely to you that Willie Mays could have been the best player in his league. But he was.
This is a classic Musial-related thread in that no one's actually talking about Musial. Stan the Also-Ran.
Prior to that, all the known records and all the known championships were held by American players, and whenever discussions took place as to the "best all-time player", the only real dispute was how to compare the tournament players (or "fun players", as they were referred to by gamblers) to the shadow "champions" of the back roads and bar rooms, where no records were kept but the competition was every bit as intense, or even more so.
Bottom line: Within ten years after the first Filipinos came over here and started gambling and playing in our tournaments, it became universally recognized that the top Filipinos were as good as or better than the top American players. And with the competition now coming from all over Asia and Europe, there are no more than a handful of Americans considered to be in the top 20 overall.
And yet before the mid-1980's, the world of Filipino pool was even more unknown to Americans than the feats of the Negro Leaguers were to the general white public of the 1920's and 30's. Even for those who saw the NeLers play, there were only tales of wonder, and few if any concrete bits of written statistical evidence.
Knowing what we do about how the Filipinos fared once they came over here, it's not unrealistic to imagine that their best players prior to that time were a match for our best, even without statistical "proof". And knowing what we do about how the best black players fared in the Major Leagues once they were integrated---and how their fathers and grandfathers fared in exhibitions against the Major Leaguers of their time---it takes more than "hand waving" to pretend that we can say with any assurance at all that the best Major Leaguers in the era of Cobb and Charleston were necessarily better than the best Negro Leaguers.
Look at the NL offensive leaderboards of the 1950's and 1960's and then repeat that comment with a straight face. I'll see your response tomorrow after the Hitchcock mini-festival is over.
It is a little dangerous to necessarily extrapolate the percentage of black players who were top hitting stars from the 50s and 60s to the teens through 30s, particularly since the trend really didn't hold by the end of the 80s. IOW it might have just been a 40s through 60s thing and not necessarily a teens through 60s thing. Or it could have been the same throughout.
The way I see it, you can probably bump a guy like Charleston all the way up into Joe DiMaggio/Tris Speaker territory and be pretty sure he's at least close to there. But it's just so hard to have him surpass a guy like Cobb, because even the tiniest bit of regression based uncertainty would have him come up short. When it came to MLB stars of the teens, there were two groups: Ty Cobb and everyone else. I really think Gibson is the only pre-integration Negro Leaguer with enough of enough to get him up into that kind of rarefied air.
Dog meat is a PED.
Pool is nowhere near as popular now as it was 60 or 70 years ago, when bar pastimes were a much more common form of distraction. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a commensurate decline in general ability as the talent pool evaporated. Lord knows it happened with boxing.
At what point since the 1950s has it not been obviously, objectively true that the best African-American and/or "black" players were as good as or better than the best white players? Jackie Robinson, Campanella, Mays, Banks, Aaron, Frank Robinson, Bob Gibson, Clemente, Stargell, Carew, Rickey Henderson, Barry Bonds, Ken Griffey Jr., Ozzie Smith, Barry Larkin, Frank Thomas, Pedro Martinez, Matt Kemp, etc., etc.
But if the question being asked is, "Who was better, Cobb or Charleston?", the lack of evidence of how good a player Charleston was is equally damning to both sides of the question. How can you express an opinion about how much better Cobb was than Charleston or how much likely he is to have been better without a sense of how good a player Charleston was? If you can't say anything about Charleston, then you can't say anything about Cobb in relation to Charleston.
I don't understand what you mean here. The OPS+ league leaders from 1988 - 1991 included Darryl Strawberry, Kevin Mitchell, Fred McGriff, Barry Bonds, Rickey Henderson, and Frank Thomas.
All I'm saying is, just because during the 50s and 60s more than half of the top five position stars were black, doesn't mean that would have also been the case from the 1910s to 1940s.
But you can. If the weather on July 4th this year in Phoenix is 121 degrees, while I can't say for sure it will be hotter than any July 4th since I've been here (since I don't know all the high temps the last 11 years), I can still take an educated guess that it probably would be, since days that hot on any day are so incredibly rare.
Players of Cobb's quality (in the context of MLB when he played) are so rare, if you have another player whose quality you know a lot less about, your best guess would naturally be lower than that. It's regression more than anything.
If you're not including Frank Thomas as one of the best hitters of the 1990s, you're not doing it right.
But more generally, the 1950's don't have to be representative of the 1910s-30s to put Gibson and Charleston on a 25-man "best dead" roster. The 1980s work just fine. By BB-Ref WAR, the best player of the 1980s - by 10 wins - was African-American (Rickey), as were 4 of the next 11 (Ozzie, Raines, Dawson, Eddie Murray). Since they started playing together, it has always been the case that the best African-American and/or black baseball players have been at least comparable in talent and value to the best white players. If that was also true in the 1920s and 1930s, then Charleston and Gibson have very strong cases for being comparable in talent to their white contemporaries.
Position players. Thomas was one of the best five hitters, but not one of the best five position players. And yeah, I'd put Gibson in my top 25 dead team, I just did. Delahanty is in there and not Charleston because I wanted representation across several decades (and Hornsby was needed as an infielder). And Williams, Cobb, Ruth and Mantle all fall under the "regression" explanation above.
BB-Ref WAR, 1990 - 1999, position players only:
1. Barry Bonds, 77.9
2. Ken Griffey, Jr., 65.0
3. Jeff Bagwell, 55.0
4. Craig Biggio, 51.4
5.(t) Barry Larkin, 50.6
5.(t) Frank Thomas, 50.6
So no, neither Frank, nor Larkin would be in my 90s top 5. Nor Biggio for that matter either.
Well, you're the one who mentioned "90s". But we're getting into semantics. There was a period of time where Frank Thomas was unquestionably one of the two or three best players in major-league baseball, even with his horrific baserunning and fielding.
At what point since the 1950s has it not been obviously, objectively true that the best African-American and/or "black" players were as good as or better than the best white players? Jackie Robinson, Campanella, Mays, Banks, Aaron, Frank Robinson, Bob Gibson, Clemente, Stargell, Carew, Rickey Henderson, Barry Bonds, Ken Griffey Jr., Ozzie Smith, Barry Larkin, Frank Thomas, Pedro Martinez, Matt Kemp, etc., etc.
As good, yes. Better, I don't think so.
All I'm saying is, just because during the 50s and 60s more than half of the top five position stars were black, doesn't mean that would have also been the case from the 1910s to 1940s.
Exactly.
Look at the NL offensive leaderboards of the 1950's and 1960's and then repeat that comment with a straight face. I'll see your response tomorrow after the Hitchcock mini-festival is over.
Andy, are you arguing that blacks have some inherent superiority to whites in playing baseball? Because, if that were true, why are approximately zero of the best players today American blacks?
Isn't it more likely that baseball drew a disproportionate amount of attention/effort from blacks in the '50s and '60s because it was a rare escape from poverty, and now there are lots of other options?
When a large percentage of the white population had baseball as a rare escape from poverty (1900-1930's), it's likely you got a lot more great white ballplayers, than in the '50s and '60 where an average white guy could earn a decent living anywhere, or even go to college with relative ease.
So something like Gibson, Suttles, Wells, Lloyd, Charleston, Torriente, Home Run Johnson or Frank Grant and maybe Pete Hill would cover a nice range of positions and active years. And you can then add Cobb, Ruth, Hornsby, Collins, Cochrane, Wagner, Delahanty, Gehrig, Jennings (my list so "peak" guys rule), Speaker, DiMaggio and Foxx would be a good dozen. There's not a lukewarm HOFer in there besides Jennings and I felt like I needed another shortstop, and for four years Jennings fit in quite well with the rest.
There's plenty of solid HOF guys from that era who wouldn't be in that top 20, whether it's Charlie Gehringer and Arky Vaughan or Biz Mackey and Turkey Stearnes. But if I were to guess at the right ratio, that (around 40%) would be my guess. A little less from like 1890-1910, a little more from say 1925-1942.
But that's still just a guess.
How small is your set of "best players today" that it doesn't include Andrew McCutchen and Matt Kemp?
So right now that ratio looks like 25 to 30% (3 out of 11 or 12 on the list).
EDIT: I forgot Cespedes who should count, but I don't think he would make the top 12 yet either.
Dog meat is a PED.
Yeah, but practicing rotation and then playing nine ball is even more of one. It's like going from Justin Verlander to Carl Pavano, and the Filipinos have been doing it for many decades.
Pool is nowhere near as popular now as it was 60 or 70 years ago, when bar pastimes were a much more common form of distraction. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a commensurate decline in general ability as the talent pool evaporated. Lord knows it happened with boxing.
It's possible, but not likely. BITGOD (and there actually was such a thing in pool), there was so much easy money to be had from suckers on the local level** that local players never had to be that good to take it down. Whereas today, the easy money to be picked up from one-on-one pool gambling has evaporated, since the fish are throwing away their money on lottery tickets, poker and casinos, where they think they can win, rather than in a game that takes far more apparent skill. (I say "apparent" since poker is every bit as much of a skill game in the long run.) Which means that in order to make a living at the game today a MUCH higher level of skill is required.
In addition, the equipment today is far tougher than BITGOD. The pockets are smaller and cut at angles that make shots down the rail far more likely to jar than they used to on most tables. Add the foreign players to the mix and the overall level of talent at the top is almost certainly at an all time high.
**There were over 2000 pool rooms in New York City in the 1920's. You'd be lucky to find two dozen today. More proof of our declining culture.
He may not be the right answer, and he's definitely not top 12 overall, but Adam Jones probably belongs in this part of the conversation.
This seems to me to agree with Andy's basic point. If you agree that the top NeL players deserve to be considered in the conversation, then I'm not sure there's any disagreement.
Isn't it more likely that baseball drew a disproportionate amount of attention/effort from blacks in the '50s and '60s because it was a rare escape from poverty, and now there are lots of other options?
When a large percentage of the white population had baseball as a rare escape from poverty (1900-1930's), it's likely you got a lot more great white ballplayers, than in the '50s and '60 where an average white guy could earn a decent living anywhere, or even go to college with relative ease.
First, I'm not arguing for any "inherent" superiority of black ballplayers, either then or now. What I am saying, and all I am saying, is that you can't show with the statistics we have that the best MLB players in the Jim Crow era were better than the best NeL players. Was Cobb better than Charleston? Was Grove better than Paige? To state either of those propositions---or their opposite---is more a matter of faith and / or intuition than any sort of rigorous study.
I brought up the leaderboards of the 50's and 60's not to show any "inherent" superiority of black ballplayers, but to make the point that simply assuming the superiority of the best white Major Leaguers in the Jim Crow era over their best black contemporaries in the Negro Leagues is just that---an assumption, an assertion that can't be proven. It's the same reason I brought up that comparison of American and Filipino pool players. There are simply too many unknown and conjectural factors out there to make any blanket statements of superiority, no matter how many closed circles of statistics you can gather about one of those sets of players.
Ultimately we just know more about Ty Cobb's playing career than Oscar Charleston's. And at that extremely high level of performance, it gives Cobb an advantage if we were to take a best guess at how good they were. Gibson is the only one whom the statistical and contemporary evidence we have is so overwhelming that I think he reaches that level of certainty. People thought Lloyd and Charleston were great players. They stared in disbelief at Gibson.
But I'd say that only supports my belief, not rebukes it. All of those old-timey pool players would be doing something else these days. Surely you can't think that only the most naturally talented potential pool players are attracted to the game; there's a discover process, a winnowing, a refinement of talent that produces the best wheat when allowed to shed much chaff. The same thing certainly held for boxing during this same period, when New York played host to hundreds of boxing clubs and you could find a professional card every night of the week. In today's environment do you think there's a chance in hell Benny Leonard (still universally considered an all-time elite lightweight) becomes a boxer? All-time elite lightheavyweight Gene Tunney? That's boxing's loss. Obviously that's a good thing for an contemporary Leonard or Tunney equivalents of course, their brains have more value to society as something more than targets but that's neither here nor there.
Well that's an entirely separate issue, and one very pertinent to boxing as well, as the 1920s was an era with 6oz gloves, almost no referee stoppages, varying judging rules and standards, and nonexistent athletic commissions that allowed Harry Greb to fight 20+ times a year. Today's bigger, more uniform gloves with high tech padding means broken hands are things of the past, opening up new techniques of punching and blocking, for example. I don't think that detracts from the larger point - bigger pool equates to better talent at the top, all things considered.
Charleston was often compared to Cobb by many of their Major League contemporaries, and not unfavorably, and by white sportswriters who saw him play. McGraw thought Charleston was better. There's no way to prove any of that, but there's one more thing we do know: Cobb refused to compete against blacks after a not so great showing against some black Cuban teams early in his career. Perhaps it was merely racism on Cobb's part, but in that case it seems strange that that same racism wouldn't have stopped him from playing against blacks before. OTOH Charleston never ducked competing against whites.
I'd say that's true if you were just to talk about the United States, but that bigger American talent pool has now been replaced by the foreign pool, which is infinitely deeper, especially in Asia. If that hadn't happened, I'd be more likely to consider your point valid. Speaking from my relatively limited experience, there was far more pool talent in the Washington area 40 or 45 years ago than there is today. But since the top local players now compete on a national level, and the top national players compete against the best foreign players, the talent at the very top hasn't really dropped. I've seen the best of them play since the mid-1960's and the best players from any era aren't any better or worse than the players from other time periods.
Of course pool is also different from boxing in one very important respect: In pool, there's almost never been a (male) player since Willie Mosconi who's been capable of winning more than about 20% of the biggest tournaments against world competition; the talent difference among the top 10 players is much smaller than the difference among the top 10 boxers in any weight division.
You must be Registered and Logged In to post comments.
<< Back to main