| Keith's Player Commentary: Players 1-10 |
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| 1. Babe Ruth Ah, the one consistency between all five lists, and indeed between most knowledgeable baseball fans. People have different opinions regarding whom the best football, basketball, and hockey players of all time were, but rarely is Ruth’s supremacy put into question. Among these four major sports, baseball is most accurately evaluated through statistics. You would have to really misinterpret the statistics to come up with anyone other than Ruth at #1. 2. Ty Cobb Cobb was one of the five best hitters ever and one of the top 10 defensive outfielders of all time. What’s difficult to analyze with Cobb is his baserunning, since we only have Caught Stealing data for half of his years, and only three of those were during his prime. We do know that he has the fourth most stolen bases in history, the most steals of home plate in history, one of the best SB% of his era, and scores 40% of his times on base, one of the best marks ever. Certainly, Ty was one of the most complete players of all time. 3. Walter Johnson Unlike Scott and Asher, I do not believe that the starting pitcher has a much greater impact on team wins than position players do. Nevertheless, it is a valuable role, and Walter is as obvious a choice as best pitcher of all time as Honus Wagner is for the best shortstop of all time. In fact, here’s a difficult question: What is the most egregious effrontery, ranking a pitcher ahead of Walter, a shortstop ahead of Honus, or any player ahead of Babe? I don’t have a good answer. 4. Rogers Hornsby I can’t figure how there can be people out there who aren’t impressed that the greatest right-handed hitter of all time was a second baseman! While Hornsby-haters are quick to claim that he wasn’t good enough defensively to play second base, I counter that he was apparently good enough to play shortstop, where he played about 20% of his career. Whether you look at Fielding Percentage, Fielding Runs, or Fielding Win Shares, Rogers doesn’t look that good on defense, but he certainly doesn’t look like enough of a liability to justify ranking another second baseman ahead of him. 5. Ted Williams It isn’t as difficult to rank Ted as one might think given how much time he missed due to wars. But it’s actually pretty clear that his hitting, fielding, and baserunning are all not quite at Ruth’s level. All in all, he’ s just too one-dimensional of a player to rate much higher, and too incredible of a hitter to rate much lower. 6. Honus Wagner Not only is his superiority over all other shortstops impressive, but Honus’ ability to play any other position on the field if needed is pretty breathtaking as well. I tend to favor offense over defense when ranking position players, but right now it’s hard to say that I’d rather have a team of nine Ted Williams than nine Honus Wagners. Would Williams’ offensive advantage counteract Wagner’s defensive dominance? I realize that this is not the only way to look at the issue of who is the more valuable player, but it is an interesting one. 7. Barry Bonds Bonds should be ranked higher than this, but we revise our lists at the All-Star break and tend to rate active players conservatively. Yes, just a few months ago it seemed possible for Bonds to get injured and spend a couple of years as a mediocre DH struggling to reach Aaron’s record. Now it seems as though he may have his best seasons still ahead of him and break the record in ’05. I don’t see how he could be ranked lower than #4 on next year’s list. 8. Mickey Mantle People often remember Mickey as a slugger, and nothing more. Perhaps what he ought to be known for is grounding into fewer double plays per plate appearance than any hall of famer for whom we have significant GIDP stats, with the notable exceptions of Chuck Klein and Joe Morgan. He also had an astounding 80.1 SB%, and was no slouch in center field. 9. Lou Gehrig Where you rank Lou Gehrig ultimately comes down to two things. One is how much you penalize him for being a first baseman, and one is how much you penalize him for being the second-best player on his team. I rank him below Mantle because I think that if you were starting a team from scratch, it would be easier to find a good-hitting first baseman to go with Mantle than a decent hitting center fielder to go along with Gehrig. I deal with the second issue in Bill James Comment #14. 10. Willie Mays Bucky Dent, Ron Swoboda: these are mediocre players who are remembered for single plays in their careers. Willie Mays, certainly one of the best players of all time, is also known for a single play: an overrated catch. Willie was one of the best defensive center fielders ever, but the hype of that catch misleads people into thinking that he was the best ever. Although Mays has impressive career numbers, his offensive career value is just lower than Mantle. Plus, none of his individual seasons rank near the top 50 for position players, making his offensive peak value astonishingly low for someone who is often considered as Ruth’s main challenger for the #1 spot. |
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