- This topic has 10 replies, 9 voices, and was last updated 4 months, 4 weeks ago by
.
-
Posts
-
Though they had a methodology, it still seems to have been opinion-driven.
Stan barely made the top 10, Albert is 30 and Gibson is at 33.
https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/33145121/top-100-mlb-players-all
I find this list laughable. I don’t have a issue with where Musial is. But pujols all the way down at thirty. Trout way too high. Funny how ESPN just had a article today that was asking if Oscar Charleston was maybe the best player ever and they had this big list of players based on some criteria but didn’t look like this list. Like I said, more or less a joke. But its all opinion.
It’s all designed to create discussion and clicks. Albert has not aged as well as some others, which is unfortunate. If they had done a list after 2011, he may have ranked higher than he does now. Not many right handed hitters did it better than Albert. Hank Aaron and Willie Mays, perhaps.
Pedro being ahead of several pitchers on the list makes it null and void in me taking it seriously……. Great pitcher but not worthy of where he’s ranked.
“Funny how ESPN just had an article today that was asking if Oscar Charleston was maybe the best player ever…”
Thanks for bringing that article to my attention, Willie. Charleston the greatest? That’s a pretty silly idea, considering Josh Gibson was a far more dominant Negro Leagues batter than outfielder Charleston — and Gibson freakin’ played catcher. Charleston’s career Negro League OPS+ was a tremendous 184 (roughly 145-155 or so if properly converted to the Blanco Leagues). Josh Gibson however posted a vastly superior career 215 OPS+, which converts to Hornsby and Gehrig territory.
In other words, Gibson was unquestionably the greatest hitting catcher in history by a wiiiide margin, and there’s an argument that he was surpassed as a hitter by only Ruth & Williams. Which is why I would contend that Josh Gibson is the greatest position player in baseball history.
Babe Ruth, though, is easily the greatest overall ballplayer. Because during his four seasons as a full-time twirler (age 20-23), he pitched over 1,000 innings and had MLB’s 3rd-best ERA behind just Walter Johnson and Old Pete Alexander, two pretty fair country pitchers with nearly 800 wins between them. So basically, he was pitching at a Hall Of Fame level in his early 20’s, then switched to solely hitting…and you know the rest.
——————————–
As for the top 100 list, I feel like it just rehashes a lot of the same Peak v. Longevity arguments we see every year in Hall Of Fame voting.
Yea Bob I agree with you on Gibson. A damn fine baseball player that should have been playing in the majors. I personally really enjoyed the article. I agree with the notion that you have to look at the numbers posted in negro leagues were real. I guess you can compensate for lengths of seasons and ballparks though they didn’t have much control over ballparks they had to play in. Far as above poster who mentioned pujols aging. He had a lot of injuries which hurt him after leaving at Louis though his numbers weren’t bad but yea not as good as his first ten but those were historic figures. Far as later, sure he got old. But same can be said for almost all of the legends and anyone else that played til they were older. Their numbers were far off their glory years. Let’s see how trout is doing 10 years down the road before we start putting him high on list.
I also don’t like combining pitchers and hitters on these list. To me baseball is first about pitching since they have the ball to start. So to me a pitcher would be number one and so on. Now if we were talking about fame well it’s a different story cause everyone knows people are drawn to the batting numbers.
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.