Greatest baseball players of all time

By admin · Tuesday, May 11th, 2010

I like sports. I like sports analysis and discussion. The grease that lubricates sports discussion has historically consisted of some variation of “Who’s Better: X or Y?”

I recall being 10-11 years old and just laboriously pouring over Maury Allen’s book where he listed the Top 100 players in MLB history; I’m a sucker for lists, be they films or books or rankings of Supreme Court justices, I want to play.

Performance analysis has advanced since 1981 (although you shouldn’t tell Murray Chass…hell, you can’t really tell Bob Costas; my guess is that we would agree far more often than not on the big issues of the day, perhaps even on more metaphysical matters – but when I watch he and Keith Olbermann talk about baseball as if the sabermetric insights of the past quarter-century haven’t happened, that they continue to deny the massive paradigm shift that has occurred during their professional careers and instead revert back to the same level of understanding they had as children, I get incredibly frustrated) and my views have evolved; first with Bill James, then with Pete Palmer, then Rob Neyer and Baseball Prospectus.

At my blog, http://theblogofrevelation.blo g.sponscore.com/ I will unveil my ranking of the 200 Best Major League Baseball Players of All Time; my reliance is not on anecdote, not on fitting into a particular childhood narrative that player X simply must be better than player y. My reliance is on facts and not faith, on statistics and not storyline. I happen to believe that baseball is more objectively quantifiable – the “truth” of what happens on a baseball diamond more knowable than in virtually any human endeavor.

With each player, ranked 200 down to 1, will be a comment of whatever length and nature that seems appropriate; I’ll also note his primary position, the teams with which he was most associated, the years he played, and a handful of statistics that I find to be most relevant and used to determine the composition of my list:

OPS+, AERA, Batter Fielder Wins, Pitcher Wins and, from baseballprospectus.com WARP3.

WARP3 is, in my view, the superior “universal theory of everything” number; I prefer it vastly to Win Shares (heresy to some, I recognize) as expressing actual career value. The list is skewed to career, as opposed to peak value – I’m attempting to express who had the greatest careers as opposed to “on any given day, who would you pick to win one baseball game for you.” That’s a reasonable list, I guess, but it’s not this one. I add the Pete Palmer numbers, which used to be expressed in the Total Player Rating from Total Baseball and are now BFW and PW in the Baseball Encyclopedia as they serve to express the value of peak, and give a different defensive perspective than the Davenport translations from WARP3. BP expresses peak itself with a JAWS number, taking the 7 best years and combining it with the WARP3, and at some point, all of those numbers will be sortable and, one assumes, they’ll put out their own list of this type; I might even prefer it to mine.

But right now – nope. Right now, I want to read a book that, using the statistics which I believe are most revelatory, lists the 200 best MLB players ever. A book that adjusts for era and ballpark; that doesn’t reflexively list the same top players at each position that the author decided upon when he was 12…

Spoiler alert…..

The greatest catcher of all time is no longer Johnny Bench.

…if there was a book like that, I’d buy it.

But there’s not. So – I’m writing this list.

200-1. The Best 200 Baseball Players Ever.

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