re: Ruth: I don’t think Ruth was even the best player on his team. Lou Gehrig didn’t put up the same home run numbers, but he exceeded Ruth by every single other measure, even beating Ruth in Triple Crowns, 1-0.
And then, the argument against Gehrig is that the only reason he put up those numbers is that he saw so many fastballs because Ruth batted behind him (Gehrig batted 3rd, Ruth 4th.)
Catch 22 there, basically eliminating both from being GOAT’s in baseball.
That’s absurd. It’s not true by any stretch of the imagination; in fact, you named basically the only statistic in which Gehrig outpaced Ruth.
Moreover, Ruth batted third and Gehrig cleanup, not the other way around, and there’s no reason it should disqualify either from an objective evaluation. They each still had to hit the ball.
re: wilt+russell vs jordan.
Wilt is not a GOAT: He couldn’t beat Russell’s Celtics.
Russell is not a GOAT: he is generously listed as 6’ 10", and thus probably couldn’t even play center today. At best, he would be a power forward.
So who are the concensus GOATS just in this thread? If I have this right…
Tight End: Kellen Winslow
Offensive Lineman: Anthony Munoz
Linebacker: Lawrence Taylor
Safety: Ronnie Lott
Everyone else has either had someone else mentioned instead of them, or a contrarian arguing against them. Did I miss anything?
And Jimmy, you’re cracking me up in virtually every post. Love it. (“So what, you’re telling me I haven’t heard people argue?” hehheh.)
I would argue that Munoz’s GOAT status is a function of short memories. Jim Parker did things on the offensive line that just shouldn’t be possible, like taking out three defenders in one play. Alas, offensive linemen don’t have books and such written about them like backs and receivers do, so he’s largely faded from the public consciousness. Pity.
Not that Munoz wasn’t a great tackle–he was–but I’d put Parker just a tad higher.
The word on Munoz is that he’s the guy all the other Hall of Famers are in awe of.
But he’s second only to Jordan on career-average points, right? Jordan, on the other hand, isn’t second only to Wilt’s record-breaking career-average rebounds; just like Jordan can’t touch Wilt on Most Points In A Season or Most Points In A Game, he’s not even close to Wilt’s assorted rebounding records: not Most Rebounds In A Season, not Most Rebounds In A Game – and, of course, not Most Career Rebounds.
Wilt started off as the guy with both the Most Points By A Rookie and[ Most Rebounds By A Rookie; he kept on keeping on from there. Jordan couldn’t break either of those right out of the gate; no one could. But he eventually tied the big guy up on consecutive seasons leading the league in scoring, even if he never really made rebounding part of his schtick.
What else do we look at, then? Career assists? Career steals? There’s a whole constellation of stuff going on.
You can’t judge a guard by rebounds, that’s not his job.
Wilt’s 100 point game was mostly a stunt, by the way, not really a true, organic outcome of performance. His team was pretty much feeding him the ball exclusivly in the 2nd half just to see if they could get him over 100. That’s an overrated game.
I had Shannon Sharpe instead of Winslow.
Can we agree on Tiger yet as the GOAT for golf, or do people still think he has to pass 18 to earn that?
Well, yeah. We’ve been doing GOAT by position for football, but just asking whether Jordan was the GOAT in basketball period. So should we shift this to discussing Jordan as the GOAT at guard?
As to exact number, sure. But he started off by establishing the all-time Most Points By A Rookie In A Game while doing likewise at Most Points Per Game By A Rookie, and soon he was all-time #1 at racking up Most Points Per Game In A Season easy as also sewing up the #2 and #3 slots. He’s got all kinds of crazy per-game scoring records: most 50-point games in a season, most consecutive 50-point games in a season, most points in an All-Star Game – it’s his signature schtick. (Well, that and the rebounding, I guess.)
Well, since he plays a minimal non-major schedule in order to win more majors, I think we have to wait. If he played a normal schedule I’d have him in now.
He is not the Greatest of All Time. He has the potential to be, yes, but Nicklaus still had a better career.
He will pass up Snead’s record for the most lifetime victories pretty soon. He plays a limited schedule and will still have the most victories ,all time. His competition is trained by golf pros from the womb. The overall quality of golfers is much superior to the ones Jack or Sam had to beat. Yet he is better and they all know it.
People quibble .like the 4 majors in a row argument. He won all 4 in a row. He had the trophies on his fireplace ledge, yet some said it is not a slam because he had to win them in one year. What a crappy argument that was. He sloammed. He won all the majors in a row.
How can you argue for Wilt being better by his scoring when Jordan has a higher scoring average? Jordan takes that. Next you can compare rebounds to assists or steals or something like that. Chamberlain was a two time all NBA first team defensive player, Jordan was nine times.
Ruth had a 342 batting average and was a very, very good pitcher. Yes he was a better athlete than Pujols.
Waldo I don’t think that the point-for-point statistical argument is really the best method of comparing the two players at all, really. So I didn’t mean to say “Jordan outscored Wilt by a quarter of a PPG, QED.” I was just pointing out that using Wilt’s one-year scoring average won’t get it done when Jordan outscored Wilt for their careers.
I think that a fair evaluation of Jordan vs. Wilt goes like this:
The first point, which you need to really deal with before you move beyond it to any other arguments, is that Jordan won six titles, and was the unquestioned star of his team and the league each of those years. It can fairly be said that Jordan personally won those titles as much as any team sport player has ever won a title. His early career arc took him deeper and deeper into the playoffs year by year, then he finally won a championship, and from that point on, basically, when he played, he won the championship, and when he didn’t play (94-95), somebody else won the championship and his old team was only decent. Wilt won two titles - once as the unquestionable star of his team, averaging like 25 and 25, and once as a 35 year old when he was less of an offensive option and more of a defender/rebounder for two Hall of Fame guards in their primes (a supporting-old-man role he shared in the regular season with also-decrepit Elgin Baylor, so I mean, that was a pretty good team).
Shorthand for the above:
Jordan, 5 MVPs, 6 rings, and 6 (S I X!) Finals MVPs.
Wilt, 4 MVPs, a couple rings, and a Finals MVP (which he won in '71, and they didn’t give one out in '67, so you could credit him with two, but if he had won the first maybe they wouldn’t have given him the second one, which was a lot tougher call… but anyway).
So already, in my opinion, Jordan has a huge head start. There’s the Bill Russell problem for Wilt, which has been mentioned already, but I’m inclined to say it isn’t such an immediate disqualifier for him because honestly, those Celtics teams were fucking ridiculous, and Wilt was getting like 30 and 30 every time they played them, so what do you want him to do? Of course, it doesn’t have to be much of a tarnish to put him underneath a guy who literally was never beaten once he was on top, unless you count his re-un-retirement.
The second major thing I think you have to look at is that, and I’m trying to be tactful here, but subjectively speaking, they played some watered-down basketball in Wilt’s day. I mean, seriously. And look - I’m a big advocate of the approach that doesn’t hold a player’s era against him, so I’m not inclined to just say that since Shaq or Dwight Howard or Hakeem would eat his lunch, he should just be dismissed.
I am inclined to say, though, that, all things considered, Wilt Chamberlain catching the ball, back to the basket, six feet from the rim, and not even making a move before finger rolling over a six-five guy and getting a foul called (which foul shot he would then miss six out of ten times) (or getting blocked repeatedly by Bill Russell and following his own miss because nobody else comes up to his elbows or even bothers to enter the lane, much less double down on him hard), just isn’t that subjectively and contextually appealing as what Jordan did. It wasn’t his fault how tall everyone else was or how aesthetically ridiculous the game still was 50 years ago, and certainly he was an unbelievable outlier athletically, but just off the top of your head, Jordan played in the playoffs against Bird, Isaiah, Stockton and Malone, Barkley, Shaq and Penny, Kemp and Payton, Dominique, Drexler, and Ewing. It was much harder to be dominant in the 90s, in my opinion, because there were so many more great players.
Those are the two big points, I think. Then you can look at stats, where Wilt is as impressive as anybody in any sport except Gretzky, probably, or maybe Barry Bonds. I just don’t really think the stats outweigh the other stuff.
Why don’t we just stick to real sports?
I kid, I kid. Actually I wanted to comment more on the basketball part of the debate. There may sometimes be a bias toward players from more recent eras but Russell, Chamberlain, Jordan all played in games that we can watch on film. I choose to ignore the statistics and go with what I can see. Michael Jordan is simply more dominant, more electric, against better opponents. If anyone from any sport could be considered the greatest of all time I have a hard time not believing he is the one. I saw Gretzky play live and I’m not even convinced he was better than Mario Lemieux although he did clearly raise his teammates’ level of play more than Mario did. If I vote for anyone for GOAT status it’s Jordan, stats be damned.
And that’s the other part of the math: if we start arguing that Jordan’s 5 MVPs and 6 rings make up a master stat, then he’s of course surpassed on MVPs-and-rings by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who scored more points than Jordan while racking up more rebounds than anyone not named Russell or Chamberlain – and, of course, that’s why there’d be a “Bill Russell problem” for Jordan as well, since he surpasses Jordan on the MVPs-and-rings metric likewise, and edges him out in this or that category to boot.
So we won’t use that as the master stat – not if we start off with the assumption that Jordan is the best and want to hunt for a metric that’ll favor him against all comers: we can say points-per-game average in a career is the master stat, since he never cracked the top five for points-per-game in a season but didn’t have a bad year at the end; Wilt’s got four of the top five, but we can disregard those upon noting that he threw off his career average with a bad last year upon playing one year longer than Jordan did.
Jordan never led the league in rebounds; Wilt did; we’ll disregard that, as it wasn’t really in Jordan’s job description. Jordan never led the league in assists; Wilt did; we’ll disregard that, ditto. Jordan leads Wilt in career average by five-one-hundredths of a point thanks to Wilt’s lackluster extra year there at the end? We could run with that, sure.
Well, it’s a little easier if you’ve got Scottie Pippen on your side; the expanding talent pool works both ways, after all.
Still, yes, we could make out the argument that Jordan in his prime would beat Wilt in his prime if each is partnered with an equally-talented team; it’s the sort of argument that Montana-v-Marino usually comes down to. But at that point, stats go out the window as the speculation starts in earnest; it comes down to what you said about how “you can look at stats, where Wilt is as impressive as anybody in any sport except Gretzky, probably, or maybe Barry Bonds. I just don’t really think the stats outweigh the other stuff.” I think the “other stuff” – the era-to-era comparison – pretty much has to swallow up the stats entirely to make the GOAT point in question.