Ok, the baseball season is nearing the end, and I need one more baseball thread. I tried a search to see if this was covered, but I found nothing. (but I suck at searching)
So here it is. In your humble opinion, Who was the Greatest Baseball Player of All Time? And why do you think so?
For my money, it’s Pete Rose!
A 22 year major league career.
Rookie of the Year as a 2nd Baseman
National League MVP as a Left Fielder
World Series MVP as a 3rd Baseman
17 time All-Star with starts at 5 different positions
10 seasons with over 200 hits
And of course, All-time leader in hits, at bats, and games played.
[ul]
[li]Career batting average of .366[/li][li]Won 12 batting titles, including 9 in a row from 1907 thru 1915.[/li][li]Third all time in stolen bases with 892.[/li][li]First in runs scored with 2245.[/li][li]Second in career hits with 4191.[/li][li]Led the American League in slugging eight times.[/li][li]Scored 100 runs 11 times in his career.[/li][li]Drove in over 100 runs 7 times in his career.[/li][li]Led the American League in runs 5 times.[/li][li]Led the American League in hits 8 times.[/li][li]Youngest AL player to reach 1,000 hit level (24 years old);[/li][li]Played for 24 years; 22 years with Detroit, 2 with Philadelphia.[/li][li]One of the first five players elected to the Hall of Fame in 1936. Received 98.23 of the vote (222 out of 226)[/li][li]Batted over .400 3 times.[/li][li]Batted under .320 only once in his career.[/li][/ul]
I think the last one might be the most impressive. It is a close call…
Are stats required? I hope not because I’m too lazy and it’s too early to do the research. But I gotta go with Teddy Baseball, The Splendid Splinter.
Last man to average .400 for the season, and I don’t see it happening again anytime soon. Besides, he just loved that freakin’ game like nobody’s bidness. You gotta admire that.
is the right one. Babe Ruth. One of the better pitchers of his day - career marks of 94-46, 2.28 ERA. Absolutely the greatest hitter ever. Period. There simply can be no debate. For example, these are his stats from age 25 to 32:
No one has ever put up numbers like this in any era or in any time. Imagine what he would have done if he had not drunk himself into a stupor so often. [Then again, maybe the drinking helped.]
As far as the earlier suggestions go - Ty Cobb and Ted Williams are worthy choices. However, I simply don’t see any way to rationally argue for Pete Rose. Setting aside the scandal that ended his managerial career, longevity alone does not make you great. At his best, Pete Rose would not crack the top 20 players of all time. Would you really start Rose ahead of Williams, Cobb or Ruth? Please.
No, stats aren’t required, I’m just bored at work…I’ll put Williams up there, especially because of the home runs (over 500)…but I repsect the longevity, as well as the sheer number of hits and runs that Rose and Cobb had…
Batting great and all, and if that were the sole requirement, it’d be tough for me to decide between Ruth and Williams. Stan Musial would be close in the running for me also, but then again I’m a Cards fan.
But for greatest player, I’d go for a pitcher. Sandy Koufax, there will never be another like him.
It is Tyrus Raymond Cobb, the Georgia peach, hands down.
From 1910-1913 Cobb hit an astonishing .385, .420, .410, and .390.
He is the only player ever to have hit a home run younger than 20 and older than 40 years of age.
Babe Ruth had approximately 1,000 more strikeouts than Cobb in MANY less at bats than the Peach.
“I never saw anyone like Ty Cobb. No one even close to him as the greatest all-time ballplayer.That guy was superhuman, amazing.”
Casey Stengel, 1975
Squooshed is right - sometimes the obvious answer is the right answer. No other player has put up the numbers the Bambino did; no other player’s achievements were so far above those of mere mortal players of his era.
Strikeouts have nothing to do with it; how you make an out is rarely of import, as long as you avoid the DP. But Ruth hit for high average and easily the most serious power of his time. (IMO, his most amazing achievement was hitting something like 29 HR in the last year of the dead-ball era.)
Bill James’ Runs Created stat, which was the first stat to accurately reflect individual players’ contributions to their teams’ offense, ranked Ruth at around 200 RC per season for several of his best seasons. This leaves pretty much everybody else in the dust.
Well, if we are going with everyday players, I would go with Babe Ruth. Look at everything he did, and then take into consideration his early years in the sport were as a pitcher and in the dead-ball era. Imagine how incredibly high his batting stats would be if he had began his entire career in the outfield and during the lively-ball era.
It’s quite arguable that Ruth could’ve had between 800 - 900 homeruns, and he still hit for average while being a slugger.
As you all know, all of this is relative. Ty Cobb may have been the best in his time, but you could pluck out at least 200 guys from the the line-ups of today’s games and they’d be a whole lot better.
Ruth doesn’t cut it. If he had played his entire career in the “dead ball” era, a large portion of those gaudy home runs would have been fly-ball outs, and there would have been a corresponding decrease in his slugging percentage and RBI totals.
Cobb was the man. The Stengel quote posted by writefetus says it all.
I’ve gotta go with Roberto Clemente. He was the complete package. A select group of others may have put up better offensive numbers; But in looking at the entire game (hitting, running, throwing, fielding, game smarts, etc.), he had no equal. *
And yes, if you go only by offensive numbers, Pembridge is correct. Josh Gibson was the man.
Re: Babe Ruth – I recall hearing on a braves radio game that one of the announcers (either Skip Caray, Joe Simpson, Don Sutton, or Pete Van Weiren) saying that before a certain year (1927?) that what today is a ground rule double was then considered a homerun and about 100 of the Babe’s homerun’s were acquired this way. Not trying to piss on his parade, he was one of the best. Just something to consider.
I disagree. When Cobb played, baseball was the sport in the U.S. Nearly all of the great athletes in the country would have aspired to be baseball players, and would have focused their energies in that direction. Everyone played baseball. Every factory and church had a team. The fact that even a country boy like Cobb was exposed to baseball is testimony to the degree of saturation of the sport in American culture. Do you suppose Cobb ever played basketball?
Today, on the other hand, great athletes have a greater list of professional sports from which to choose: football, hockey, basketball, track, golf, etc. Those sports had nowhere near the following of baseball in Cobb’s day.
So, I would argue that the baseball teams of yore drew from a larger talent pool. That has been offset somewhat by the overall increase in population. Still, provided I could choose from the Negro Leagues as well as the majors, I would put a team of old-timers up against today’s all-stars any day.
The greatest ballplayer of all time, by far, is Babe Ruth. If you can imagine Pete Rose hitting fifty home runs a year and hitting 40 points higher and then having five years where he pitched like Tom Glavine, you’ve got Babe Ruth.
Ruth was MUCH better than Cobb, even just taking his hitting into account. There’s no comparison at all. Ruth ** got on base more than Cobb did** despite losing 23 points in average on him and he hit six times as many home runs. Ruth towered over everyone; only Ted Williams even approaches him as a hitter, and Ted didn’t play as much and was a genuinely bad defensive player. (Ruth, though he is portrayed as being a blimp, actually ran fairly well and played solid D until he got old and really fat.)
Let me put it this way; the two basic functions of a hitter are getting on base and driving in runs.
Babe Ruth got on base more than anyone except Ted Williams (just barely). He got on base quite a bit more than Ty Cobb, although Cobb’s in the top ten all time.
Babe Ruth had more power than any other player in baseball history, and nobody’s even close.
The only thing Cobb had on Ruth was his tremendous baserunning, but without getting too deep into it, stealing bases just doesn’t match home runs for piling up runs. Ruth was a better hitter than Cobb; he was a better hitter than ANYBODY. Throw in his pitching and it’s no contest.
Babe Ruth is to baseball what Wayne Gretzky would be to hockey if Gretzky had spent an additional five years playing goalie like Martin Brodeur.
As to the others…
Roberto Clemente was a fine player, but wasn’t the best player of all time. Willie Mays has a pretty good argument but objectively it’s clear Ruth was greater. Sandy Koufax was an amazing pitcher but Pedro Martinez is every bit as good as Koufax was, and other pitchers have been that good, too; the best pitcher of all time was probably either Walter Johnson or Lefty Grove, and neither was as great as Ruth.
The only competition to Ruth is Honus Wagner, who was a magnificent hitter in the Ty Cobb mold AND was a shortstop.
My personal list of the best players of all time would be, for position players, without using any formal method or anything:
Babe Ruth
Honus Wagner
Willie Mays
Ty Cobb
Stan Musial
Henry Aaron
Lou Gehrig
Barry Bonds
Ted Williams
Mike Schmidt
For pitchers, I’ll take Johnson, Grove, Koufax, Christy Mathewson and
Incidentally, as to ** Mouthbreather’s comment on ground rule doubles, that’s not true.** God only knows where Skip Caray came up with such a dumb idea, but that’s Skip.
In fact, under the rules of the time, Ruth actually lost a home run that would have counted today. Prior to 1950 a home run that ended a game would not be counted as a home run if the winning run scored before the batter. For instance, Joe Carter’s home run that ended the 1993 World Series would not have been a home run because the winning run was scored by Paul Molitor (it was 6-5 when Carter slammed his homer; Rickey Henderson scored the tying run ahead of Molitor.) Carter would have gotten a triple, since Molitor advanced three bases to score. Ruth did that once, hitting a two-run homer to win a tie game, and so only got a double.
We’re getting into a lot of definitions of “great” here, but I’ll be happy to throw in another name.
Willie Mays
He could run, hit, hit with power, throw, and field. Hell, if he’d ever tried, he probably could have pitched, as well.
Plus there was an intangible. He was exciting. When he was in the field, people waited for a fly ball to be hit to him. When he was in the dugout, people waited for him for him to come to bat.
In his era, only Mickey Mantle could compare, and Mantle played hurt most of the time. Jackie Robinson, while maybe not as good a total package, was perhaps even more exciting. Roberto Clemente came close.
I grew up in St. Louis, and as much as I revere The Man, Musial and Williams just didn’t kick up the adrenaline on base or in the field. (Ditto Mark McGwire – compare him with Sosa) Aaron and Frank Robinson were so good, they made it look TOO easy.
There is not really a larger talent pool; in those days there were a lot fewer players that came from South America and the like, and even the Negro Leagues were diluted because many had to work and do other things to survive. Now, the talent pool is larger, and the athletes are better trained, healthier, practice harder, and are, for the most part, just better.
And who? You left one out…I was curious. Satchel Paige? Mordecai “Three-Finger” Brown? (My favorite) Greg Maddux? (Best pitcher I have ever seen live…)
As for the originial question, I guess I also picked Cobb because he played harder than just about anyone…he never claimed he was athlete, he said he simply wanted to be the best…