Is anyone else surprised by how high Adrian Beltre is on that list? 45th, ahead of Pedro Martinez, and Rod Carew, to name players on some poster’s top 15, and he’s still playing! Pujols, I get as one of the greatest of all time that’s still playing: 30th on that WAR list, 2nd in JAWS for all 1st basemen. He’s a legend.
Just surprising to me that Adrian Beltre’s in the same sort of conversation.
I understand the desire to place the Negro League guys in their own Inner Circle, but truthfully, who here can name 15 Negro League guys without digging out a reference? I certainly can’t. I’m pushing it to name past the two I picked and Cool Papa Bell, half for his nickname, and half for his renowned speed.
Do any Japanese League players come anywhere close to this Inner Circle? Or the Hall, period? I think Ichiro’s just about through, and if so, he has not quite 60 WAR. How would we begin to translate Sadaharu Oh’s stats to if he played in MLB?
Ty Cobb
Babe Ruth
Lou Gehrig
Cy Young
Walter Johnson
Mickey Mantle
Rogers Hornsby
Stan Musial
Ted Williams
Willie Mays
Mike Schmidt
Hank Aaron
Roger Clemens
Johnny Bench
Joe Jackson
Babe Ruth
Barry Bonds
Willie Mays
Ted Williams
Hank Aaron
Ty Cobb
Walter Johnson
Rickey Henderson
Mike Schmidt
Cy Young
Frank Robinson
Albert Pujols
Mickey Mantle
Honus Wagner
Lou Gehrig
Adrian Beltre is a really good player and he’s been remarkably healthy throughout his career. And he’s played a hundred years. Ok, 19. Career WAR is…something I guess. Not a bad way to measure, but not the end-all. Look at Beltre’s year by year WAR and he only had one season with WAR over 8. I mean, you rack up 20 years of 4 WAR and ta-da, you have career WAR of 80. And by the way, that’s pretty damn good. But look at the guys like Pujols and Boggs just above Beltre, they’ve got 5+ seasons of 8 WAR or higher.
Beltre will be an interesting HOF case because everyone seems to think Chipper Jones is a shoe-in and Beltre’s numbers are not too far off.
I once had a conversation with my father, who became a Braves fan after they moved to Milwaukee in the early ‘50s. He talked about how, when he was following them, it seemed to him that the Braves’ power hitters were Eddie Mathews and Joe Adcock, and he saw Aaron as a very good hitter with a fair amount of pop in his bat (but not quite the HR hitter that the other two were).
Then, as the years passed, and Aaron was making his run at Ruth’s career HR record, my father realized that his evaluation of Aaron was off (and, TBH, I think that he didn’t realize just how many HRs Aaron was hitting in the 1950s, either). Aaron was just amazingly consistent. He “only” led the NL in homers 4 times, but he hit at least 20 home runs in 20 consecutive seasons.
I’d vote for Rose in the hall, but even putting aside the gambling he doesn’t really have a case for the top 15, and might be the worst player anyone has listed. He had little power, wasn’t a great base-runner, and was a mediocre defender. There are only so much value to a billion singles.
Beltre is a great player and has a lot of things against him that cause him to be underrated. He started really young, he has played in mostly pitchers parks, and a lot of his value is from his defense.
There is certainly something to be said for giving a player credit for a higher peak than another player.
Sandy Koufax’s career WAR is about the same as David Wells, but I suspect Mr. Koufax will end up in the SDMB Hall of Fame and Mr. Wells will not, for obvious reasons.
Ideally, there would be an old hall and a new hall. Or maybe Baseball v.1.0 and 2.0. Something to separate the stars from the deadball era and earlier. And even later, when baseball was a second job and players smoked, drank and didn’t take conditioning seriously. It was like baseball at half speed. Pitchers threw hundreds of complete games without wrecking their shoulders and elbows because they were just tossing the damn ball.
Half the players on these lists are pretty much irrelevant to the modern game. Sports evolve, and baseball didn’t become the game we know now until after WW2.
With this in mind, I played around with the numbers a bit to compare the best N seasons, to reduce the impact to career WAR for someone who plays 20 years while still rewarding several seasons of high WAR.
Best total WAR summing up each player’s top 10 WAR seasons:
1 Babe Ruth 114.55
2 Cy Young 108.35
3 Walter Johnson 108.00
4 Willie Mays 100.39
5 Rogers Hornsby 98.62
6 Kid Nichols 98.49
7 Barry Bonds 97.90
8 Ted Williams 91.12
9 Lou Gehrig 90.92
10 Ty Cobb 89.84
11 Roger Clemens 88.32
12 Lefty Grove 87.99
13 Honus Wagner 87.38
14 Alex Rodriguez 86.85
15 Pete Alexander 86.53
16 Stan Musial 86.15
17 Christy Mathewson 84.86
18 Eddie Collins 84.09
19 Tris Speaker 83.76
20 Hank Aaron 83.71
21 Mickey Mantle 83.47
22 John Clarkson 83.15
23 Tim Keefe 81.75
24 Randy Johnson 81.48
25 Albert Pujols 81.16
And best total WAR summing the best 7 seasons:
1 Babe Ruth 84.74
2 Walter Johnson 83.02
3 Cy Young 80.71
4 Kid Nichols 75.48
5 John Clarkson 74.44
6 Willie Mays 73.67
7 Rogers Hornsby 73.50
8 Barry Bonds 72.68
9 Ted Williams 69.24
10 Ty Cobb 68.98
11 Lou Gehrig 67.67
12 Tim Keefe 67.57
13 Pete Alexander 67.23
14 Pud Galvin 67.18
15 Lefty Grove 66.46
16 Roger Clemens 65.70
17 Honus Wagner 65.42
18 Amos Rusie 65.28
19 Old Hoss Radbourn 65.16
20 Mickey Mantle 64.73
21 Eddie Collins 64.22
22 Alex Rodriguez 64.19
23 Stan Musial 64.19
24 Randy Johnson 63.49
25 Christy Mathewson 63.41
Beltre doesn’t appear in the top 50 by either measure. Pujols is 25th over 10 years and 28th over 7 years; Boggs is 40th and 38th.
So as one of the voters for Pete Rose, let me explain that I made this list mostly off the cuff. I thought that something like “The Inner Circle” was actually better represented by a voter’s mind’s eye of the best players ever to play the game than actually researching WAR (which I feel is the sort of thing one should do for the positional votes, where selection should be more scientific.) I will admit that I did consider that Rose’s lack of a real position would harm his ability to be voted in in any given position category.
So it just boils down to… guy is the Hit King. How do you not put the guy with the most hits in the history of MLB in? I accept all the arguments about his lack of power and his defensive mediocrity, but there’s something magical about owning that hits record.
I don’t disagree with that logic behind Rose. People say he only owns that record because he played forever. Yeah, well, he still did something no one else in the history of baseball could do.
I really don’t see anything wrong with that. Jackie Robinson is also in contention, and I don’t think Jackie Robinson was objectively one of the 15 greatest baseball players who ever lived. He was an awesome player - he was a greater player than Craig Biggio or Roberto Alomar, in my opinion, to use two other second basemen as examples - but you’re going to be hard pressed to explain that he was a more valuable baseball player than Randy Johnson, who so far only has four votes to Jackie’s nine. Also polling behind Jackie are Tris Speaker, Lefty Grove, and Joltin’ Joe, and based purely on baseball accomplishments that’s a hard thing to explain. Clearly people (including me) are voting for Jackie based on some sort of subjective decision about his importance to baseball.
The voting process will tease out who’s deserving and who isn’t. I will be awfully surprised if Pete Rose doesn’t get in one way or another. Incidentally, Pete Rose was a better defensive player than people are giving him credit for, in my opinion.
MORE VOTES, PLEASE. I invite you all to ask baseball-loving friends to become SDMB guest members to vote and debate the vote.
Ichiro is close. His general downward slide over the course of his MLB career (which is completely understandable: guy was at his prime when he came over, after all) doesn’t help, but the start of his American career was fantastic, and he kept up his performance for a long time for a guy who was a 27 year old rookie. I’d say he’s in the Hall, but not anywhere near the top 15 players. More along the lines of top 50 or 75.
The Japanese leagues today might be better than American AAA teams, but I don’t think that was even close to the case back when Oh was playing. I base that on the performance of American players who washed out of MLB and became All-Stars when they surfaced in Japan. While what Oh did was impressive, he didn’t even have a single Satchel Paige-like season where he showed that he could perform against MLB competition.
Robinson may not have bigger than big numbers — though he did hit .311 —, and he played only 10 seasons in the majors. But I would argue that a Hall of Fame should not consider statistics only. In my mind, there’s more to the game than the game itself.
For me, Robinson may not be the greatest, but he is the most important man in the history of baseball. (That his number 42 is retired across the major leagues is a testimony to that.) Sure, sooner or later another African American player would have come along, but when? Would Willie Mays have played in the majors if not for Jackie? Would Hank Aaron? Would Roy Campanella?
So Robinson had excellent numbers, and he did it in extraordinarily tough conditions, notably because he was the face of Black baseball. He fully belongs in the Inner Circle.
