Joe Posnanski

Oh it is clearly about nostalgia in baseball, and all the stories that we were all told as kids about the greats of the game. It has to do with the way baseball is ingrained into our culture the way football is only ingrained into our present. Would two football fans argue for hours about who should have won the 1941 MVP, the way fans STILL argue about DiMaggio vs Williams? Are there ever 5000 word pieces written about the all-time snubs by the Basketball Hall of Fame?

We know, deep down, that the competition today is much fiercer, that the learning curve is higher, and that the players are better. At the very least there is an honest and open competition, instead of only white men allowed to play. Despite this, we return to our demigods constructed from allegory.

And we let our nostalgia cloud or judgment, which is a shame, because the best hitter of all time played right in front of us. But because of some stupid vendetta against the man’s character, or his race, or his workout regimen, less than a quarter of the 1300 of us who’ve voted realize how great Barry Bonds is.

Wilt was, for all intents and purposes, the best basketball player ever. And he last played 35 years ago.

Terrific post, as always. I was reading Baseball Between the Numbers, by the Baseball Prospectus team, the other day, and they consider a closely related question: who was better, Babe Ruth or Barry Bonds? Using a variety of statistical models far too complicated to get into here, they conclude that Barry Bonds was better, for some of the reasons you suggest. Since Bonds was playing in an era of superior training and nutrition, in addition to integration and the much more worldwide pool of talent we currently enjoy, his competition was much, much tougher. This means that his numbers, which are admittedly not quite as good, represent much more significant achievements.

However, they also calculate that had Ruth come up in 1984, in an integrated league and with access to contemporary nutrition and training methods, Ruth would have hit .309/.441/.682 with 913 home runs. For reference, Ruth’s actual stats are .342/.474/.690. Bonds’s stats, through last year, are .298/.444/.607. Although Ruth’s numbers are down, they’re still pretty eye-popping.

I totally voted for Ruth. And I would never, ever vote for Bonds.

Wilt? Um, a guy named Michael Jordan can also lay claim to that title.

I think it’s because we don’t notice the change in baseball the way we do in other sports. If you watch a clip from a football game on NFL films, it looks VERY different from today’s game. Basketball’s evolution is even more dramatic. I don’t notice that big change in baseball. Players are still situated in the same formation on defense and the lineup still seems to follow the same rules (leadoff, contact, power, power, and everyone else). I think part of it is because visually the game still looks very similar to those old clips.

I feel like you’ve expanded on my post on the First Class thread.

It’s baseaball.

It’s the same game.

I think Cy Young pitched underhanded for a long time. He simply threw the ball where people couldn’t hit it. That’s still the point of the game for a pitcher.

Ty Cobb simply could hit the ball and go ninety feet from base to base. That’s still the object of the game.

We can play all sorts of what-if games. Could Cy Young have put the ball past Barry Bonds on a regular basis? I kinda think so, but who really knows?

Would Cobb collect a horse collar every time he faced Koufax? Maybe, but I doubt it.

Somehow I suspect Jim Brown would be an NFL superstar today. And I mean today, even though he’s what, 70 years old?

But baseball figured it out a long time ago. It’s the game. It’s 90 feet from base to base, that ball with the stitches and a bat made out of wood.

Perfect.

I can’t say this with certainty, but I believe that 80 years from now, we’ll still look at Gretzky’s stats and marvel. The fact that he had more assists in his career than anyone else had goals and assists combined, going along with his all-time goals lead and all the single-season records, the eight straight MVPs, etc. — might be even better against his peers than Ruth. If I live long enough to see someone challenge Gretzky’s records, I’ll be shocked.

I think it’s a combination of the relative continuity of the game (mentioned above) with the fact that baseball is competition between players. Sports like football and basketball have so obviously changed in the past 50 years. And champions in sports like swimming and track measure their success against the clock rather than their peers.

Golf is a good choice for a comparison to baseball and you do hear people talk about Bobby Jones as a choice for best ever - even if Hogan, Nicklaus and Tiger get mentioned more. Even though the equipment has gotten better, the players stronger and the field more inclusive, the game is still essentially the same one played 60 years ago. And (I would guess) the score relative to par is still pretty close to where it always was - so you don’t get the effect of Abrahams finishing eighth among CA high schoolers.

When I was little, I used to think Babe was THE best, but somewhere along the line I started feelin’ like he was overhyped or overrated. I look at his stats every so often and realize he was way way beyond his peers, and that’s why he belongs in the HOF. He changed the way players approach the game - swing for the fences. And even though his pitching numbers were in the deadball era, I still can’t think of another guy who could successfully hit and pitch in the majors consistently. Can’t even think of one who did it, but was pitchetic at it (pun intended).

That being said, I often wonder how the Babe would hit against pitchers throwing sliders, splitters, circle changes, and the variety of other pitches that came around after his prime. For that reason alone, I have to figure that even average players in our era, are probably better than the Babe. Yeah, that’s right. Better. Nobody would be able to put their bat on the ball squarely enough, as often as they did in the 1920’s.

Statistical evidence behind my conclusion? Just look at the increased K’s and disappearance of the .400 hitter since 1931. Despite Ruth’s era being an easier time to put your bat on the ball, Ruth became the all-time strikeout leader in 1926. Imagine how much more he’d have K’d with a higher variety of pitches thrown at him.

But that doesn’t take away from how far beyond his peers the Babe was. It doesn’t take away the fact he changes the game. It doesn’t take away the fact he was probably the most inspiring ballplayer in history even if he isn’t the best anymore. So I voted for Ruth.

I’m puzzled how Rickey Henderson, didn’t get onto this ballot. Any ballot for “starting over” the HOF, should at least have the all-time leaders in all key categories included. I’m not talking about SB’s (tho I love them!), but Runs scored, which is the most important in baseball history. Joe, did any of the people you emailed, mention Ricky at all?

Who is the greatest cricket player of all time? Don Bradman. Who is all of thirteen years and six months younger than the Babe. Incidentally, the Babe died during Bradman’s last Test match.

Few would dispute Bradman’s genius; he stands above other batsmen statistically to perhaps an even greater degree than Ruth does. Just two figures, first his average of 99.94 compares to a second best of 60.97 - if the Babe led by a comparable margin, he’d have an SLG of 1.039, and the other is that in just 80 innings he scored 12 double centuries; the second place here took 230 innings to get to 9.

The Don wasn’t just better than anyone else; you could take the next best two batsmen in the world and put them together and they couldn’t match him.

It’s interesting that there really is only one other sport where one man from the distant past dominates the imagination, and it’s the sport most like baseball.

One sport I can think of that seems to have the same obsession with the past is college basketball. ESPN did a countdown this past year of the best 25 college basketball players in history, and I think of the 25, maybe only 1 or 2 played in the past 15-20 years…and they were all near the bottom of the list. It depressed me a bit (and I feel similarly about Joe’s post) to think that as much as I love watching baseball/college basketball that I haven’t seen any of the so-called “best ever.”

[i]Incidentally, the Babe died during Bradman’s last Test match.[/i]

That must have been one exciting match.

I’d just like to back up Richard Gadsen’s point about cricket. Unlike baseball, batting average in cricket is by some distance the best judge of a player. Here are the all time batting average leaders among players with more than 50 test appearances (and their debut year):

Don Bradman - 99.94 (1928)
Herbert Sutcliffe - 60.73 (1924)
Ken Barrington - 58.67 (1955)
Wally Hammond - 58.45 (1927)
Ricky Ponting - 58.37 (1995)
Garfield Sobers - 57.78 (1954)
Jacques Kallis - 57.14 (1995)
Jack Hobbs - 56.94 (1908)
Len Hutton - 56.67 (1937)
Mohammad Yousuf - 55.49 (1998)

In other words, Bradman is nearly 40 runs clear of the pack when just five runs cover the next nine all-time greats.

The century (100 runs in an innings) is the gold standard of a great batting performance. While Bradman’s 29 centuries place him just 8th overall on that list, he scored them in just 80 test innings. The next lowest number in the top ten is Matthew Hayden’s 167 innings (for 30 centuries) - they just didn’t play as much cricket in the 1930s, yet Bradman’s “counting stats” are still up there with the best.

In double centuries (200 runs in an innings), Bradman is amazingly still the all-time leader with 12 in 80 innings. Second is Brian Lara, with nine doubles in 232 innings. Bradman is also, along with Lara and Virender Sehwag, the only batsman in history with two triple centuries to his name.

Apologies for labouring the point, but it is pretty clear Don Bradman is a Ruth-esque freak.

I wish they would make more movies about Babe Ruth.

Wait, how is it possible that the BP analysis says that if Babe came up in 1984 he would have beat Bonds numbers in BA, OBP, SLG, and HRs….and yet they conclude that Bonds is “better”??

I tend to believe that great baseball players of earlier eras could compete more effectively today than great old players in other sports. Mostly I just base that on comparisons of players within my own lifetime.

When I think about guys who were great baseball players when I was a kid - Schmidt, Brett, Carlton, Reggie, Parker, Bench - I have little to no doubt that they could walk onto a big league field today and excel.

But when you think about NBA players of the same era, personally I think even Dr. J would have a hard time penetrating against today’s athletes.

Think of the Steel Curtain that I grew up with. I believe that most if not all of today’s NFL offensive lines would destroy that vaunted front four.

Only in baseball do I think the stars of my childhood could be stars today. That’s a span of 30 years since I was old enough to be a fan.

Well, if George Brett 1980 could be a star in 2008, doesn’t it stand to reason that Ted Williams 1941 could have been a star in 1978? And if Williams could have been a star in 1978, couldn’t Ruth and Wagner have been stars in 1941, or 1978, or this season? To a much greater degree than in other major sports I think the answer is yes.

Want to echo what some of the other commenters said. The sheer age of baseball would
Babe Ruth was easily my number one, and it was based on the numbers. But it wasn’t based on the presumption that you could take the Babe Ruth from 1921 and plop him down onto Yankee Stadium and within a season or two he’d be the absolute best player on the field. Even giving him the advantages that todays players have, he still wouldn’t dominate to the extent that he did in the 20’s, although I do think that he’d be an excellent, HOF worthy player no matter what era he was in.
Now, if you took an All-Star (let’s say Albert Pujols) from today and placed him at the beginnings of the lively ball era, he’d absolutely DESTROY the league. It’d be like he was playing with an aluminum bat.
In order to make these kind of comparisons, we have to make the assumption that a 142 OPS+ is the same across all times, and the only corrections we have to make are ones of game context (park, level of offense) variety and not so much one of a time variety. Other wise, the arguments for the greatest player would be intra rather than inter generational. And what kind of fun is that?

Oops.. forgot to finish my first sentence.. it’s supposed to read- The sheer age of baseball as a professional sport means that it had the opportunity to work out most of its developmental kinks in the mid to late 1800’s. By the time basketball and football caught up, baseball had been played under the same basic rules and styles for a much longer time.

“Why baseball? What is it about this game that would allow people to believe that it has not evolved like the other games, that the smaller, poorer, less-trained players were, in fact, better than players today?”

I don’t know. What is it about men’s javelin throwing that has allowed Finland to produce 19 Olympic medal winners to 5 for the United States? Why has Hungary won 67 Olympic medals in canoeing and kayaking while the United States has won only 16? History has shown that small, devoted populations can produce a disproportionate number of high-class athletes.

There are so many thoughts bouncing around my head right now I had to take a minute and let them settle a bit before attempting to articulate them.

So much is made about the major sports “competing” for fans these days, but when Ruth played there was baseball, which had been pro for about 50 years, an infant NHL and even younger NFL, and that was it. I don’t know much about golf, but I think Bobby Jones was an amateur, as were Olympians (according to Chariots of Fire) and tennis stars, and so on. So as far as pro athletes went, and as they were pretty much the only ones competing into adulthood, baseball had the lions share of the publics attention. The spotlight was undiluted by Gatorade and Super Bowls.

Of course baseball players still have for the most part much longer careers than those who play the other team sports. And they play much more, twice as many games as hockey or basketball, and ten times as many as football, so we are exposed that much more to baseball players, and I think that makes them that much more familiar. Do kids today even remember Barry Sanders? Or even Emmet Smith as a dominant player?

I agree that it is not so much could the ‘27 Yankees hang with the ‘98 Yankees so much as man, NOBODY else in ‘27 could touch the Yankees, and I think for the most part when people partake in the former (and similar) arguments, they are more frequently comparing relative dominance than athletic abilities. I think many people, from Ruth to Kruk to Wells have proven that baseball is not necessarily about athleticism. But I do think that the parts of the game that are subject to athletic virtues have remained an fairly even ground. Unlike the swimming example, Nolan Ryan’s fastball was clocked at only 2 mph faster than Feller’s, and inexact as the calculations may have been, it seems that there has been enough overlap that someone would have faced Johnson and then Lefty Grove, then someone else would have faced Grove and Feller, then Feller and, well, you get my point, and while there may be an overall evolution of speed like there is of increasing tallness, it’s not on the same scale as the other sports, where they run faster, jump higher, wear bigger clothes and have greater muscle mass.

I wonder also how much the more regimented styles of coaching in other sports hinders the evolution of the games, as I also wonder about what seems to me more interference/adjustments by the respective leagues of the rules for sports like football and basketball. And while it’s true that gloves have improved and gotten bigger, balls are generally manufactured to a higher quality, and bats are lighter (though that was more of a macho thing, Ted Williams knew the advantages of a lighter bat and used one), the equipment advances in most other sports are far more significant.

I love the cricket points, I had one myself, but I don’t know if it makes sense, but it seems that a common element to the two games is the kind of competition that they both have, where it is very much a one on one confrontation, followed by a collective effort of a bunch of people to keep a much smaller number from “scoring”. They are the only two sports (I think) where the defense controls the ball, not the offense. And despite advances in physical conditioning, people don’t seem to really throw the ball that much faster or be able to hit it that much farther. Wasn’t Ruth the only person to hit one out of Forbes Field, and at the very end of his career to boot? Maybe that’s just a limit of physics, and maybe the difference between .6 seconds and .58 would mean more if it were in any way apparent to me, but I think that those unchanging elements add much to the continuity of the game.

Or maybe baseball just has much nicer weather.

But I have British friends that go on about footballers of yesterdays, so maybe it’s just that baseball really is the national pastime. It does have much larger attendance figures than other sports, and though it is helped by stadium size and schedules, I don’t think football could keep up the intensity that it creates for a baseball type season, nor basketball on a daily basis, never mind that the players would start to have limbs fly off if they played everyday.

I love this blog. Thank you.

I did not think we were voting for the best baseball player ever. I thought we were voting for first class Hall of Fame.

That list you rattled off at the end- Gwynn, Unit, et al., made me realize that the last twenty years were at the very least, no worse than what came before it. I think baseball has a sort of storytelling culture that mythologizes the greats and makes them demigods. The closest thing to it that I can think of is presidents. It’s hard not to get into specific bills and policies once you really get going, but when you think of the “great presidents,” for me, and I feel for most, Washington, Lincoln and FDR jump out in a similar way that Ruth, Aaron and Mantle do (and the others). I bet someone could convince me in 10 minutes that, for example, Mantle might not crack the top 5 centerfielders today or that Dimaggio couldn’t hold a candle to ARod or Manny, but when I think of the baseball greats, all the old names immediately pop into my head. Ruth was definitely my #1, and I originally had Maddux, but I bounced him in favor of Hank and Honus (Willie and Jackie were my other two). Also, I love the new look.

I think that this is a great question and may not be able to be fully explained with objective variables. For some it could just be because. After thinking about this, and pardon me if I’m restating others here, I have come up with the following.

It involves the athlete’s size, strength, and the equipment they used as well as the similarity of yesteryear’s stats to today’s. It also involves how a player dominated his sport during his time.

With size, strength, and equipment. With football you just can’t realistically fathom a player from 70 years ago playing against the behemoths of today. They would have no chance and you know it and it’s therefore impossible to compare the two. With individual sports, like track, the world records of yesterday aren’t even close to today’s. That’s because of strength or speed. You could apply the equipment of today’s golf with that of yesterday and there is no similarity whatsoever. You see the wooden rackets of tennis and can’t imagine how they would compete against the oversized rackets of today.

One thing about equipment, look at it this way. when looking at the hitters you are still dealing with wood baseball bats. Very little change other than the ones today shatter instead of crack. Now look at fielding. Who would pick there greatest fielders of all time from that period? I wouldn’t. There would be Ozzie, and Brooks Robinson, and Bench, Maddux, and Say Hey would maybe be the oldest of them all. There were good ones back in the day but I don’t know how many would be included in our top five.

Finally, we also take into account how the numbers have lasted. Baseball records last forever in some cases. This is off the top of my head but I think Earl Webb’s doubles record still stands and no one has gotten close. No one seems likely to break Hack Wilson’s RBI record anytime soon as that approaches 80 years. That doesn’t exist in almost any other sport. Especially those that are individual sports.

If I had to pick a sport closest to baseball it would probably be tennis but even that has it’s inadequacies. In most sports, either their bodies get beaten or their numbers gets beaten or their equipment gets beaten and in baseball you see none of that when looking at stats or photographs.

What clinches it for Babe Ruth is, as Joe mentioned, he wasn’t just the best hitter of his or possibly any era, but he was also a phenomenal pitcher. Simply put, there will never be another player who could come along who could do that. Bonds can hit all the homers he wants, but the Babe can always play the ‘ace pitcher’ card. It would be like if Howie Morenz had also been a star goalie of his era, then people might still consider him as a singular great in hockey.

Old football players, btw, have the added advantage that many were two-way players, so they have their own answer to excelling in two facets of the game as Ruth did. But, as many have noted, football has evolved so much that it’s just a different sport.

Another older sport that hasn’t been mentioned….soccer. I think you’d get more people arguing that Pele, Dixie Dean or Stanley Matthews were the greatest footballers of all time than you would people arguing in favour of Cristiano Ronaldo or David Beckham.

Someone mentioned soccer. Soccer was a big, well-organized, professional sport from around the same time as baseball (ie from the 1890s).

Baseball went through a fundamental tactical change with the beginning of the lively ball era in 1920. For all that we revere giants of the past, only Cy Young and Honus Wagner are pre-lively ball.

Soccer’s revolution came around 1960 with the beginnings of the fourth back. Before then, scoring was massively higher than today. We can’t compare Dixie Dean’s 60 goals in a season (in 1927-8) to any modern player - there were an average of more than four goals a game back then, where it’s about two-and-a-half now.

It was a tactical change - playing with four defensive players instead of three - but it transformed soccer into today’s low scoring game.

Only a handful of the pre-1960 greats still get mentioned, and the statistics, though kept, are quite impossible to compare.

It’s simple to me - No other sport tracks statistics like baseball. It is VERY easy to see who hit the most HR, who had the highest batting average, who won the most games - and almost all the answers are from players in our past.

In truth, it is because the competition was scarce ‘back then’ and it was easier to separate the great from the average. But I personally don’t think you can hold that against someone like Ruth or WJ.

Good to see cricket and the Don feature in the discussions and it’s universally accepted that Bradman is the greatest Test batsman of all time. But the guy from that sport with most in common with Ruth is W G Grace, who transformed cricket from a pastime for those with time on their hands into England’s pre-eminent spectator sport . . . a position it held from mid-Victorian times until the 1960s. He was “the best known Englishman of his time”.
The other sport which holds its past champions in higher regard than today’s performers is horse racing. In Australia (which I submit as the greatest sporting nation on the planet), Phar Lap, who raced from 1929 to 1932, is revered like no other hero. In England, Eclipse, foaled in 1764, is still talked about as the greatest ever.

I don’t think people necessarily think Ruth is the absolute greatest of all time. I think people think he was the greatest of all time at the game in the time he was playing it. He was the greatest in relation to his peers. If he played today, assuming he could (and would) take advantage of modern conditioning techniques and diet, I think he would be a tremendous player, though of course not with a 207 OPS+. When you pick the Hall of Fame, I think you have to look at how they did on the field compared to their contemporaries with regards to creating wins for their teams, and there Ruth has it over everyone, except maybe those pre-1900 pitchers who threw 600+ innings.

“But the guy from that sport with most in common with Ruth is W G Grace, who transformed cricket from a pastime for those with time on their hands into England’s pre-eminent spectator sport . . . a position it held from mid-Victorian times until the 1960s. He was “the best known Englishman of his time”.”

Sounds more like George Wright than Ruth.

I loved the stat about Ian Crocker and Johnny Weismuller. Amazing. Also, I think this proves that baseball fans are smart. They seem good for the most part at comparing players from one era to another and understanding where those players fit in. Whose to say Babe wouldn’t be healthier and in better shape as a player today? Also, baseball seems to be the one sport that hasn’t really changed that much on the field compared to others. The James Earl Jones speech in Field of Dreams seems to apply here.

Imagine the following headlines, most of which might be repeated numerous times, and how they would affect the public’s view of the ballplayer today:

X punches umpire
X threatens to throw manager off train
X suspended for insubordination
X in car accident while drunk
X seen leaving infamous bordello
X threatens to jump team during pennant race
X reports out of shape
X breaks curfew and threatens to “punch the shit out of manager” when suspended and fined. Refuses to apologize
X’s cheating drives wife near to insanity
X violates federal law carousing in speakeasy

I voted for Ruth in this poll; he was tied for my first choice. But I do not understand how some others of you did.

For those who take the view that Babe Ruth’s deeds should be downgraded because he played in a less-competitive era, an era of less intensity than today, of lower over-all skill than today, of lesser physical specimens than today, consider this . . .

England of the late 1500s was a fairly insignificant adjunct to Europe, its population something around the four million mark. Dramatic entertainment in the form of plays, staged at dedicated venues, was a recent phenomenon, replacing small touring groups putting on religious performances and wealthy amateurs entertaining themselves in grand houses.

Into this new environment came William Shakespeare, a butcher’s son from the provinces, with an education that ended when he left grammar school at age 14 or so. Four hundred years later, he’s the undisputed master of his craft — considered so globally and so far ahead of the competition that it’s no race.

He’s the Babe Ruth of words.

Or, conversely, Ruth is the Shakespeare of swat.

Oy. Sorry about the multiple posts above. Should not post via blackberry, ever.

My Clevelandness requires me to point out that you discussed the all-time greats for the major sports and Jim Brown was not mentioned.

I comfort myself with the realization that he is the best ever, and played 50 years ago, so was probably omitted because he provides a counter-example to your point that it only happens in baseball.

Still, let’s not let this happen again, umkay?

I think the eras translate pretty well. Babe didn’t do so badly barnstorming against players who were excluded from the American League or in all-star games. He faced all sorts of odd pitchers in exhibitions and set records for home run distance in fields everywhere. Wherever and however it came from, he had unmatched power WITHOUT any modern advantages in nutrition, equipiment or medicine. If you aren’t getting a lot pitches to hit with Gehrig batting behind you, how WOULD you manage to get a strike to swing at? He’d only pitch in blowouts in today’s game, and have five more years of stats.

On the comparison to golf and baseball greats, the golf comparison is Tiger is Babe Ruth. He is dominating in a way no player ever has including Nicklaus who is more comparable to Hank Aaron. In 80 years, people will speak of Tiger as they speak of Ruth now. They have/are transcending their sport.

Regarding the inclusion of Hogan on the list of greatest golfers ever, I have a question: How many majors, of his 11, did Hogan win when Byron Nelson was an active player? One. Nelson is your fourth in the list of greatest golfers ever. His scoring average record (68.33) was set in 1945 and was bested 55 years later by Tiger, playing with much better technology.

Bob R makes a terrific point. This is why I am a little wary of applying the character clause to exclude Bonds, since once you do that, it is hard for me to see how you don’t also impugn Cobb or Ruth or Mantle or Mays (for amphetamines)…

First of all, I agree with everyone who posted that today’s players are clearly stronger, faster, and more disciplined than ever before. That said, I think we can still draw comparisons between players today and yesterday because baseball has probably changed less than any major sport. Not so much because of style or, clearly, player fitness, but because of the very limits of human capability.

There is compelling evidence that the furthest a baseball can be possibly hit without wind assistance is between 450 and 470 feet (http://www.slate.com/id/2095/). While players today may hit more shots that far, we know, albeit from anedoctal evidence that Ruth, Foxx, Gibson, etc. could hit balls that far in the 20s and 30s.

There is further evidence that the human arm cannot withstand the stress it would take to throw a baseball much faster than 100 mph (http://www.slate.com/id/2116402/). Sure, storytellers surely exaggerated about Walter Johnson’s or Satchel Paige’s fastballs, but we’ve all see the footage of Bob Feller’s fastball matching the velocity of a speeding motorcycle (going around 98 mph, if I recall correctly).

Again, it’s impossible to know how Ruth would have fared in today’s game and seems awfully likely that if Bonds could travel back in time, and for some reason was allowed to break the color barrier, he would have dominated Ruth’s era. But given the limits of what people can do, Ruth’s performance so outdid his contemporaries that I feel safe considering him the best ballplayer ever.

There is only one other sport that I can think of, in which the past is conjured up with such enthusiasm, and “The Greatest” with such unequivocal reverence.

My roomate is from Ahmedabad India. He has little idea of who Babe Ruth is, and is still confused how one team can score more than one run on a home run. If you are to ask him who the greatest sportsman of all time is, he will, along with I would venture about 99% of those who are in the know, name without batting an eye, Sir Donald Bradman; the greatest Cricket Batsman ever.

Saying that Bradman is the Babe Ruth of Cricket is an understatement. Most cricket fans would say that Ruth is the Bradman of Baseball.

He put up numbers in the 30’s and 40’s that would make your head spin. Somebody once calculated (I have no idea how, and can’t at the moment find where) that the stats that he put up would be equivelent of a baseball player hitting .650…FOR THEIR CAREER.

Batsmen have come since. Sachin Tendulkar has more international runs, and holds the current title, according to my roomate, of “The Michael Jordan of Cricket.” Defensive strategy and positioning have improved. The use of the googily has come more into fashion. But still, Bradman is head-and-shoulders above the rest.

And I think the reason why is for the same reasons that baseball of the past is so revered. Watching cricket is fascinating. There is a simple elegance to it. A man with a bat hits a ball that is hurled at him. Simple. It has not chaged in a century. The statstics are still relevant to the discussion, and the lore of which we speak of them is still applicable today.

This discussion of the greatest accross sporting lines just got me thinking about The Don. He really is a towering figure, and I encourage all of you to take a look at him some time.

Here’s an article by Dave Kindred of The Sporting News:

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1208/is_17_225/ai_73827978/pg_1

To continue the Bradman/Ruth subthread, there’s one other interesting comparison: The Don was a deeply religious man, and in his personal habits had the reputation of something of an ascetic. Almost entirely single-minded, his relationship with the press and his teammates was far closer to Ted Williams than the Babe.

So because in the sample size of 6 other sports, we don’t talk about a guy from 80 years ago as the best player ever, it’s impossible to do so in baseball?

I find your sample size lacking.

Also, you’re acting as if nobody even has a shot. If A-Rod puts up 10 more years of gargantuan numbers and finishes with 900 homeruns, don’t you think he’d at least make a solid argument that he’s the best ever? I think he’s already in the top 10 ever, and he’s 32 years old.

If Albert Pujols stays healthy, is really only 28, adds 12 more years of his current - absolutely insane AND unappreciated by his contemporaries - production, won’t he make that a solid argument?

I think it’s also the combination of AND a great pitcher AND the best hitter of his time that puts him over the top. How many guys have ever done that? (zero). How many guys have ever been the top offensive player in football for 15 years AND been one of the best defensive players at the same time? (zero.)

So, yeah, I wonder why there’s so much respect for the Babe.

Besides, we all know Buck Bokai will be known as the greatest player ever by the time the sport stops being played.

Will Rogers once said, “A difference of opinion is what makes horse racing and missionaries.” That and a bunch of horses running around a racetrack. And some pretty unshakable faith. Or maybe it was Mark Twain who said it. At any rate, I like the different opinions. It would be terribly boring if everyone agreed on everything. Imagine a world where there was a single undisputed national champion in college football every year. Where’s the fun in that? What are you going to argue with your buddies about then? Also, Bert Blyleven so belongs in the Hall of Fame. In addition to all the pitching stats in his favor, he set more shoes on fire than any player in modern history. A guy like that deserves enshrinement.

I voted for Babe as number one and would so a thousand times over. The thing about figures like Cousy (or maybe Mikan, more properly), Tilden, Jones, Weissmuller, etc. is that they came into sports that were either new or unpopular, dominated, and became the first superstars. Baseball on the other hand was THE game and had been for decades when Ruth started to go nuts. Chamberlain and Tiger are the only athletes who might lay claim to a similar feat.

Advanced hitting statistics are very stable across eras (though not perfect of course), and they all say that Ruth was among the best three hitters of all time. Smart people who analyze swing mechanics say that his efficient, powerful, ultra-rotational swing is remarkably alike those of great hitters in later generations. He is iconic and transcendent and his very name evokes more to more people than any other athlete in history.

There were tens of thousands of baseball players clamoring to reach the Major Leagues when Babe came around; he was orders of magnitude better than them all. Anything that would have given him an advantage over his latter-day counterparts (no slider, no splitter, no night games, shorter schedule, etc.) was available to all of his contemporaries, yet he dominated.

Forget about his pitching, which would almost certainly be nothing special in the modern game, and you still have the biggest figure in baseball’s history. He’s the first player in the Hall of Fame, and there just isn’t a reason he shouldn’t be.

“If he came up in today’s game, you would have to assume he would be in MUCH better shape, and probably even stronger.”

I don’t think you can make this assumption. It might be valid on the average, but it isnt a given with superstars.

It’s like saying “If Miguel Cabrera had the work ethic of A-Rod, he’d be the better third basemen”…OK, well, he doesn’t. And how can we know who would and who wouldn’t?

…How meaningful is that 207 OPS+ anyway? When was OPS+ invented? Is it possible that Ruth was just one of the few who was playing the game the right/productive way, the way we currently understand it should be played?

Even in posts regarding Joe Morgan it has been revealed that Joe was criticized for walking too much….that was in the late 60’s! How much credit does the Babe deserve for walking and driving bombs when everyone else was bunting for hits and hittem em where they aint? (I think a lot!) As time went by, and more players starting thinking like this the gap between best and second best was never as pronounced. Ty Cobb supposedly said he could have hit 30-40 HR a year if he thought that was how you won ball games.

“Ty Cobb supposedly said he could have hit 30-40 HR a year if he thought that was how you won ball games.”

I have to think that, with the exception of Dusty Baker, there has never been ANYONE in baseball who was stupid enough to think that a basehit was somehow more valuable than a homerun.

In any sport, the more people play it and get good training in it, the higher the average performance should become at the pro level. And as everybody in MLB now has to get through a rigorous set of hurdles in the minor leagues and gets the training to make them the best they can be, there seems to be much less variance in ability at the top level than there was in olden times. Back in 1920 there were probably a lot of people who could have been almost as good as the Babe, but never got discovered or taught to refine their raw skills. This made it much more possible for one man to be WAY better than everyone else, hitting more homers than almost any TEAM.

So, mean performance has presumably increased a lot over the years at the pro level, but variance seems to have dropped a lot relative to the mean. That makes it much harder to put up 207 OPS+ numbers these days. Other sports generally lack anything like OPS+ that tells you how Ruth was SO much better than his contemporaries. So we might hear legends about Red Grange, we can’t statistically prove that he left his contemporary football players behind in the way Ruth did.

These thoughts actually give me much more respect for Barry Bonds’ relative amazingness in recent years, despite the fact that I really dislike the guy.

Joe D over Musial, Morgan, and Hornsby? Are we gonna make him dramatically overrated again?

Somebody suggested Pete Rose? Aw, criminee - next it will be Steve Garvey or Derek Jeter!