100 Greatest Players
dallasactuary
Posts: 4,337 ✭✭✭✭✭
in Sports Talk
Warning: another of my long, rambling posts summarizing my latest number crunching.
I think Bill James is, easily, the greatest baseball mind of our time. He knows his stuff, and he's very talented at statistical analysis. His list of the Top 100 players should be given great credence by everyone. That said, his list includes a great deal of qualitative input, not just numbers. For example, he gives credit to players for seasons that they never played, whether due to war, the color barrier, and some other reasons. He also has an explicit "fudge factor", but he doesn't disclose what it is, or even if he has applied it at all to a specific player.
His final formula is also somewhat odd, at least to me. For example, at one point he gives credit for what a player did in his best consecutive seasons. I don't know why any seasons have to be consecutive to get maximum credit, and I'm sure James would concede that it was just his opinion.
So, I gathered the same data James used (his own Win Share data) and used my own formula. First and foremost, there is no "fudge factor" for anyone, and no player gets credit for anything he didn't actually do in the major leagues. I understand why James gives players credit for war years, and I'm not saying he's wrong to do so; in fact, I generally agree that he's right to do so. My goal was simply to see what the list would look like if as much speculation as possible was removed.
The formula I used ranks each players season Win Shares in order from top to bottom, and gives maximum credit for the best season, slightly less credit for the next best season, and so on for every season that they played. In this way, the formula still recognizes both peak value and career value, but no longer requires the peak to be in consecutive years. The adjustment for the era in which the player played is speculative, but the need for such an adjustment is not. So I simply used the same adjustment James used.
A few other key things to note:
James data ends in 2001, so that's all I've got. No question that a few modern players would have cracked this list.
James mixed pitchers and position players. I just took out the pitchers. James includes a few people that I simply refuse to include, or even mention unless I have to; I took out the known cheaters. You may find a name or two in my list that you think probably cheated; if you want to ignore them, I don't mind. James also threw in his guesses at where some of the Negro leaguers would have ranked; I took those out, too. So while I am making a top 100 list, if you want to compare it to James' list, he's only got 68 comparable players on his.
With all that out of the way, my list (players not in James Top 100/68 are in bold):
Ruth
Wagner
Cobb
Mays
Mantle
Williams
Musial
Speaker
Aaron
Gehrig
Schmidt
Hornsby
E. Collins
Morgan
Mathews
F. Robinson
Ott
Henderson
Lajoie
Rose
Brett
Ripken
Foxx
Vaughan
DiMaggio (James has Joe at #10, I've got him at 25. I like my ranking better)
Boggs
Yastrzemski
R. Jackson
Bench
Biggio
Bagwell
Yount
Allen (Richie Allen was great; James hates the guy and "fudge factored" him out of his top 100)
McCovey
Murray
Berra
F. Thomas
Crawford
P. Waner
Sandberg
Alomar
Raines
Gwynn
G. Carter (no matter what I do or how I do it, Carter looks great; James doesn't even have him in his top 100)
Snider
Piazza
W. Clark (Seriously, Will was awesome; I don't know why he wasn't in James top 100)
Santo (the greatest Cub ever)
Killebrew
Larkin
Molitor
Kaline
Flick
B. Williams
Gehringer
Winfield
Griffey Jr.
A. Simmons
Carew
Mize
Fisk
Delahanty
Stargell (I've got Stargell 7 slots lower than James, in case anyone thinks I put my thumb on the scale...)
Burkett
Clemente (...but Clemete drops 15 points once the emotion is removed)
Da. Evans (only a handful of the players below this line are in James Top 100 or in the HOF; they represent the most underrated players in baseball history)
J. Wynn
Trammell
Appling
Singleton
Magee
Banks
Clarke
Heilmann
Parker
Cronin
Grich
Brock
Torre
Sheffield
HR Baker
Wheat
K. Hernandez
Murphy
Bo. Bonds
B Robinson
Reese
F. Howard
Staub
Perez
Bando
Frisch
Goslin
Medwick
J. Clark
Hamilton
J. Robinson
Cepeda
Reg. Smith
Ashburn
Some names that I mention frequently, or that I find interesting for whatever reason:
101 Norm Cash
104 Bobby Murcer
121 Jim Fregosi
123 Kirby Puckett and in James' Top 100/68; way overrated
125 Dwight Evans
134 George Sisler
141 Andre Dawson
150 Jim Rice
I think Bill James is, easily, the greatest baseball mind of our time. He knows his stuff, and he's very talented at statistical analysis. His list of the Top 100 players should be given great credence by everyone. That said, his list includes a great deal of qualitative input, not just numbers. For example, he gives credit to players for seasons that they never played, whether due to war, the color barrier, and some other reasons. He also has an explicit "fudge factor", but he doesn't disclose what it is, or even if he has applied it at all to a specific player.
His final formula is also somewhat odd, at least to me. For example, at one point he gives credit for what a player did in his best consecutive seasons. I don't know why any seasons have to be consecutive to get maximum credit, and I'm sure James would concede that it was just his opinion.
So, I gathered the same data James used (his own Win Share data) and used my own formula. First and foremost, there is no "fudge factor" for anyone, and no player gets credit for anything he didn't actually do in the major leagues. I understand why James gives players credit for war years, and I'm not saying he's wrong to do so; in fact, I generally agree that he's right to do so. My goal was simply to see what the list would look like if as much speculation as possible was removed.
The formula I used ranks each players season Win Shares in order from top to bottom, and gives maximum credit for the best season, slightly less credit for the next best season, and so on for every season that they played. In this way, the formula still recognizes both peak value and career value, but no longer requires the peak to be in consecutive years. The adjustment for the era in which the player played is speculative, but the need for such an adjustment is not. So I simply used the same adjustment James used.
A few other key things to note:
James data ends in 2001, so that's all I've got. No question that a few modern players would have cracked this list.
James mixed pitchers and position players. I just took out the pitchers. James includes a few people that I simply refuse to include, or even mention unless I have to; I took out the known cheaters. You may find a name or two in my list that you think probably cheated; if you want to ignore them, I don't mind. James also threw in his guesses at where some of the Negro leaguers would have ranked; I took those out, too. So while I am making a top 100 list, if you want to compare it to James' list, he's only got 68 comparable players on his.
With all that out of the way, my list (players not in James Top 100/68 are in bold):
Ruth
Wagner
Cobb
Mays
Mantle
Williams
Musial
Speaker
Aaron
Gehrig
Schmidt
Hornsby
E. Collins
Morgan
Mathews
F. Robinson
Ott
Henderson
Lajoie
Rose
Brett
Ripken
Foxx
Vaughan
DiMaggio (James has Joe at #10, I've got him at 25. I like my ranking better)
Boggs
Yastrzemski
R. Jackson
Bench
Biggio
Bagwell
Yount
Allen (Richie Allen was great; James hates the guy and "fudge factored" him out of his top 100)
McCovey
Murray
Berra
F. Thomas
Crawford
P. Waner
Sandberg
Alomar
Raines
Gwynn
G. Carter (no matter what I do or how I do it, Carter looks great; James doesn't even have him in his top 100)
Snider
Piazza
W. Clark (Seriously, Will was awesome; I don't know why he wasn't in James top 100)
Santo (the greatest Cub ever)
Killebrew
Larkin
Molitor
Kaline
Flick
B. Williams
Gehringer
Winfield
Griffey Jr.
A. Simmons
Carew
Mize
Fisk
Delahanty
Stargell (I've got Stargell 7 slots lower than James, in case anyone thinks I put my thumb on the scale...)
Burkett
Clemente (...but Clemete drops 15 points once the emotion is removed)
Da. Evans (only a handful of the players below this line are in James Top 100 or in the HOF; they represent the most underrated players in baseball history)
J. Wynn
Trammell
Appling
Singleton
Magee
Banks
Clarke
Heilmann
Parker
Cronin
Grich
Brock
Torre
Sheffield
HR Baker
Wheat
K. Hernandez
Murphy
Bo. Bonds
B Robinson
Reese
F. Howard
Staub
Perez
Bando
Frisch
Goslin
Medwick
J. Clark
Hamilton
J. Robinson
Cepeda
Reg. Smith
Ashburn
Some names that I mention frequently, or that I find interesting for whatever reason:
101 Norm Cash
104 Bobby Murcer
121 Jim Fregosi
123 Kirby Puckett and in James' Top 100/68; way overrated
125 Dwight Evans
134 George Sisler
141 Andre Dawson
150 Jim Rice
This is for you @thisistheshow - Jim Rice was actually a pretty good player.
0
Comments
Not sure I agree with some you have added such as Staub, Bando and Grich. I did see that you had F. Howard and I recall that you have written favorably about his season with the Senators in the 1967-71 time frame. Howard never really got the playing time he deserved with the Dodgers- I never completely understood the rationale behind that. But if he had the playing time and 600 at bat seasons in the 1960-1964 time frame, I suspect his numbers would have been better.
Experience the World through Numismatics...it's more than you can imagine.
mark
Fellas, leave the tight pants to the ladies. If I can count the coins in your pockets you better use them to call a tailor. Stay thirsty my friends......
Collecting 1970s Topps baseball wax, rack and cello packs, as well as PCGS graded Half Cents, Large Cents, Two Cent pieces and Three Cent Silver pieces.
Interesting list-
Not sure I agree with some you have added such as Staub, Bando and Grich. I did see that you had F. Howard and I recall that you have written favorably about his season with the Senators in the 1967-71 time frame. Howard never really got the playing time he deserved with the Dodgers- I never completely understood the rationale behind that. But if he had the playing time and 600 at bat seasons in the 1960-1964 time frame, I suspect his numbers would have been better.
Let me clarify - I didn't add anyone or take anyone away from James' list. What I did was take the same information that James used and attempt to take out the guesses and hypotheticals that James used, and replace some of what appeared to me to be somewhat random choices he made with ones that I thought were more logical. So it's still mostly James' list, but the list he would have created if he had strictly followed the numbers.
Bando and Grich, I think, would have made James' original top 100 list if had omitted pitchers and Negro Leaguers as I did. They were great players, and Grich, at least, ought to be in the HOF. What Bando and Grich have in common is that they played in the toughest hitters parks in the majors. Every hitter on the A's and Angels from those years (players like Fregosi, Tenace and Reggie Jackson) are much better than most people think - people who don't realize how tough their parks were anyway. Conversely, all the pitchers on those teams (like Jim Hunter and Nolan Ryan) were not as great as most people think.
Rusty Staub wasn't particularly great - he was very good for a very long time. James decided that being great for three years made a player better than another player who was very good for 15 years. He's not wrong about that since it's just an opinion, but it's an opinion that doesn't make any sense to me. Rusty Staub accomplished more in his career than several HOFers, and I like that he's in this list.
I couldn't agree more about Frank Howard - a truly great player for a short time, and a very good player for long enough on top of that to be in the HOF. I think he suffered from the same asinine thinking that made people say of Harmon Killebrew that "all he did was hit homers". Howard wasn't as good as Killebrew and he never overcame that thinking.
http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1098327-the-100-greatest-hitters-in-mlb-history
IT CAN'T BE A TRUE PLAYOFF UNLESS THE BIG TEN CHAMPIONS ARE INCLUDED
Collecting 1970s Topps baseball wax, rack and cello packs, as well as PCGS graded Half Cents, Large Cents, Two Cent pieces and Three Cent Silver pieces.
The bleacher report, lol..
I actually laughed at the James list. Pretty stupid to have a guy in the top 10 who never played a game in the majors.
Bleacher is Turner Sports Network.
IT CAN'T BE A TRUE PLAYOFF UNLESS THE BIG TEN CHAMPIONS ARE INCLUDED
The bleacher report, lol..
I actually laughed at the James list. Pretty stupid to have a guy in the top 10 who never played a game in the majors.
Bleacher is Turner Sports Network.
I agree, the bleacher report exists only to lol at. Or so it seems.
To call James' decision to put Negro Leaguers on his list "stupid" is, well, stupid. His list is of the 100 greatest baseball players, not the 100 greatest MLB players. He would be the first to concede that how he ranked them is little more than a guess, but his belief that a handful of Negro Leaguers were among the 100 greatest baseball players seems perfectly reasonable to me. But it was his guesses that I was trying to remove from his ranking, so the Negro Leaguers were necessarily dropped.
Hank Greenberg
Minnie Minoso
Kirby Puckett
Mickey Cochrane
Rou Campanella
Minoso and Campanella were undoubtedly getting credit from James for their years in the Negro Leagues, and Greenberg for his war years.
I don't know why James had Puckett and Cochrane so high; the stats certainly don't support it anyway. Both had relatively short careers, which James doesn't penalize much, but they weren't that great even at their peaks to merit a top 100 spot, or so it seems to me.
All but Campanella are in the top 150 on the revised list, with Campanella falling to 184.
The bleacher report, lol..
I actually laughed at the James list. Pretty stupid to have a guy in the top 10 who never played a game in the majors.
Bleacher is Turner Sports Network.
I agree, the bleacher report exists only to lol at. Or so it seems.
To call James' decision to put Negro Leaguers on his list "stupid" is, well, stupid. His list is of the 100 greatest baseball players, not the 100 greatest MLB players. He would be the first to concede that how he ranked them is little more than a guess, but his belief that a handful of Negro Leaguers were among the 100 greatest baseball players seems perfectly reasonable to me. But it was his guesses that I was trying to remove from his ranking, so the Negro Leaguers were necessarily dropped.
I'll take TSN opinion any day over your dumb list. Dick Allen over Barry Bonds, Eddie Murray, and Roberto Clemente
IT CAN'T BE A TRUE PLAYOFF UNLESS THE BIG TEN CHAMPIONS ARE INCLUDED
And that's certainly your right. If you'd like to join the ranks of people who understand such things, though, you'd be better off asking questions than putting all of your faith in a sportswriter whose biases happen to match your own.
Barry Bonds was excluded from my list because he wasn't a baseball player, having not followed the rules of baseball. That he put up numbers playing the game he was playing that exceed those that baseball players put up playing baseball is of no interest to me, and ought not be of interest to anyone. Apples and oranges.
That Allen ranks higher than Clemente came as no surprise to me nor to anyone who, you know, understands these things. That he ranks higher than Murray gets into how peak and career value are weighted. At his best, Allen was better than Murray - there's no question about it. Murray was great/very good for much longer than Allen - no question about that. I've made lists and posted them here that have Murray ahead of Allen, and lists that have Allen ahead of Murray; neither is right or wrong, they are both products of the assumptions that go into them. My point here is simply that Bill James would have ranked Allen higher than Murray had he left his personal opinions out of it. My personal opinion is that Murray was a better baseball player than Allen, but I'm not dumb enough to claim that the opposite opinion is dumb.
mark
Fellas, leave the tight pants to the ladies. If I can count the coins in your pockets you better use them to call a tailor. Stay thirsty my friends......
Collecting 1970s Topps baseball wax, rack and cello packs, as well as PCGS graded Half Cents, Large Cents, Two Cent pieces and Three Cent Silver pieces.
It's tough to rate the Negro Leaguers simply because they were not allowed to compete, so you end up guessing. It might seem unfair, but sadly that's the way it was/is.
And of course Killebrew should be higher!!!! ;-)