There is no sport with a greater history (or perhaps, no sport which relies on its own history more) than baseball. Of course, as a lifelong baseball fan, one who played for nearly 10 years, I'm somewhat biased, but in terms of the sheer amount of statistics (and the variety of different stats), no sport comes close to being close. No other sport has the combination of a rich history and the scores of varied statistical metrics that allow for legitimate comparisons of ballplayers whose careers were separated by over a century. In fact, arguments about baseball players go back as far as the establishment of the game itself, and you can find hundreds of examples in newspapers, major magazine articles, and yes, blogs, about which player was better than whom. Fortunately, unlike other sports, the statistics intrinsic to America's National Pastime afford us the ability make draw legitimate comparisons across decades, which is what this series will be all about: The Top 20 Greatest National League and American League Hitters of All-Time.
Throughout the history of the sport, when judging hitters, different metrics have taken superiority when it comes to bestowing upon the honorific title of "Greatest Hitter." Throughout the majority of the first half of the 20th Century, batting average took precedence. The Chalmers Award was given to the hitter with the highest batting average from 1910-1914, and Henry Chadwick (a man sometimes referred to as "The Father of Baseball"), the creator of the metric, thought it to be the best representation of a hitter's true skill. However, even during that time, home runs were tracked, and Babe Ruth captivated the imaginations of both young fans and seasons sportswriters with his almost single-handedly propelling baseball into the Live Ball era in 1920, with his mammoth long ball blasts and just as extraordinary strikeout totals. Then there came slugging percentage and on-base percentage, which combined to form OPS (on-base plus slugging). Perhaps the most understood "advanced" statistic (at least according to the Fangraphs tables), it has been replaced by newer metrics, such as OPS+, wOBA, and wRC+. OPS+ adjusts the OPS of a player by the hitting environment of that year as well as the park factor in which the hitter played in, and calculates it on a scale, with 100 being average, above 100 is good, below 100 is bad, and so forth. wOBA and wRC+ involve a bit more in-depth calculations, so I've attached links to them above, but the important thing to note is that wRC+ is scaled just like OPS+ and wOBA is scaled to mirror on-base percentage. There is also Batting Runs and Offensive WAR (RBat and oWAR, for short, explanations of which can be found here) But all five do a better job of judging a hitter than the traditional volume and rate stats do.
So with the above out of the way, the question turns to how can one use those metrics to compare hitters across eras. I took the approach of using them in conjunction and sorting them out that way. Fortunately, the heavy lifting has already been done by those guys who devised the metrics, and the only thing I did was make some slight adjustments that I think allow for more accurate comparisons, which I describe below.
I hope that this series will be insightful and perhaps cause you to reconsider some players who may not have gotten the credit they rightly deserve, as well as maybe re-evaluate some hitters who perhaps received a little too much credit than they objectively earned. I will try to post one entry a day, alternating between the AL and NL, and hopefully it will be completed within six weeks. Thanks for taking the time to read and let's have some fun.
Throughout the history of the sport, when judging hitters, different metrics have taken superiority when it comes to bestowing upon the honorific title of "Greatest Hitter." Throughout the majority of the first half of the 20th Century, batting average took precedence. The Chalmers Award was given to the hitter with the highest batting average from 1910-1914, and Henry Chadwick (a man sometimes referred to as "The Father of Baseball"), the creator of the metric, thought it to be the best representation of a hitter's true skill. However, even during that time, home runs were tracked, and Babe Ruth captivated the imaginations of both young fans and seasons sportswriters with his almost single-handedly propelling baseball into the Live Ball era in 1920, with his mammoth long ball blasts and just as extraordinary strikeout totals. Then there came slugging percentage and on-base percentage, which combined to form OPS (on-base plus slugging). Perhaps the most understood "advanced" statistic (at least according to the Fangraphs tables), it has been replaced by newer metrics, such as OPS+, wOBA, and wRC+. OPS+ adjusts the OPS of a player by the hitting environment of that year as well as the park factor in which the hitter played in, and calculates it on a scale, with 100 being average, above 100 is good, below 100 is bad, and so forth. wOBA and wRC+ involve a bit more in-depth calculations, so I've attached links to them above, but the important thing to note is that wRC+ is scaled just like OPS+ and wOBA is scaled to mirror on-base percentage. There is also Batting Runs and Offensive WAR (RBat and oWAR, for short, explanations of which can be found here) But all five do a better job of judging a hitter than the traditional volume and rate stats do.
So with the above out of the way, the question turns to how can one use those metrics to compare hitters across eras. I took the approach of using them in conjunction and sorting them out that way. Fortunately, the heavy lifting has already been done by those guys who devised the metrics, and the only thing I did was make some slight adjustments that I think allow for more accurate comparisons, which I describe below.
- For wOBA, I re-calculated the linear weights to distinguish between leagues, as the AL and NL have one big difference between the two (the AL uses the designated hitter while the NL makes the pitcher bat), so there are differences there if the distinction is not made.
- For wRC+, I modified it to include intentional walks so that the hitters are on an even playing field, as IBBs were only first tracked in 1941. Babe Ruth undoubtedly was intentionally walked in his career, but because the stat wasn't tracked until six years after he retired, we have no record of the times in which he was.
- The biggest distinction I made was to exclude seasons in which the hitter did not have 400 or more plate appearances. This was done primarily to weed out outliers and not weigh seasons from hitters in which they missed significant time for one reason or another.
I hope that this series will be insightful and perhaps cause you to reconsider some players who may not have gotten the credit they rightly deserve, as well as maybe re-evaluate some hitters who perhaps received a little too much credit than they objectively earned. I will try to post one entry a day, alternating between the AL and NL, and hopefully it will be completed within six weeks. Thanks for taking the time to read and let's have some fun.
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