> Me (present): > His being hurt was eminently predictable. He's old and tremendously out of > shape. Why not let the emotional center of your team walk? The Yankees let > Babe Ruth walk.
Babe was truly over the hill when the Yankees got rid of him. Hurt or healthy he had nothing left. Vaughn might have contributed on the field if healthy. He would have contributed in the clubhouse in any event. There is a fine line to walk when dealing with an aging star. I believe you have to give them that one last contract if at all possible. But in sports as in life there are people who are very valuable for the emotional qualities they bring to an enterprise and you hang on to them if you can even past their prime. The emotional center of the team > isn't nearly as important as the hitting center of the team. Vaughn wasn't > worth anything remotely like $80M. He was a somewhat-better-than-average > first baseman. And who do they have that is better. Don't get too hung up on the money. Power hitting first basemen get contracts like the one Vaughn signed. I think he would have been worth it for the Sox because he might have gotten them past my Yanks. Even for one year that would be worth it (for the red sox a world series win would be worth way more than 80 mil) We're not talking about Frank Thomas or Mark McGwire here for goodness sakes. No, we are talking about a guy who was tremendously popular in the city and on the team. > > Now wait a minute young man. Best ever. How about Gibson, Kofax, Guidry > (at > > his peak) Roger himself, Whitey. Give me a break. He is the best active > > pitcher not doubt about it. But the best ever? > > > I really, really mean this - it's not even close. > > Bob: > I know you really mean it but that doesn't mean I have to believe it. > > Me: > Yes, but you have to provide some data to back up your assertions, and I > still haven't seen any. My arguement is that there is no data that can back up these assertions. That statements about the best ever are very difficult to prove. That there are too many variables to compare the best from different eras when those bests were so much better than any of their contemporaries. I have provided you with my reasons for believing that Kofax may have been the best ever. Pedro is in his league. But Pedro has yet to do it when everything is on the line. Kofax did. > > > Me: > To take your points in reverse order: > Actually, the odds are very high that someone playing now is the best ever > at his position. Think about it. The population from which baseball > players are drawn now is the largest it has ever been, while modern surgical > techniques mean that injuries that used to be career-ending can be overcome > in months. The combination of the two means that the baseball talent base > is deeper than it has ever been. But there are many more teams now than before. So the talent is diluted. Even if half the major leagers who ever played the game are playing now one must still be suspicious of claims that current player x is the best ever. It is just too easy to make that claim. Player X is performing now in front of eyes in the style that is current against other contemporaries whose talent is also readily apparent. Player y played 40 years ago. Few remember seeing him, styles were different etc. Modern players would blow away old timers > without even putting up a sweat. The old timers didn't begin to have access > to the techniques that make modern players so good. So what makes you think that if Pedro were pitching in 1960 that he would have been better than Kofax. He would have been subject to the same limitations. Conversely if Kofax were pitching now he would have the same advantages of training and medical care that Pedro does. I may have posted this before but I saw an interview with Dave Debuscher of the great Knicks teams of the early 70s. He was asked if his team could compete against the current crop of stronger bigger more athletic players. He laughed and said that if he were playing now he would be using the same training regiment and would be just as strong. He said if his teammates could keep their skills (shooting passing defense) and add strength they would still be able to win. What is more surprising > Barry Bonds - the best left fielder of all time, period, and maybe someday soon the >second best player of all time You don't think it a little peculiar that after Ruth's record lasted 34 years and Maris's 38 years that suddenly the number of people hitting over 60 homeruns has increased so dramatically. You think this is all talent? Come on; this is technology and equipment and new ball parks conducive to hitters etc. If Babe Ruth came up today (assuming he went to AA or through rehab 5 times and was HIV positive and stable) he would have hit 100 homeruns. > Alex Rodriguez - will probably retire as the best shortstop of all time Yes I agree here. > Cal Ripken Jr. I'm not sure about this. Here is the problem. Give me a list of the top 50 shortstops. Surely amongst those we one will be best. But to just choose a few that we remember (mostly because they are playing currently is just not a reasonable way to procede.) > Roger Clemens - a plausible candidate for best pitcher of all time by the > time he retires > Greg Maddux - a pitcher who is almost as good as Clemens, and had perhaps > the best four year streak of any pitcher ever when he won four consecutive > Cy Youngs > Pedro Martinez - again, the most dominant pitcher of all time :-) Not one pitcher from the 20-50s? Not one as good as these four who by huge conincidence are playing now. Come on. > Rickey Henderson - the best leadoff hitter of all time Yes , and the fourth best > left fielder > Mark McGwire - probably the second best first baseman of all time (after Lou > Gehrig) > Mike Piazza - the best-hitting catcher of all time by a very large margin Best stats but better than Yogi or Dickie or Bench when it mattered. I am a huge Piazza fan. Great hitter, good guy, gets all sorts of crap from idiotic Mets fans. One of the best for sure but your simple little lists do not do justice to the complexity of what makes for a great player. > > There are probably some other candidates. But modern ballplayers are better > than their counterparts, and the pool of talent today is vastly larger than > that of any other time in history. Babe Ruth, in his entire career, never > saw a slider, a circle changeup, or a split-finger fastball. Saw lots of spit balls. Much more importantly, he never saw a black player. Well he did but not in official games. > Pedro Martinez is from the Dominican Republic - two generations ago he could > never have played in the majors. The sheer size of the talent pool means > that it's a virtual certainty that many of the best players ever are playing > today. In absolute terms there's no question - everyone in the majors would > have been an all-star fifty years agoNo - forget race and nationality for a second. >Assume they all would have played in the Bigs. They would have lived in that time and >been like the players of that era. Same training same medical treatment etc. The >opposite is true for the players from that era. I just don]'t think human native >ability changes that much. There are a few truly outstanding athletes in every >generation but not many. They are flukes of nature. Ruth and Jordan are my two, Jim >Thorpe from what I have read. Maybe Tiger. With everone else they are products of >their times. To take them out of their times makes no sense. Maybe Kofax would have >done better on lower mounds, maybe training techniques would have made him faster. >Maybe Pedro would have struggled in the 60s. I think it is impossible to know and the >stats can never reveal the answers to this question. In another context, people argue >about what Darwin would think about evolution if he were alive today. Wel! ! l if he were alive today he would be over 175 years old and probably no t thinking anything. If he were born now he would not be Darwin, at least not the Darwin we are arguing about. Same with Kofax and Pedro. , in just the same way that very good > high school students now run 4:00 miles when it was impossible for anyone > decades ago. But the same students could not have done this decades ago. The important thing again and again is; did you win? You can't take performances out of their historical context. > > As for Pedro not being in big spots. Koufax had the advantage of one of the > best _hitting_ teams in baseball behind him. When the Dodgers beat the Yankees no one hit on either team. The Dodgers won their games 1/0 or 2/ As did all of the other pitchers you cite. Look at Clemens this year - he's 20-3 because he's > averaged _almost 7 runs per game_ of run support. It's not Pedro's fault > that his team can't hit. As for his big game performance - it would be hard > to name a playoff performance superior to his in 1999, and this with an > injured back. Mike Mussina in 1997 was close, I suppose, but not his equal. > There have been others, certainly, but in his one chance at a sequence of > really big games he did every bit as well as any other pitcher in history. > I don't quite see how it's possible to argue that he doesn't perform well in > big games when, the one time he got a chance, he was unbeatable He has not been successful over the past two years against the Yankees. He has not gotten his team to the World Series. I know that there is a certain amount of unfairness here because we are talking about a team game. Pitchers are critical to success but even they cannot do it alone. But we are trying to decide who is the greatest ever. Not who is great. For me the only test that makes any sense is the test of how well that player does in the penultimate games. Pedro hasn't had the chance. Is that his fault? No and yes. Kofax had the chance and performed herocially by the way with an elbow that was so bad that he had to retire early and can bearly raise his arm. His greatest years were ones in which he suffered from horrible pain. This is a prime example of why one should be suspicious of calling the current player the best. We know or remember more about the current player but we remember less about the older player. We even know what Pedro's MR shows but poor Sandy had to s! ! how the world a crummy insensiti ve plain xray of his elbow. > Bob: > You understand that that argument makes Pedro look better, not worse? You miss my point. At a certain level ERA will become insensitive as a comparative measure. No one denies that Pedro is truly amazing. The best in an era will be that by definition. The issue is how to compare the best from different eras. My point is that below 2.0 ERA becomes insensitive because it makes the assumption that Kofax's ERA would be higher now. I believe that if Kofax were magically time travelled from 1958 to 1998 and given the benefits of modern training and medicine that he would have done just as well as Pedro. Bob: > The stats you site are of course interesting and revealing but stats are > used in an attempt to characterize past performance so that future > performance can be predicted. Kind of like economic indicators. The numbers > don't lie but they may not capture the important element in any system. > > Me: > Not sure what this has to do with your argument, but the nice thing about > stats is precisely that they allow us to capture the most important elements > of the system in a way that subjective judgments cannot. The stats capture what we think are the most important elements. Whether or not they are the most important is determined by how well they predict or explain overall performance. The stats aren't > deceived by fallible memories or wishful thinking. But they blind to some complex phenomena that are intangible. Like how well a manager and a general manager prepare a team for the playoffs or how a leader sacrifices some of his/her own time to help team mates. The numbers are the > numbers. The sabermetric community actually has _peer-reviewed_ journals, > for goodness sake. It's hard to aspire to a higher standard of reliability. Reliability is fine but it does not equate with predictive value. Reliability refers to reproducability. Whatever you think IQ tests are measuring they do it reliably. But there is a huge arguement over what reliable statistics mean. \> > > Me: > > Jeter is a very, very good player. > > Bob: > He has too many errors but he has great range and makes the big play. You > can't have seen him play every day and argue that he is a poor fielder. > > Me: > What he absolutely does not have is good range. He has _terrible_ range. > He just looks very good. Defensive performance is almost impossible to > judge by eye, because the most important component of defense is the _first > step_ - when you're still looking at the batter. Not the last step, when > you're looking at the fielder. I note that it is very hard to judge > statistically also, but the stats are more revealing than judging by eye. So all of those people who watch baseball for a living who talk about players and see them every day. These guys are all deluded. > Furthermore, there's selection bias. You only remember the plays he makes, > not the plays that he does not. Because the plays he makes are the important ones. \ > Me: > Who all of this underserves is Alex Rodriguez, who is so > > far superior to the other two that even comparing him isn't fair. > > Me: > I have already argued that basketball and baseball are so different that you > can't analogize from one to the other. Why not because such an arguement is inconvenient? As for the ninth inning - well, a > good team can score enough runs in the first 8 that the ninth doesn't > matter. But in the playoffs things often come down to the end of the game. Teams tend to be more evenly mathced than in the regular season and they play things closer to the vest. So games are usually close near the end. That is where championship teams excell. > > Let me ask you a simple question. Do the great teams win close games? Since I don't have the stats at hand I can't answer but they do win games that are close. (They may also win non-close games but the key is that they win when the games are tight near the end. Tied or down one run in the 7th inning the great teams find a way to win). > > > > Me: > Because baseball is different than other sports. but this is a circular arguement. In other sports whether there is a single game playoff or a series, it is not luck but in baseball it is. Why? Because it fits your arguement? But is this in the nature of the game or are there other factors like the lenght of the season or the importance of some games as opposed to others? > Winning the championship is emotionally more important. I would certainly > rather the Orioles had won 5 fewer games in 1997 but won the world series. > I've never argued otherwise. I was far happier the year my state team won > the championship when we were an inferior team than I was the year we came > in second but were, in both my opinion and that of many who saw us play, > probably the best team ever. _But_ I don't think winning the championship > necessarily tells you who the best team is. There's no way on this earth > that the 1997 Marlins were the best team in baseball. They were the best team that >year by definition. They may have been lucky but they were not just lucky. They >played the best when they had to. > The regular season tells you who the best team is far better than the > postseason. Not as I and most people define "best". > > > Me: > I do think that the playoffs may be somewhat different than the regular > season, largely in that I guess that managers and bullpens become more > important - one reason that the Yankees have done quite well. But that's > almost certainly less important than the simple factor of random luck. When you see a pattern luck should be the last thing you use to account for it. > > > Me: > Or they were lucky. If Terrence Long had caught that flyball in Game 5, then we >wouldn't be having this discussion. Yes but he didn't in part because he found >himself in a situation that was more pressure than he could handle. The Yankees would >not have made this mistake. During what you call their lucky streak they have avoided >mistakes in critical situations. That is why they won. > > Gautam
