Well played. You may grab a complimentary gift bag on your way out.The joke was a grounder towards CF and you are Jeter.
That's not normally how he does things, and he certainly is implying that it is a Herculean task in his newsletter, preventing him from doing other things like his HOF candidate writeups. But as I said, I imagine his is reproducing a fair amount of old material where possible.I'm not as familiar with Posnanski's work as others, but given he is doing an entry a day, I imagine he had almost all of them, if not all 100, done before he published the first entry.
That is a really dumb way to do this then. Not to turn this into something about me, but I did a similar exercise where I did 50 installments, once a week for a year. They were fairly lengthy, but I was finishing up college and had a lot of time on my hands, but when I started I probably had about 30 of the installments already written, and finished them by April, so there was no stress in "finishing" the list. There is absolutely no way I could have produced one installment a day for 100 straight days. Now, Posnanski is a far more prolific, experienced writer than myself, but this seems like a complete recipe for disaster, or at least a lot of half-assed entries. With the exception of a handful of modern players, there is nothing time sensitive about any of the entries.That's not normally how he does things, and he certainly is implying that it is a Herculean task in his newsletter, preventing him from doing other things like his HOF candidate writeups. But as I said, I imagine his is reproducing a fair amount of old material where possible.
I would agree that this is the plan and it will very likely happen, but hopefully he redoes the Jeter one for the book.My guess is he posts all of them on time, just like the Athletic said he would, then in a year or so he publishes them all in a book.
Jeter, in 40 plays, had maybe three plays in which he threw with his feet set. He threw on the run about 20-25 times; he jumped and threw about 10-15 times, he threw from his knees once. He threw from a stable position only when the ball, by the way it was hit, pinned him back on his heels.
Everett set his feet with almost unbelievable quickness and reliability, and threw off of his back foot on almost every play, good or bad. Jeter played much, much more shallow than Everett, cheated to his left more, and shifted his position from left to right much, much more than Everett did.
The low defensive rating for Derek Jeter is not based on computers, it is not based on statistics, and it is not based on math. It is based on a specific observation that there are balls going through the shortstop hole against the Yankees that might very well have been fielded. Lots of them—93 of them last year, not counting the ones that might have gone through when somebody else was playing short for the Yankees. Yes, there are computers between the original observation and the conclusion; we use computers to summarize our observations, and we do state the summary as a statistic. But, at its base, it is simply a highly organized and systematic observation based on watching the games very carefully and taking notes about what happens.
Jeter, given the balls he was challenged with, had an expectation of recording 439 groundball outs. He actually recorded 400. He missed by 39. Everett, given the balls hit to him, had an expectation of 340 groundball outs. He actually recorded 374. He over-achieved by 33-point-something.
From here sure, but Pos is calling it the Baseball 100 so it’s not him.If Sadaharu Oh is included, I believe MLB should be eliminated from the title.
Yeah I referred to the thread.From here sure, but Pos is calling it the Baseball 100 so it’s not him.
Yeah, he must mean Gwynn Jr. there. No, but Gary Carter, for example, ahead of Gwynn is shocking. Even more shocking is Gary Carter noses out Gwynn in BWAR. Tony gets hosed for defense, whereas Gary shines there. .338 lifetime hitter vs. .262. I don’t know, sometimes I think that War, what is it good for?Gwyn is way too low
My first instinct with Robinson was that he was too high; bWAR likes him a lot mainly because he both played a long time and also kills it in dWAR, with 39.1 career dWAR, third most all time behind Ozzie Smith and Mark Belanger (man, that was some left side of the infield Baltimore had in the 60s and 70s). To place Robinson that high, you have to value dWAR pretty highly, which can be faulty. That being said, everyone who saw him play seems to believe that Robinson was the best fielding 3B of all-time, so maybe this is a case of the advanced metrics backing up the eye test.Yeah, he must mean Gwynn Jr. there. No, but Gary Carter, for example, ahead of Gwynn is shocking. Even more shocking is Gary Carter noses out Gwynn in BWAR. Tony gets hosed for defense, whereas Gary shines there. .338 lifetime hitter vs. .262. I don’t know, sometimes I think that War, what is it good for?
As for the rest: This list is a moving target. I have done it three times using different methods and the rankings are quite different. This is because there’s no significant difference between a player ranked 72 and 48 and 31. I could swap them, for the most part, without it changing much of anything. So if you believe a player ranked 97th should actually be 53rd, well, it might be that way the next time.
Everyone that has ever done a list like this has to say something like this. At the same time, you can't have the attraction of ranking baseball players from 100 to 1 and then also say that there is no use arguing about why X is ranked higher than Y.I think Pos wanted to get out ahead of the "x is ahead of y" critique with the quote posted earlier in the thread (shown below). It's a bit of a cop out but I can also understand him wanting people to focus on the players and not necessarily whether player x is truly better than player y. That's probably easier to do until you get towards the top when people are naturally going to compare the rankings.
These rankings are a chance to tell some of the best baseball history stories there are. Cool Papa Bell deserves an audience.How can Posnanski rate Cool Papa Bell as the 84th best player? Posnanski was born several years after Bell stopped playing ball and then Bell played in the Negro Leagues and Mexico. trying to compare players from differing periods is bad enough without throwing in ones whose stats aren't remotely comparable.
I have no doubt that Cool Papa Bell was one of the great baseball players but how can he be ranked?
I think it does a tremendous disservice to not rate black players because of The racism of MLB. In Joe’s Monte Irvin essay he does a great job of walking through the 1950s and showing how each year new black players entered the league and immediately became stars. Why in the 20 or 30 years before Jackie broke the color barrier would the best Negro League players not have been in the upper echelon of MLB players if given the chance? It just doesn’t make sense, and to Joe’s credit, he, through his friendship with Buck O’Neil, has down a ton of work to figure out these players’ proper rank.How can Posnanski rate Cool Papa Bell as the 84th best player? Posnanski was born several years after Bell stopped playing ball and then Bell played in the Negro Leagues and Mexico. trying to compare players from differing periods is bad enough without throwing in ones whose stats aren't remotely comparable.
I have no doubt that Cool Papa Bell was one of the great baseball players but how can he be ranked?
And add in young Bobby Grich at 2nd and Paul Blair in center. Year after year Jim Palmer's actual ERA was better than his FIP.My first instinct with Robinson was that he was too high; bWAR likes him a lot mainly because he both played a long time and also kills it in dWAR, with 39.1 career dWAR, third most all time behind Ozzie Smith and Mark Belanger (man, that was some left side of the infield Baltimore had in the 60s and 70s). To place Robinson that high, you have to value dWAR pretty highly, which can be faulty. That being said, everyone who saw him play seems to believe that Robinson was the best fielding 3B of all-time, so maybe this is a case of the advanced metrics backing up the eye test.
However, Robinson has a career OPS of .723 and a career OPS+ of 104. Is defense really as valuable as offense? Teams don't seem to function like that in real life, otherwise Kevin Kiermaier would be getting a $250 million contract. If I was starting a team, I would rather have a complete banger like Frank Thomas or Miggy than a defensive ace like Robinson. In the age of a DH, you can also hide your big hitters weakness and pay a cheap Brendan Ryan type to play defense for them.
Bill James I know frequently criticized Robinson, saying that he was below average hitter, his defense was overrated by hero-worshiping sportswriters and that Ken Boyer was just as good.
I also liked Joe’s aside related to this in his piece on McCovey:I think it does a tremendous disservice to not rate black players because of The racism of MLB. In Joe’s Monte Irvin essay he does a great job of walking through the 1950s and showing how each year new black players entered the league and immediately became stars. Why in the 20 or 30 years before Jackie broke the color barrier would the best Negro League players not have been in the upper echelon of MLB players if given the chance? It just doesn’t make sense, and to Joe’s credit, he, through his friendship with Buck O’Neil, has down a ton of work to figure out these players’ proper rank.
And if you ever find yourself wondering about the quality of the players in the Negro Leagues, think about this: If Aaron, Williams and McCovey had been born 20 years earlier, all three of them would have spent their primes in the Negro Leagues, and their stories would be told as legend. People would be telling tall tales about the power of Stretch McCovey or the impossibly quick bat of Henry Aaron or the gorgeousness of Billy Williams’ hitting and … would you believe it? I wouldn’t worry about people overrating Negro Leaguers. I’d worry about people underrating them.
I'm going to post this even though it's long because I think it really answers this question nicely (not the entire Irvin essay but a big chunk of it):I think it does a tremendous disservice to not rate black players because of The racism of MLB. In Joe’s Monte Irvin essay he does a great job of walking through the 1950s and showing how each year new black players entered the league and immediately became stars. Why in the 20 or 30 years before Jackie broke the color barrier would the best Negro League players not have been in the upper echelon of MLB players if given the chance? It just doesn’t make sense, and to Joe’s credit, he, through his friendship with Buck O’Neil, has down a ton of work to figure out these players’ proper rank.
We've had this argument here before, but there are so many other factors to consider when comparing players from different eras. Beyond conditioning and strength, how many players were there in 1930 compared to today? How did they travel and what were their accommodations? There's ballpark factors like field conditions and the conditions of the ball itself. A lot of those guys were playing a ton of games in the offseason, or working other jobs.I trust Posnanski will be able to do it justice, but I think it is hard to thread the needle between acknowledging that athletes have consistently gotten better over time due to various advancements in training and nutrition and also give ample respect to the players of previous generations. I think too much of the former leads to some interesting arguments that I'm not sure people want to see; like that if Babe Ruth played today in the era of the shift, without 5 pitching changes a game, black and Latin players, advanced scouting, etc. he wouldn't even be a replacement level player. Of course, you could make the same argument that if Ruth lived today and had today's advantages such as a nutritionist telling him that he shouldn't eat 13 hot dogs before a game, he would be even better. I just think it gets kind of messy and impossible to prove what would and what would not be true.
If you want to argue that since athletes are all getting better over time, realistically you could take the top 25 players of today's game, and with a few minor adjustments, argue that these are the 25 greatest players of all time, but that isn't any fun.
I think the most logical way to look at it is to assess players based on their dominance in their era, and factor in the advantages/disadvantages of their era appropriately. So Ruth, or Honus Wagner or Cap Anson are docked for playing in a rather unrefined era for the game, while a player like say, Ken Griffey Jr.'s dominance can be taken more at face value. Maybe that is too tricky, IDK.
The inclusion of the Negro league players is fair, but it has to be acknowledged the way Bill James did, by admitting that realistically there is no fair way to rank those players since even statistical records of their games are scarce and the level of competition varied greatly. Since the dying days of the Negro leagues managed to produce some of the best MLB players in history (Mays, Aaron, Campy, Jackie Robinson) it is reasonable to believe that players pre-integration were among the best players of all-time as well, so if you want to put Josh Gibson or Oscar Charleston in the top ten, that is fine by me. James I believe ranked Charleston fourth all time, which I found delightfully ambitious.
So as someone who is just over 40, Hank Aaron couldn't be on my list as one of the greatest, just first alphabetically? Okay.I don't think players from the Negro Leagues or even other leagues should be ignored but I think it is ridiculous to rank players that you've never seen as the 84th or 44th or 4th greatest. If you want to tell their histories, fine, but rank them alphabetically or chronologically.
That is basically what I'm saying. If you took 1925 Babe Ruth and put him into a time machine and plunked him into the middle of the Yankee's order, I don't know how good he would be. That isn't exactly a fair way to assess things, since a great athlete in the 1920s should theoretically have all the physical tools to be a great athlete in the 2020s, provided that they grew up and matured in an environment that is more advantageous to athletic development. But if you want to purely assess a player based on how good they actually were at baseball, I think the modern players would be superior to the players of the past; that is just how athletics work.We've had this argument here before, but there are so many other factors to consider when comparing players from different eras. Beyond conditioning and strength, how many players were there in 1930 compared to today? How did they travel and what were their accommodations? There's ballpark factors like field conditions and the conditions of the ball itself. A lot of those guys were playing a ton of games in the offseason, or working other jobs.
Obviously integration and the global spread of baseball has increased the talent pool, but kids (in the US at least) are playing a lot less baseball than generations before.
The idea that the best 25 players right now could comprise the best 25 of all time is silly. Babe Ruth replacement level? I doubt it, but that's a harder one to argue. Ted Williams and Willie Mays would still be raking in todays game, maybe not at the same level (though with the conditioning, who knows). I would bet anything they would be well above replacement level. I'm pretty sure Benintendi wouldn't be starting on the Sox.
It’s not that simpleThat is basically what I'm saying. If you took 1925 Babe Ruth and put him into a time machine and plunked him into the middle of the Yankee's order, I don't know how good he would be. That isn't exactly a fair way to assess things, since a great athlete in the 1920s should theoretically have all the physical tools to be a great athlete in the 2020s, provided that they grew up and matured in an environment that is more advantageous to athletic development. But if you want to purely assess a player based on how good they actually were at baseball, I think the modern players would be superior to the players of the past; that is just how athletics work.
In general I agree with that, but I think that dismissing greats from the past as replacement level today is silly.That is basically what I'm saying. If you took 1925 Babe Ruth and put him into a time machine and plunked him into the middle of the Yankee's order, I don't know how good he would be. That isn't exactly a fair way to assess things, since a great athlete in the 1920s should theoretically have all the physical tools to be a great athlete in the 2020s, provided that they grew up and matured in an environment that is more advantageous to athletic development. But if you want to purely assess a player based on how good they actually were at baseball, I think the modern players would be superior to the players of the past; that is just how athletics work.
Yes.In general I agree with that, but I think that dismissing greats from the past as replacement level today is silly.
Andrew Benintendi is above RL, but does he have 20/10 vision? If you put him back in time to replace Ted Williams, do you think he could hit near .347/.467/.677 over a career 124 ABs against Bob Feller? (a pitcher who threw 100 regularly)
Or if you brought Ted Williams ahead in time and he had all the modern methods of studying pitchers, might he not hit even better than he did back in the '40s and '50s? And recall, the Ted Williams' shift was started in the middle of the 1946 season.If you put him back in time to replace Ted Williams, do you think he could hit near .347/.467/.677 over a career 124 ABs against Bob Feller? (a pitcher who threw 100 regularly)
Great point. The way Ted was obsessed with hitting, imagine him analyzing game footage of opposing pitchers.Or if you brought Ted Williams ahead in time and he had all the modern methods of studying pitchers, might he not hit even better than he did back in the '40s and '50s? And recall, the Ted Williams' shift was started in the middle of the 1946 season.
So everyone would have been worse? Not going to agree. Greater competition often leads to better performance.Hitters would not look as good if they had to play against the best black pitchers of the day and pitchers would not look as good if they had to face the best black hitters. They didn't have too, though.
Also, Japan in 1948 and 1995 could not be more disparate than any modern nation in the 20th century.Didn’t Japan implement a program to increase its citizens’ heights?
There isn't a complete statistical record like we have with the minor leagues today.If stats can project minors to majors, why can’t they project Negro Leagues to majors using the players who went to MLB and their rates there compared to their years in the Negro Leagues?
I'm mostly curious about his take on John Donaldson (if he includes Donaldson). I think he's the most overlooked Negro League player of all.And Martin Dihigo should also be included.
I amazed that I hadn't heard of him or the All Nations team.I'm mostly curious about his take on John Donaldson (if he includes Donaldson). I think he's the most overlooked Negro League player of all.
You're not alone. He came 10 years before the heyday of the Negro Leagues, retired seven years before integration, never appeared on TV/film, and spent most of his 33 ballplaying years barnstorming against semi-pro competition, so he didn't get the coverage of other, later Negro Leaguers. No one really kept stats on him, either, so....without statistics, exposure, or famous teammates/opposing players to lionize him, he became largely forgotten after he retired. In fact, the only reason we have any sense now of how good he was is because some guy has spent the last 20 years digging up all of Donaldson's box scores one by one from local newspapers.I amazed that I hadn't heard of him or the All Nations team.
The crazy part of that footage is that a.) it's the only known footage of Donaldson, b.) it was only (re-)discovered in 2010, and c.) the person who filmed it (W.T. Oxley) owned the hand-crank camera that took the video only because a store screwed up an alteration of one of his items (something jewelry-related, I believe, though I can't find it online) and offered the camera to make amends.Here's film footage of John Wesley Donaldson pitching in 1925:
View: https://youtu.be/j4HZC14Wyww?t=101
Here's his Negro League Museum page:
https://www.nlbemuseum.com/nlbemuseum/history/players/donaldson.html